Antarctic journey through more favorite photos

About to enter the Lemaire Channel, Antarctica

Male and female fur seals, South Georgia Island

Along the narrow Lemaire Channel, Antarctica

 

Raucous Gentoo Penguins, South Shetland Islands

Iceberg at dusk in the Lemaire Channel, Antarctica

Black-browed Albatross pair, East Falkland Island

Blue-eyed Cormorants on West Falkland Island cliff

Lone King Penguin on Falklands beach

King Penguin chick molting, South Georgia Island

Early morning in the Antarctic sea ice

Glacier and sea in a snowstorm, South Shetland Islands

Breaking through the sea ice of the Southern Ocean

Intent Chinstrap Penguin, South Shetland Islands

Mountains and glaciers along the Lemaire Channel, Antarctica

The Antarctic Peninsula 



The Lemaire Channel, Antarctica



There’s no way to adequately describe the scenery on the Antarctic Peninsula.  It is astonishingly magnificent.  Dark mountains of volcanic rock rising straight from the ocean floor to heights reaching 10,000 feet above sea level.  Spectacular glaciers covering the mountains and spilling in giant blocks and crevasses down to the deep gray sea.  Stately icebergs filling the bays and fjords.  It’s seems very still until you stop and listen to the pops of the small icebergs releasing their air bubbles, the thunder of the calving glaciers, and the cries of the birds. 

Antarctic Peninsula from the Lemaire Channel

Blue-eyed albatrosses nesting

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

This far south, there are mostly crabeater and leopard seals, loner species that spend much of their time on the ice floes.  We have seen several of each, but all alone.  Gentoo and Adelie penguins fill the rocky rookeries in the spring, but then are at sea much of the year.  So, while we haven’t seen any of their chicks (unlike the King Penguin chicks we saw farther north), we have seen thousands of the penguins nesting.  There are many immature penguins “nesting” in the snow, which would freeze an egg.  These penguins are “practicing” the behavior they’ll use when they’re full adults, but it’s a futile effort right now. 

Petermann Bay

On one island stop, we hiked up a snowfield, hoping to reach the top of a mountain.  Our hiking group looked like a long red snake on the snow.  We stopped and turned around when the snow had become too hard for cutting steps and too slick to be safe as the landing spot if you fell was a pile of rocks and then the ocean far below.  We were able to do a shorter snow hike at another island and had such beautiful views of the bay below, surrounded by mountains and glaciers and filled with icebergs.

Nesting Adelie penguins

There are dozens of “research bases” scattered around Antarctica.  Some of these are doing real research, while others are place holders for countries that want a stake on this continent.  The US has by far the largest base at McMurdo Sound, with about 3000 scientists and support personnel.  We also have a base right at the South Pole and several smaller bases in different parts of Antarctica.   

Our final stop in Antarctica was at a tiny British base, Port Lockroy, which has a mini-research project studying the impacts, if any, of tourists on penguin colonies.  Its main purpose seems to be running a gift shop that supports their research.  We have several Japanese and Chinese tourists on board and they pretty much bought out the gift shop all by themselves. 

Rather than trying to describe this beautiful place, I will post a bunch of my favorite photos in several more blogs.

 

Peninsula from the Lemaire Channel

 

 

Newborn fur seal with mom

Minke Whale

Mountains on the Peninsula



The Magnificent South Shetland Islands  

South Shetland Islands

We haven’t had any internet access for several days, though the weather has been mostly beautiful and moderately cold, with periods of sunshine and blue skies, and some patches of clouds and snow.  The ship lost its satellite signal and couldn’t seem to get it back.  The temperature has been warmer than I expected, between about 20 and 32 degrees, but pretty windy.

Leopard seal resting

Wednesday, after battling heavy sea ice most of the day, we were able to make 2 landings on 2 of the South Shetland Islands, Half Moon Island and Deception Island.  By the time you’re this far south, the islands show a bit of rock, but are almost entirely covered by glaciers. This is a frozen land of ice and rock, all enormous.  There is no vegetation on the islands, but thousands of breeding penguins, seals, and sea birds.  After the breeding season, these birds and animals head out to sea for their summer feeding. 

These Antarctic animals make nests on the rocks and are crowded into rookeries, generally mixed up together.  The skuas  (large brown birds) nest here also and steal penguins’ eggs whenever they can.  They are the scavengers as well, eating anything dead or dying. 

Gentoo penguin with rock for nest

The Gentoo penguins line their nests with small stones.  Once a pair has mated, they begin work in earnest on their nests.  They travel quite far, sometimes, to retrieve just the right stone and take it to their nest, where the female will lay an egg a couple of days after mating.  They are happy thieves and puff up with pride when they can steal a rock from another Gentoo’s nest, not noticing that while they’re lifting the neighbor’s pebble, another neighbor is stealing theirs. 

Gentoo female rearranging rocks for nest

We have seen Adelie and Gentoo penguins in these southern regions.  Their numbers have plummeted in the last 10 years and there is real concern for their continued existence, particularly the Adelies.  These 2 penguin species usually lay only 1 egg per season and generally don’t re-lay an egg if one gets lost.  Because the spring is wetter now, the birds too often lose their eggs to a big snowstorm, which wouldn’t have been a problem a decade ago.  Also, the sea ice is melting, depriving the penguins’ main food source, the krill, of their food, the algae that grows on the bottom of the sea ice.  That means that the penguins may have trouble feeding their chicks and lose them to starvation.  A lost breeding season can be catastrophic when the populations are small (the Adelies are only 20% of their numbers 25 years ago).

We are seeing Leopard, Weddell and Crabeater seals in this region.  They tend to be loners, so we see them on scattered rocks and ice floes, whereas the fur and elephant seals were sprawled in large numbers all over the beaches and rocks farther north.  On the western side of the Antarctic Peninsula, where we have been, there are lots of ice floes, but virtually no beaches as most of the glaciers come right down to the water. 

Breaking through the sea ice

View from Petermann Island

The glaciers end in huge ice cliffs ranging from a few feet to several hundred feet in height off the ocean surface.  But, they are much deeper than that, tied to the ocean bottom.  They calve thousands of icebergs from the ice cliffs, but also thousands that break off from the bottom of the glacier, under water, and pop up to the surface because they are lighter than sea water.  For the last 3 days, we have been sailing through a sea of ice, with some really huge icebergs.  The ship twists and turns as it avoids the big bergs.  We have also been seeing very large icebergs for the last couple of days—beautiful and ghostly as they drift with the wind and the current. 



In the South Shetlands, we stopped at Half Moon Island and Deception Island.  Because of the sea ice that forced us to turn around and take a different route, we didn’t reach Half Moon Island until late afternoon.  We disembarked there to see large penguin colonies and a couple of seals.  We didn’t reach Deception Island, a still active volcanic caldera with a very narrow entrance, until 9:30 p.m.  But, because it’s light here virtually 24 hours a day, we were able to go ashore at Whalers’ Bay about 10:30 p.m., inside the caldera where it was calm and cold.  This is a place where the bravest or most foolhardy of the passengers go for a swim because sometimes there is warm water from the volcano, though not when we were there.  Didn’t dampen the swimmers enthusiasm, though the water was quite a shock. 

Adelie penguin

The entrance to Deception Island was clogged with ice.  We made several passes before we got through and into the bay.  By the time we left, the ice channel had closed again and we moved very slowly through it, creating huge cracks in the ice with the bow of the ship.  The captain was anxious to get out quickly because sea ice was also building up, thanks to the strong winds, outside the caldera in the main channel and he worried about getting stuck.

Next blog will be about our Antarctic visit—maybe the most spectacular scenery I’ve ever seen.

 

 

Sea Ice, Ice Floes, More Ice 

Blocked by sea ice

We have just turned around for the second time in 12 hours because of dense sea ice that blocked our way.  Last night, we spent about 8 hours reversing our course to head back to Elephant Island, around it’s long north side, and south again in the open ocean.  

Crabeater Seal



This morning, about 3 a.m., the ship shook as it scraped a sizeable iceberg.  The sun was already up, so I peered out our windows to see an ocean of ice.  We continued moving forward until about 4:30 a.m., when I went up on deck to take pictures of this remarkable (for me) and beautiful sight.  Soon after, we turned around again and are now headed NW around King George Island in the South Shetland Islands, back to the open sea.  We had planned a hike on Pigeon Island this morning, but now hope to do that late this afternoon.  Alternatively, we’ll do a short hike on Deception Island, a horseshoe-shaped island that is the crater of a still active volcano. 

 



Huge iceberg

I thought you might enjoy some of my photos of the sea ice and several of the huge icebergs we are passing.  The seal on one floe is a crabeater seal, the most plentiful seal in these waters.  The penguins are Adelie Penguins.

  

Adelie Penguins on ice floe

King George Island, South Shetland Islands



Elephant Island, Whales and Two Days at Sea 

Tiny spit where Shackleton's crew spent 4 1/2 months

After 2 days at sea, we reached Elephant Island, where Ernest Shackleton left 21 of his crew under the command of Frank Wild while he and 5 others made their terrifying journey to South Georgia Island, 800 miles away in a tiny, leaky lifeboat, through storms and huge waves, in 15 days.  They were only able to get their navigational bearings twice during that awful trip and yet managed to land on this tiny speck of land in the huge Southern Ocean.  

Iceberg near Shackleton's landing site

They landed on the opposite side of rugged South Georgia from the whaling stations, so Shackleton and 2 of his crew had to hike across mountains covered in snow, ice and glaciers to Stromness Bay, where they could get help.  They managed this difficult feat in 36 hours (an experienced trio of mountain climbers, well fed and equipped, took nearly 4 days to repeat the crossing several years ago).  When the 3 men came down the valley into the station, they were taken to the manager, who demanded to know who these filthy, frostbitten, haggard men were.  “My name is Shackleton,” Shackleton replied.  The manager turned aside and cried.  They had been lost in the pack ice for 17 months and were thought to be lost at sea.  

After rescuing the 3 men left at their landing site, Shackleton began the incredibly difficult task of saving his men on Elephant Island.  It took him 3 attempts to get back to Elephant Island, but he finally rescued his crew after 135 days in this incredibly desolate spot.  In looking at Elephant Island, it would seem that there had to be a better place to land his men, but everywhere we’ve looked, the rocky cliffs and glaciers come down to the sea, with no beaches at all. 

Glacier on Elephant Island

We went out in our Zodiacs this morning to tour the area.  The surf was too high for a landing at Shackleton’s campsite, so we circled the bay, admiring the large icebergs residing here, the glaciers and formidable cliffs surrounding the bay, and, of course, the tiny spot where Shackleton’s crew survived miraculously for 4 ½ months. 

The beach where the crew spent the winter is only a few feet above sea level, a jumble of rocks against the mountains and glaciers.  It is remarkable that they weren’t washed away by a winter storm surge because there is literally no place to go to save yourself here.  The rock beach looks about 50 feet  wide and perhaps 150 feet long, with waves crashing just below the campsite.  We did not see any seals today, but know the men lived on seals and penguins.  Not an easy catch in this frozen, slippery piece of rock.  The area is now called Point Wild and has a lonely marker to honor the captain of the completely inadequate tugboat that rescued the men against enormous odds.  When he saw the camp from the tugboat, Shackleton counted all the men who were waving frantically and happily at him and said, “They are all there.” 

Chinstrap Penguin--Elephant Island

Chinstrap Penguins nest on Elephant Island.  They are remarkable themselves, hopping up the steep, jagged and very slippery rocks to their nests.  We watched several of them as they tried to get into the water.  Those who dared slipped on the ice and bounced on the rocks before landing in the ocean.  The penguins look like black and white porpoises as they swim in and out swiftly either feeding or returning to their nests to feed their chicks.  We have admired their skill as they leap gracefully out of the water on their journeys.  They are incredibly fast. 

Yesterday we were at sea all day.  We spent several hours watching orcas and fin whales.  They are such huge animals and so incredibly graceful in the water for all their bulk.  One pod of orcas was chasing a fur seal, who soon disappeared, so we assume the unfortunate creature became a whale meal.

Sea ice forced us to reverse course

Now we are headed to the South Shetland Islands (Elephant Island is the northernmost of these islands) and then on to the Antarctic Peninsula.  We have been traveling through fairly heavy ice floes, so have had to divert our course to get around so much ice.  A short while ago, we felt the ship shudder and scrape as it hit an iceberg, so the captain wants to minimize that opportunity.   It’s so beautiful, but while the Silver Explorer is “ice hardened”, it is not an ice breaker and requires open water.  Later,after I wrote this, we actually reversed course and went back to Elephant Island (about a 5 hour detour) and around the island to the far side.  Now we’re continuing south in hopes of finding clear water. 

Every day, we have several lectures from the expedition staff who are all Antarctic researchers.  They are so knowledgeable about everything from birds to glaciers to geology to krill (the tiny shrimp that are the base layer in the food chain here, feeding birds, penguins, whales, seals—and us and our pets).   One woman studies the krill, which are quite fascinating little creatures.  One season here, she spent 2 months mostly in the water under the ice studying them and their predators.  Another crew member spent 2 years working on South Georgia Island, so knows the area well.  All the naturalists have spent years in the Antarctic, so we are lucky to benefit from their extensive experience and knowledge.

 

 

Death and Birth on South Georgia Island

elephant seal at sea

Yesterday was another beautiful, sunny day here, but so windy that we had to delay our landing a while.  Nonetheless, we did get to go ashore in a small cove covered with King Penguins and both fur and elephant seals.  The animal population was so dense that we could only walk along the shore, generally in the low surf, in order not to disturb the animals.  Fortunately, we have high-topped rubber boots, perfect for landing and walking in the surf.

 

Male fur seals preparing to fight

The male fur seals are quite aggressive and snarl and growl at one another and at us as they try to protect their small patches of territory.  All the males fight constantly, leaving large gashes on one another.  Their sleek hides are covered with scars.  The male elephant seals are also territorial and quite aggressive, but don’t bother too much about people.  Still, Don got closer than one huge male liked yesterday and he got a solid butt in his butt.  Fortunately didn’t fall down, because that would have been really dangerous.  These huge animals have formidable teeth and jaws.

There are lots of baby seals scattered about, large black blobs with huge eyes.  Within a short time, their mothers wean them and leave them pretty much to their own devices.  By that time, though, they are quite big and can swim well.  It’s a fascinating sight to watch these large, blubbery animals heave themselves with surprising speed out of the water and onto rocks or beaches.  Some even go a mile or more inland, if there is enough relatively flat land, to find a little peace from the constant agitation onshore.

baby fur seal nursing

sucessful Skua with dead penguin

In the afternoon, we took Zodiac tours into a small cove where Macaroni Penguins nest and molt.  Like every other beach on the island, there were hundreds of seals.  We watched one female who was surrounded by skua—big, sea vultures—watching her intently.  Because they are scavengers, we figured they were watching her give birth so they could get the placenta.  Sure enough, we watched as a small black creature dropped onto the sand next to the female.  She fought off the skua briefly before a huge male seal came over to help.  He made one lurch at the birds and decided enough had been done, so fell asleep on the sand.  The baby lay there next to its mother, resting, big eyes peering around.

Just before, we had observed a large group of skua about 50 yards from shore fighting over something.  It turned out to be a dead penguin.  An earlier group had seen an injured penguin surrounded by birds pecking at it.  We assume the dead and devoured penguin was the same one.  A sad fate for the bird, but a meal for the skua chicks up in the cliffs above the beach.

 

We have seen 5 kinds of penguins—rockhopper, king, Gentoo, Magellanic and macaroni.  The rockhoppers and macaronis are tufted penguins, with spiky topknots.  The king and Gentoo penguins have smooth heads and are larger than the first 2.  All carry themselves with great dignity and seem to enjoy posing for endless photos.  We will probably not see the emperor penguins, stars of the movie, “The March of the Penguins” because they will be 100 miles from the Antarctic shore nesting.

king penguins with seals

Macaroni penguins

Researchers have put GPS devices on some female seals to see where they go.  In one of our daily  lectures, we looked at a map of one seal’s annual hunting trip.  She started at South Georgia and went hundreds of miles out to sea before doubling back and going in large circles for months.  Finally, she returned to South Georgia to have her pup.  Since seals molt, she shed her tracking device with her old skin and the researchers were able to recover it to study the data thoroughly.  What remarkable technology we have.  Throughout her journey, whenever she came to the surface of the water, the GPS device radioed information about her to a satellite and then to the research station.  It also recorded the depths of her dives, which were several hundred feet.   Elephant seals are the deepest divers, going as deep as 5000 feet.

Rockhopper penguin

Gentoo penguin

We left South Georgia last night, after the captain maneuvered the ship into a tiny and magnificent cove to let us see the glaciers grinding away towards the sea.  Now we’re at sea for 2 days and I am eternally glad for my anti-sea sickness patches.  It’s quite rough and will continue that way until we get to the Antarctic Peninsula, where I hope we’ll be a bit more sheltered.

Magellanic penguin in burrow nest

I will try to upload a page of photos to this blog is I can get enough bandwidth to do that.  Otherwise, I’ll do that when we get home.

 

 

Touring South Georgia Island

South Georgia Island

 

South Georgia Island is as beautiful a place as you can find on earth.  Magnificent snow and glacier-covered mountains coming down to the deep blue Southern Ocean, and steep, grassy  valleys cut by the glaciers.  Today was clear so we had sun, bright blue sky, and lots of wind.

South Georgia glacier

Yesterday, we visited Stromness Bay in the afternoon to see its enormous collection of birds and seals.  This morning we took a Zodiac tour along the 2 mile front of a glacier that is rapidly receding (nearly 1000 feet per year), so calving constantly.  After one particularly large calving this morning, our Zodiac driver turned the boat and headed full speed out of the cove, followed by an even faster mini-tsunami wall of water displaced by the falling ice.  It finally dissipated and back we went to continue our inspection. 

There are hundreds of birds circling around the front side of the glacier.  The area where fresh water from the glacier meets cold salty sea water is rich in fish and shellfish, so excellent feeding grounds for many species of birds and seals. South Georgia has thousands of fur and elephant seals and hundreds of thousands of birds.  But, it also has rats that were introduced a century ago by visiting ships, and they eat birds’ eggs.  The small research group that lives on the Island estimates that there would be 100 million birds nesting here if it weren’t for the rats.  They have embarked on a major rat eradication program that is very difficult and very expensive, but also very successful in their test area.  It would be incredible to come back here in a decade and see if the bird population has, indeed, grown that much, assuming the rats are completely eradicated.

King Penguin breeding colony with chicks

The King Penguins are thick here and most are molting, which is quite a fascinating process.  The penguins stay in one place, mostly standing, for the 4 or 5 weeks it takes to molt.  Consequently, they lose about 1/3 of their body weight and must return immediately to the ocean for food when their molting is finished.  Often, they go hundreds of miles out to sea to feed.  When they molt, they don’t just shed feathers.  The new feathers push out the old feathers, so they look shaggy over parts of their bodies while other parts, which haven’t started molting yet, look sleek and normal.

At the same time, there are breeding pairs hatching eggs and feeding chicks, so the parent sitting on the egg eats nothing for 2 or 3 weeks while the other parent goes out to sea to feed.   Then they exchange places until the chick is old enough to be left alone, covered in soft brown feathers.  These chicks form themselves into groups for protection as they are too young to take care of themselves or to swim long distances.  When the parents return from the ocean, they often have trouble finding their chick, but the chick can find them because the baby is hungry and smells its parents and runs after them squawking until it gets fed.

Male elephant seal resting

 This afternoon, we spent 4 hours at Grytviken, an old Norwegian whaling station (there were 7 or 8 on South Georgia before whaling was banned by the British in 1965).  This is where Ernest Shackleton is buried, with his head facing south, as he wished, in a small cemetery above the water and below the towering cliffs of the mountains and glaciers.  Shackleton died of a heart attack while en route to South Georgia to launch yet another attempt to cross Antarctica.

White fur seal protecting his territory

In its heyday, Grytviken had 400 workers and could process 25 whales a day, using every part of the whale’s body.  It must have been a slimy, gruesome place, but very lucrative for the whalers.  They killed 175,000 whales here over about 50 years.  Then, one season, when they returned, there were no whales at all.  They had killed so many that the population collapsed.  The Japanese whalers took over the station for a couple of years, but gave it up because it was so unproductive.  The town now is home to 30 fishery administrators, researchers, and rat eradicators, some of whom have lived here for 20 years, taking 3 or 4 months of vacation during the darkest days of winter.  It’s a life they love, but obviously completely isolated, the only way out being boat or, occasionally, a helicopter.  The nearest land is the Falkland Islands, nearly 800 miles away.  Nonetheless, they have about 5000 visitors a year from tourist, fishing, and British Navy ships stopping here and seem very pleased to show their visitors around.