Monday, March 21, 2011

Day Four March 21: Icebergs

DAY 4 (Monday)

We were on the deck by 7 a.m.  We are in the Antarctic Sound off the coast of main continent.  What we saw was amazing: the captain drove the ship around enormous “tabular” icebergs.  100 ft high (with another 800 ft underwater) and thousands of feet long, these icebergs are from the infamous Larson B Ice-shelf that broke off from the continent about 8 yrs ago after millions of years of being firmly attached.  Larson B was a chunk of ice larger than Connecticut that has now broken up and the pieces are drifting north.  These bergs are a beautiful but ominous sign of climate change.  The iceshelf held the thousands of glaciers on the mainland firmly in place; now the glaciers are sliding into ocean. 

We then loaded up on the Zodiacs for our first landing on the mainland of Antarctica.  Landing among hundreds of Gentoo penguins and fur seals, we climbed almost to the top of a large glacier.  The guides go first and test for crevasses.   A crevasse is a crack in the glacier and they can be hundreds of feet deep.  The problem is that the snow blows over the crevasse and creates what looks like a nice safe patch of ice to walk on, but it is not.  They staked a path around the crevasses to pretty close to the top when they stopped us because they could not find a safe path all the way to the top. 

It was much colder than yesterday, but brilliantly sunny.  By the time we left to come back the ship some weather moved in and we lost the sun.  With a storm coming in tonight, we are expecting wetter and windier conditions when we go back on land this afternoon.


No comments:

Post a Comment