Note: The date of these postings is not necessarily the date of the day described, as I’m playing catch-up with these entries, due to spotty satellite and time! The order of the visits is correct however.
As we head south, as one might expect, the temperatures are dropping. The snow on the sharp, rugged mountains and on the expanses of tidewater glaciers has gotten thicker. Great tabular icebergs are more numerous, as is the sea ice.
The question arises: what’s the difference between icebergs and sea ice? Icebergs are derived from pieces of glaciers which calve into the sea. It is, in essence, fossil ice — it can be many thousands of years old, sometimes tens of thousands, depending on the length of distance and time it has traveled on its course t the sea. On the other hand, sea ice is ice that has formed during the winter from the freezing of the sea surface. In both polar regions it can be anywhere from one to several years old, the latter if it did not completely thaw during a summer season and re-froze the following winter. In that case, it often accumulates a layer of snow too, making it thicker.
Sea ice can be crunched through to a limited extent by an ice-strengthened polar expedition vessel, but icebergs are thicker, harder and more massive. They are avoided by all vessels at all costs: hitting one is like hitting a rock. And we all know at least one great example of an encounter of a ship with an iceberg!
Today is Christmas Day. It’s spectacularly clear with a brisk wind, and we take a zodiac excursion of Cierva Cove, site of the Argentine Primavera Station, inhabited only in the spring and summer. On our way to the cove, we are treated to a pod of humpback whales swimming under our zodiacs and showing off just yards away!
In the afternoon we attempted a landing in Mikkelsen Harbor on Trinity Island, but our old nemesis, the wind, sprung up and we had to abandon our plans. The sea was simply too rough to risk it in our little zodiacs.
So, we headed further south along the Antarctic Peninsula, and enjoyed a superb Christmas dinner. Late at night our Filipino crew treated us to a wonderful Christmas show which provided a sample of the amazing diversity of the staff.
