The Magnificent South Shetland Islands
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| 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.
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| 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.
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| 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.
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| 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.
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| Breaking through the sea ice |
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| 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.
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| 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.
