The Last Great Wild Places Tour 3: Antarctica: The Greatest, Wildest, Place on Earth
I don't think I've ever planned a trip in as much detail as I did this one. I've been to sea, and I know the most basic truth of cruising: if you forget it, you do without it. So we did ok, thanks to REI, and backup systems for everything. Well, Matt only brought one pair of sunglasses, which are absolutely essential in Antartica. And of course, the earpiece broke off one side. He wore them anyway. We had balaclavas so we wouldn't have to wrangle separate scarves and hats. That, and the trekking poles I'm carrying, below, earned us the nickname "The mountaineering bank robbers" from the staff. You can see the cruising yacht in the background, showing that there aren't too many places you can't go if you have sail and an adventurous spirit. And a spare pair of sunglasses, of course.
We can't help thinking that we have control - over our lives, our environment, Nature itself. It's the lie everyone tells themselves, because the truth is so terrifying. Because Nature is slow to change we can hold on to that illusion, for a while, at least until we discover that we don't have an unbroken pair of sunglasses. But in this, the wildest of the wild places on Earth, we can't deny the power of the changeable and extreme Antarctic environment for long. It always has the last words: water, wind, earth, fire, ice. In Antartica those words confront you every day.
We heard a lot of lectures on our ship, the M/S Expedition, below at Neko Harbor, about the ecosystems, the animals and the history of Antarctica.
Everyone is fascinated by the penguins, seals and whales. We go to the places they live, see their teeming colonies, and falsely believe that Antartica is full of life. But after you see thirty colonies of gentoo penguins, you have to start wondering: where is the diversity?
It isn't there because there is no terrestrial food web in Antartica. This continent, that once supported forests, is scoured by ice, wind, and volcanic eruptions. As soon as something gets a foothold, a glaciation or a storm wipes it clean, and the continent starts again. Below, at Telefon Bay in the caldera of Deception Island, lichens, nesting birds and visiting chinstrap penguins constitute the only visible living organisms. There was once a whaling station here. It was destroyed by a series of volcanic mudflows or "lahars". The tank, below, once held whale oil. The lahar has nearly buried it.
This must be what the planet looked like four billion years ago.
"Who do you think you are?"
Antarctica let us know over and over that we were not in control. Twice we tried to sail through the Lemaire Channel to Peterman Island, and twice we failed. The first time, the wind had pushed ice into the Lemaire Channel, and we had to turn back without even attempting the Lemaire. Below, you can see the ice front at the entry to the Lemaire Channel.
The next day there were enough leads in the pack ice that the ice master took the ship all the way through the Lemaire before we had to turn back. The picture below, taken over the bow of the M/S Expedition shows the ice master's idea of "enough leads."
The Lemaire Channel is a drowned glacial valley; it is a fjord. It seems a little strange to think of drowned glacial valleys in Antartica, but it too saw a retreat of the ice at the end of the last ice age, and a return of the ocean. One difference between the Lemaire and a typical fjord in, say Scandinavia: the Lemaire has never suffered the erosion caused by organic processes and running water, and the walls rise sheer and straight above the ship on either side. You will see that nowhere else on earth. Snow showered down off the heights in constant, soft streams, as though a waterfall had frozen into ice crystals and continued to flow. In the photo below you can see the smooth, uniform slope of the sides of the channel, mostly unchanged from its appearance when the ice last retreated eighteen thousand years ago. The rock face on the left shows layers of sediments deposited here millions of years ago when this place might have been a beach or a river valley.
The water in the Lemaire was almost glassy, and the sun shone brilliantly. Such a combination of calm and sunshine is rare in Antartica, and we made good use of it, as the ship plowed through the brash ice and the grumblers, and overrode ice floes that shattered beneath the bow.
A couple of icebergs rolled as we pushed them aside, and their keels scraped the paint off the hull of the ship, upending brilliant blue and red streaks as we passed. I'm almost surprised that the crew didn't run out and wipe it up. Other than that paint we left nothing behind. If you had to pee while on a shore excursion, the crew took you back to the ship, and the sewage was offloaded in Ushuaia at the end of the cruise. A passenger dropped her glove down the side of Neptune's Window, a passage between the interior and exterior of the Deception Island caldera. Out went a crew member with a grappling pole who fished it up and returned it to its owner.
At the far end of the Lemaire, we could see Peterman Island, but the pack ice, visible below, was so dense that only an icebreaker could have gotten through. So said the ice master, the ship handler who thought it was no big deal to hit icebergs, so it's hard to argue that he was too timid.
The Lemaire is famous for whale sightings, but we saw only one Minke whale in the channel. Perhaps they don't like the ice either. We saw only four whales total in nine days, but many many whale bones like those the little gentoo penguin, below, is hopping over. Whales once teemed in these oceans, their past abundance now only visible in the bones that litter Antarctica.
Whale populations collapsed long ago, saved from final extinction only by the spread of electrical power that made whale oil obsolete. It's easy to say that the whalers were greedy for profit, but the whaler's graveyard at Deception Island tells a truer story of desperation. Who would undertake such a harsh and deadly profession without great need?
Some day soon another lahar will bury the remaining graves, and Antartica will, once again, have the last word.
We can't help thinking that we have control - over our lives, our environment, Nature itself. It's the lie everyone tells themselves, because the truth is so terrifying. Because Nature is slow to change we can hold on to that illusion, for a while, at least until we discover that we don't have an unbroken pair of sunglasses. But in this, the wildest of the wild places on Earth, we can't deny the power of the changeable and extreme Antarctic environment for long. It always has the last words: water, wind, earth, fire, ice. In Antartica those words confront you every day.
We heard a lot of lectures on our ship, the M/S Expedition, below at Neko Harbor, about the ecosystems, the animals and the history of Antarctica.
Everyone is fascinated by the penguins, seals and whales. We go to the places they live, see their teeming colonies, and falsely believe that Antartica is full of life. But after you see thirty colonies of gentoo penguins, you have to start wondering: where is the diversity?
It isn't there because there is no terrestrial food web in Antartica. This continent, that once supported forests, is scoured by ice, wind, and volcanic eruptions. As soon as something gets a foothold, a glaciation or a storm wipes it clean, and the continent starts again. Below, at Telefon Bay in the caldera of Deception Island, lichens, nesting birds and visiting chinstrap penguins constitute the only visible living organisms. There was once a whaling station here. It was destroyed by a series of volcanic mudflows or "lahars". The tank, below, once held whale oil. The lahar has nearly buried it.
This must be what the planet looked like four billion years ago.
"Who do you think you are?"
Antarctica let us know over and over that we were not in control. Twice we tried to sail through the Lemaire Channel to Peterman Island, and twice we failed. The first time, the wind had pushed ice into the Lemaire Channel, and we had to turn back without even attempting the Lemaire. Below, you can see the ice front at the entry to the Lemaire Channel.
The next day there were enough leads in the pack ice that the ice master took the ship all the way through the Lemaire before we had to turn back. The picture below, taken over the bow of the M/S Expedition shows the ice master's idea of "enough leads."
The Lemaire Channel is a drowned glacial valley; it is a fjord. It seems a little strange to think of drowned glacial valleys in Antartica, but it too saw a retreat of the ice at the end of the last ice age, and a return of the ocean. One difference between the Lemaire and a typical fjord in, say Scandinavia: the Lemaire has never suffered the erosion caused by organic processes and running water, and the walls rise sheer and straight above the ship on either side. You will see that nowhere else on earth. Snow showered down off the heights in constant, soft streams, as though a waterfall had frozen into ice crystals and continued to flow. In the photo below you can see the smooth, uniform slope of the sides of the channel, mostly unchanged from its appearance when the ice last retreated eighteen thousand years ago. The rock face on the left shows layers of sediments deposited here millions of years ago when this place might have been a beach or a river valley.
The water in the Lemaire was almost glassy, and the sun shone brilliantly. Such a combination of calm and sunshine is rare in Antartica, and we made good use of it, as the ship plowed through the brash ice and the grumblers, and overrode ice floes that shattered beneath the bow.
A couple of icebergs rolled as we pushed them aside, and their keels scraped the paint off the hull of the ship, upending brilliant blue and red streaks as we passed. I'm almost surprised that the crew didn't run out and wipe it up. Other than that paint we left nothing behind. If you had to pee while on a shore excursion, the crew took you back to the ship, and the sewage was offloaded in Ushuaia at the end of the cruise. A passenger dropped her glove down the side of Neptune's Window, a passage between the interior and exterior of the Deception Island caldera. Out went a crew member with a grappling pole who fished it up and returned it to its owner.
At the far end of the Lemaire, we could see Peterman Island, but the pack ice, visible below, was so dense that only an icebreaker could have gotten through. So said the ice master, the ship handler who thought it was no big deal to hit icebergs, so it's hard to argue that he was too timid.
The Lemaire is famous for whale sightings, but we saw only one Minke whale in the channel. Perhaps they don't like the ice either. We saw only four whales total in nine days, but many many whale bones like those the little gentoo penguin, below, is hopping over. Whales once teemed in these oceans, their past abundance now only visible in the bones that litter Antarctica.
Whale populations collapsed long ago, saved from final extinction only by the spread of electrical power that made whale oil obsolete. It's easy to say that the whalers were greedy for profit, but the whaler's graveyard at Deception Island tells a truer story of desperation. Who would undertake such a harsh and deadly profession without great need?
Some day soon another lahar will bury the remaining graves, and Antartica will, once again, have the last word.