Latitude 65°11.56’ South
Ice. Glacial ice and sea ice. Ice bergs, bergie bits, and growlers. White ice, blue ice, and brown ice (stained by diatoms). Ice flows, pancake ice, grease ice, and slush ice. First year ice and multi-year ice. Tabular icebergs, ice castles, ice pinnacles, and the Taj Mahal in ice. Ice swans, alligators, turtles, and a ghostly white ship sailing on a gelid sea. Ice carrying rocks from the land to the sea. Resting places for Adelie penguins, crabeater and leopard seals, Antarctic and Arctic terns. (The latter, down from their nesting places high in the Arctic, certainly deserve a rest!) White snow petrels flying along the crest of a tabular berg, providing a scale against which its giant scale can be judged.
Here is a small part of a giant tabular berg that we encountered in the Weddell Sea. We estimated its size as 11 nautical miles along two of its sides, its height 25 meters above the sea, and its depth 150 meters below. It is made of freshwater ice, formed on land and pushed out over the sea until it became a floating ice shelf. No doubt it is a fragment of the Larsen Ice Shelf, which is breaking up at an unprecedented rate. At roughly 48 trillion metric tons of water, it would supply the needs of Endeavour for 3.8 million years! That is a lot of water!
This morning we experienced ice of a different sort, as we awoke to find the ship resting quietly in a white expanse of sea ice, blocking further progress to the south. We bid good day to this crabeater seal, extracted ourselves neatly from the ice (how different the tale might have been had Endurance been Endeavour!) and began our passage back toward the north, toward civilization and seas free of ice, but forever changed by our encounters with ice.
Ice. Glacial ice and sea ice. Ice bergs, bergie bits, and growlers. White ice, blue ice, and brown ice (stained by diatoms). Ice flows, pancake ice, grease ice, and slush ice. First year ice and multi-year ice. Tabular icebergs, ice castles, ice pinnacles, and the Taj Mahal in ice. Ice swans, alligators, turtles, and a ghostly white ship sailing on a gelid sea. Ice carrying rocks from the land to the sea. Resting places for Adelie penguins, crabeater and leopard seals, Antarctic and Arctic terns. (The latter, down from their nesting places high in the Arctic, certainly deserve a rest!) White snow petrels flying along the crest of a tabular berg, providing a scale against which its giant scale can be judged.
Here is a small part of a giant tabular berg that we encountered in the Weddell Sea. We estimated its size as 11 nautical miles along two of its sides, its height 25 meters above the sea, and its depth 150 meters below. It is made of freshwater ice, formed on land and pushed out over the sea until it became a floating ice shelf. No doubt it is a fragment of the Larsen Ice Shelf, which is breaking up at an unprecedented rate. At roughly 48 trillion metric tons of water, it would supply the needs of Endeavour for 3.8 million years! That is a lot of water!
This morning we experienced ice of a different sort, as we awoke to find the ship resting quietly in a white expanse of sea ice, blocking further progress to the south. We bid good day to this crabeater seal, extracted ourselves neatly from the ice (how different the tale might have been had Endurance been Endeavour!) and began our passage back toward the north, toward civilization and seas free of ice, but forever changed by our encounters with ice.
