eGlobal Education

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.