UN chief visits scientists in Antarctica for global warming fact-finding tour

When Ban Ki-moon clambered out of a Chilean Air Force transport plane and planted his boots in the snows of Antarctica, he became the first head of the United Nations ever to visit the world's icy underbelly.

A fleeting visit, perhaps, but one which underscores how rapidly global warming is rising up the political agenda. Mr Ban was on a fact-finding mission over the weekend ahead of a major United Nations conference on climate change in Bali next month.

There, the international community will try to work out what steps it can take to curb greenhouse emissions. A key deadline of the much-ignored Kyoto protocol is due to expire in 2012 and so far the world has yet to decide what comes next.

On Antarctica, scientists told Mr Ban of the changes they have witnessed on the continent's peninsula, the finger of land that reaches out from the South Pole towards the southern tip of South America. "The temperature increase here over the last 50 years has been up to 10 times the global average," said Gino Casassa, a Chilean expert and member of the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which won this year's Nobel Peace Prize.

In early 2002, Larsen B, an ice shelf about 10 times the size of the Isle of Wight, peeled away from the continent and crashed into the sea. "Nobody believed that Larsen B ... could collapse in a matter of weeks," Mr Casassa said.

From the Chilean base Mr Ban hopped into a snowmobile and dropped in on his compatriots at South Korea's King Sejong research station, where another retreating glacier is being monitored.

From Antarctica, Mr Ban flew over Grey's Glacier in southern Chile, a wall of ice four miles wide, the façade of the which is riven with cracks that experts blame on global warming. Chile, which accounts for 0.2 per cent of the world's carbon emissions, is home to three-quarters of all the glaciers in South America. It is also home to the world's driest desert, the Atacama, which has been encroaching southwards as rainfall diminishes.

Mr Ban flew yesterday to Brazil, where he was due to see the effects of logging and burning on the Amazon rainforest.

The secretary general and his entourage will have clocked up about 17,000 air miles by the time they get back to New York.