We are still in the Weddell Sea. The first picture will show you how close we got to some really big icebergs, but I will show you these with a purpose. The Antarctic is a desert in that it gets about two inches of precipitation (rain and snow) a year. The Antarctic continent, however, is the highest “average” elevation continent in the world, and most of that is due to snow and ice. That might seem to be contradictory, but it’s not. The deal with Antarctica is that there is next to no evaporation, so the two inches of snow or ice a year just sits there and builds the surface up higher and higher. The snow and ice reflect the sun’s rays and the temperature stays very low. On this day for example, the sun was out most of the day and it was about 32 degrees all day long.

The buildup of snow and ice creates layers which are basically equivalent to the annual rings in a tree. In a tree, each annual ring represents one year’s growth of the tree. In a glacier, each “ring” or horizontal layer represents one season’s growth, or precipitation. You can see a little of this in the first photo, but I zoomed in on this same iceberg for the next two photos and you can clearly see the annual growth lines. Some years, of course, get more precipitation than other years, just like in tree rings.