eGlobal Education

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.