The largest iceberg is how many kilometres long?
My first iceberg sighting
Day 11 - March 9 2020
The first day of sailing to the Antarctic Peninsula. Rougher seas today that took hold yesterday afternoon. You can’t walk in a straight line as you zig zag down the hallways. Standing in the shower is an unusual experience. Luckily it is narrow, although it doesn’t seem small and there are the rims that hold the soap and shampoo bottles in that you can hold onto if necessary as well as a seat.
We had a number of talks to keep us occupied: Pinipeds of the peninsula (seals), photographing birds in flight and the penguin species we will find on the peninsula. Did you know that birds replace all their feathers once a year. The ones on the wings are done symmetrically so they can keep flying. They showed the first part of the Shackleton movie with Kenneth Branagh but the quality when it was blown up on the screen was awful so I left and watched it when I got home. Shackleton was trying to get to the south pole again. He had tried once before. On that trip a number of days before they would have made it they realised that they didn’t have enough food for the return journey unless they turned around prematurely. Thankfully they chose life over success. This time they could have landed on Antarctica but would have had to spend longer trekking across the land to get to the pole. To reduce the distance on foot they decided that they would move further along the coast. This was a mistake as the ship got stuck in the ice which destroyed it. They moved off the boat onto the ice shelf which started to fall apart. Piling the men onto three small row boats, they made it to Elephant Island. Six men then sailed the James Caird boat to South Georgia but they arrived on the wrong side of the island and spent a couple of weeks trekking over the mountains to get to Stromness which had a whaling station. It then took Shackleton a few months to get back Elephant island to rescue the men who had been living in the two upturned boats for all those months. Everyone survived.
 |
| Our first look at A68-A |
Day 12 - March 10 2020
The second day of sailing to the Antarctic Peninsula. The seas are much calmer and I see my first iceberg just after 7am. The bridge saw the first iceberg at 3:30am so I was half an hour out as I had put down 4am on this day for the competition and someone else was within 15 minutes. I was pretty happy coming so close, I have no idea what the prize was. First presentation today was with Norm the geologist who explained the drifting continent that is Antarctica. Australia was once attached to Antarctica along the bottom and was the last land mass to break off and move away. They have found marsupial fossils down there as well as tropical plants – the word tropical just blows me away. Antarctica holds 95% of the worlds fresh water, imagine what is going to happen when it starts melting. All the countries still move around and in a few not too distant years Japan will pull up alongside China - I don't think they will be happy about that. Australia is moving towards the equator but that is not what is causing more humidity even as far down as Melbourne; Norm explained to me that it is climate change.
 |
| our guide quickly loses interest in the iceberg and we go looking for humpback whales |
Another bio security check of all our gear in preparation for landings on the Antarctic Peninsula.
 |
| Seal on an iceberg in far from land |
We expected to pass one of the largest icebergs around here at about 3pm, they had been tracking it for a while as it is moving all the time. You only see about 25% of any iceberg above the water line. The A68A iceberg fell off the Larsen shelf and looks like an ice shelf itself because it’s so big – 30km wide by 160km long. The original plan was just to look at it from the ship but as the seas were calm, a rare occurrence in the Weddell sea, we took a zip around in our zodiacs. About 50 metres shows above the water line and the distance we have to keep between us and the iceberg is double its height in case it calves. They have never done a zodiac cruise around it since it formed two and a half years ago. During our zodiac cruise we saw many humpback whales, a few seals reclining on floating ice and a few swimming. We also saw a Right Whale, well its tail anyway. The swell around the ship had increased by the time we got back and I was propelled up the steps as I got off the zodiac. A ship that was there two days beforehand couldn’t even find the iceberg, let alone zodiac near it. I don’t say around it as it is so large it would take hours; we were near the smallest tip. As it moves towards the equator it will melt.
Ed’s talk on the discovery of Antarctica is postponed, as was part two of the Shackleton movie.
We had access to the BBC World News which was filled with stories on the Coronavirus and the demise of the stock market. I worried about my trip in May which transits through Hong Kong, thinking that I may have to find another route. Many people thought I was being pessimistic and said it would be over by then. I didn't agree but neither did I expect the tragedy to unfold across the globe. Right up to the last few days the expedition team were optimistic that they would be going on another trip straight after ours. I never thought they would.
Comments
Post a Comment