Ship Passing

We are still in the Antarctic Sound.  We only passed three other ships during our trip to Antarctica and we passed one of them here in the Sound.  I took several photos of this other ship as we passed to help give the icebergs some scale.  This particular ship was larger than our ship and according to our crew had something like 700 passengers.  Our ship only had 330 passengers, but room for 630.

These three photos are just three sequence photos as I caught the ship passing a small tabular iceberg in the Antarctic Sound.  These tabular icebergs were usually square shaped or rectangular shaped.  You can only see the one side in these photos and it could be the small side of this iceberg.  Also, our ship was 404 feet long and this ship was bigger than ours, so it’s probably around 450 feet or so in length.

Bergy Seltzer

This was a funny little iceberg sidelight to our trip.  When glaciers and icebergs are formed, gasses sometimes get trapped in the ice.  The gasses stay in the ice until eventually the ice melts down.  When an iceberg gets rather small, the gasses start being noticeably emitted.  We never noticed this until we got into the Antarctic Sound and then the Weddell Sea.  In these locations, our ship was moving very slowly due to the large quantities of icebergs.  While we were out on deck, we started hearing “popping” noises and occasionally smelling some odd smells, like maybe some rotten eggs.

They called these little icebergs with escaping gasses by the name of “bergy seltzer”.  It’s like having a giant “alka seltzer” go floating by you.  It pops and fizzes and sometimes smells bad.

These three photos are not in sequence.  It was hard to get good pictures of this phenomenon as our ship was moving and the bergy seltzers were moving as well.  At any rate, while the photos aren’t that good, you will notice some gas bubbles around the small icebergs – bergy seltzer.

The Weddell Sea

We made it through all thirty iceberg-strewn miles of the Antarctic Sound and into the Weddell Sea.  I felt like a five year old on Christmas morning when we got into the Weddell Sea.  After having read the book “South” about the 1914 Endurance exploration in the Weddell Sea, I was thrilled to be there.  I can clearly state that the Weddell Sea did not let me down.  It lived up to its billing.

We spent about four hours slowly cruising around the Weddell Sea.  We were surrounded by icebergs and floating ice from the size of big cities to small brash.  The sun came out and it was a glorious afternoon.  I was almost overwhelmed at times by the whole scene.

I saw our lead expedition staff guy, who was German, and I asked him if this was normal for the Weddell Sea.  He said, “Der iz no normal.  It comes und it goes.”  But several other expedition staff members said it was the best weather that they had ever experienced on any visit to the Weddell Sea.  It was a floating cavalcade of ice for as far as the eye could see in every direction.

These pictures are just some general pictures in the Weddell Sea.  The Sea looked like this for four hours.  We did get much closer to the icebergs and I will be sending some of those photos.  But in general, it was just a Sea of icebergs and ice.  Mind you, we are in the far northern reaches of the Weddell Sea which means the warmest portion of that Sea with the least ice.

Iceberg Gridlock

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.

Cruising the Weddell Sea

We are still cruising in the Weddell Sea.  We eventually got farther into the Sea and got much closer to some bigger icebergs, both tabular and glacial.  We actually got really close to them as you will see in some of these photos.  It was a wondrous and glorious experience.  And you can rest at ease, we were “keeping a sharp eye”.

Annual Rings

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.

Glacial Icebergs

We are still in the Weddell Sea.  While the huge tabular icebergs were a bit overwhelming, the smaller glacial icebergs were much more interesting to look at in terms of their shape.  The glacial icebergs came in all sorts of shapes.  These are just a few interesting glacial icebergs.  And in case you were wondering, these glacial icebergs were also quite large.  It was very hard to gain perspective without a ship passing by and these glacial bergs weren’t anywhere near as big as the tabular bergs.  The Weddell Sea had all sorts of icebergs in every shape and size floating in it's waters.

Naming Icebergs

Yes, we are still in the Weddell Sea, but this will be the last of it.  I spent at least five hours out on deck today and it was 32 degrees the whole day.  We had sun, clouds, high fog and various combinations of these.  The wind went from mild to “hold on to the rail”.  Our ship moved, the icebergs moved, and the weather kept changing so it was a kaleidoscope of ice, water, and weather.  The scene constantly changed and I couldn’t help but to keep watching it all.  After five plus hours, I eventually turned red from the cold and I also caught a cold but it was worth the price of admission.

 The reason I know that I was out on deck too long is because I eventually started naming the glacial icebergs.  We would go around and around and weave through the bergs and I would sometimes see the same ones again.  At some point, I started naming them.  Here’s a few of my “named” icebergs:

 1.       “A river runs through it”

2.      “Whales goalpost”

3.      “Coliseum”