If the Antarctic Sound was “iceberg alley”, as our expedition staff called it, then they should have called the Weddell Sea “iceberg gridlock”. We weaved our way through and around the icebergs, but we could never go straight for very long. The icebergs kept getting bigger and bigger. Our way south was totally blocked by these big tabular icebergs and all the smaller icebergs as well.

These pictures are some of the tabular icebergs that blocked out path. The biggest measured tabular iceberg, according to the Antarctic book that they gave us, measured 132 miles long, was about 1000 feet thick, and weighed over one Billion Tons. Compared to that, these are small tabular icebergs, but they looked pretty big to us – and they made our ship look small.

These photos are all tabular icebergs. They got bigger as we progressed into the Weddell Sea. The one in the last photo was so large that I had my camera all the way back (not zoomed) and I still couldn’t get it all in the photo. I really don’t know how large some of these tabular bergs were but I’m sure they would be measured in miles. They looked like floating cities.