In this installment of our “Climate Diaries” series, CBS News correspondent Mark Phillips continues his reporting from Antarctica, one of the most remote places on earth. He shows us the dramatic shifts happening around a half-century-old research base. The icescape and the area’s penguin population reveal the impact of the rapid pace of climate change.
It can seem like a landscape frozen in time in Antarctica, but it’s anything but. And one place has been keeping meticulous records of the changes for 50 years, reports CBS News correspondent Mark Phillips.
At Palmer Station, about 40 people work at a U.S. research base that has clung to this rocky outcrop on the Antarctic coast since the mid-1960s.
Bob Farrell has run the station for the past 18 years. If anybody knows how things have been changing here, it’s him. It changes all the time, day to day.
Palmer was put here because it was a great place to study Antarctic wildlife. It sat in the middle of the perfect habitat for the Adelie penguin, who nested here in their tens of thousands. These are the birds that brought you “Happy Feet.” But they don’t seem happy any more.
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