The Sundarban
The ominous text arrived when National Geographic Explorer Jane Youthful used to be aboard a review vessel in Antarctica’s Weddell Sea: “More boring crabbies.” It used to be from a chum working as an expedition leader on a nearby cruise ship. He had noticed boring crabeater seals on the edge of the sea ice. Youthful used to be finding out how the bird flu sweeping the globe used to be circulating in the voice, and the sighting suggested that the virus had jumped to crabeaters.
However it surely used to be also a most likely portion of a vital better puzzle. Antarctica is one of the fastest warming areas on Earth—temperatures are rising on the continent at two cases the world moderate—fueling an anticipated develop in emerging diseases over the subsequent 50 years. The continent’s ecosystem is a “canary in the coal mine” for the procedure local weather alternate will reshape world disease outbreaks, says Youthful, a molecular ecologist at the College of Tasmania.
Youthful and a crew of scientists on the Schmidt Ocean Institute’s R.V. Falkor (too) space a direction for the boring seals’ closing home. The community used to be segment of the National Geographic and Rolex Perpetual Planet Ocean Expeditions, an colossal mission sending researchers to peep the Earth’s five oceans. After three and a half days navigating cold waters in December of closing year, they arrived. However by then, the whole lot had changed. An ice edge had broken into minute pieces, which made taking a look the colossal home by ship hopeless. So they launched a drone.
Soon the drone’s camera zeroed in on a lone crabeater seal, boring and partially frozen into a drifting chunk of ice. Youthful and Amandine Gamble, a veterinarian and researcher at Cornell College, navigated to the seal in a Zodiac. Flu viruses concentrate in the brain, so the pair fairly broke through the thick braincase with a screwdriver and hammer, inserted a lengthy swab, swirled it through the exposed tissue, and sealed it in a vial of buffer resolution.
Back in Australia, the specimen used to be tested at Youthful’s lab. The seal had bird flu—the first verified case in an Antarctic ice seal. It marked an alarming milestone in the virus’s relentless spread. Since 2021, the H5N1 subtype has proliferated all over continents, killing thousands and thousands of birds and tons thousands of marine mammals. In South The US the disease has ravaged sea lion colonies, killing tens of thousands of the animals. In Antarctica the stakes are specifically excessive.
Youthful’s crew contributors Clive McMahon and André Van Tonder take blood samples from Antarctic ice seals. The specimens have been later assessed in a lab, and one tested obvious for bird flu, confirming the virus had transferred to the seals.
As the planet warms and more animals creep toward the poles, researchers ask diseases to spread to recent territories, leaving Antarctic flowers and fauna susceptible. “Seals are lengthy-lived, gradual to breed, and top predators,” Youthful says. “Shedding them may maybe well presumably have lengthy-lasting results on the ecosystem that we can’t but predict.”
As well to to seals, the crew sampled penguins and scavenging birds. Most attention-grabbing the scavengers—kelp gulls, skuas, and sheathbills—had antibodies, that methodology they’d been exposed to the virus however lived through the infection. Penguins didn’t have antibodies, suggesting they may maybe well presumably merely no longer have been surviving exposure. “That’s what’s so worrying,” Youthful says. “They’re no longer entertaining carcasses fancy the scavengers are, so they’re less likely to be exposed—however if they are, it seems to be to be like fancy they’re loss of life.”
How is the virus getting to Antarctica? Samples from two animals have been traced to South The US. The likely vectors, Youthful says, are migratory birds. Some massive petrels and skuas breed in Antarctica or on sub-Antarctic islands and streak massive distances as segment of their migration—usually through South The US and into Asia—before returning south. Their globe-spanning journeys may maybe well presumably merely have introduced the virus in more than as soon as, seeding it in recent areas whenever.
The crew disembark from their review vessel and motor in a Zodiac to attain the soar of Antarctica, where they gather samples fancy penguin feces (at merely) to study the animals’ weight reduction procedure.
Youthful’s lengthy-timeframe plan is that fieldwork fancy hers will be the lifeblood of an early-warning procedure for disease in the Southern Ocean. Necessary as meteorologists spend atmospheric records to forecast storms, she envisions harnessing genetic data and on-the-ground observations to observe pathogens. This methodology would wait on scientists intervene before a virus kills colossal populations of flowers and fauna.
Youthful is optimistic that in the future scavenging birds may maybe well presumably aid as sentinels, offering early warnings of outbreaks. In the end, they may maybe well presumably even turn into vaccination targets, she says, to wait on give protection to more susceptible populations, fancy penguins, before viruses get to them. “Antarctica offers a obvious initiating point,” Youthful says, “to take a look at and refine the tools we want before scaling them worldwide.”
This story seems to be in the December 2025 discipline of National Geographic magazine.
Reporting listed here is offered by the National Geographic Society in partnership with Rolex below the National Geographic and Rolex Perpetual Planet Ocean Expeditions.
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