The pack ice has moved away from the south side of Paulet Island and we were able to get ashore on a cold, gray morning, to mingle with the 200,000 Adelie penguins who nest here during the summer months. Last time we landed it was on the far side of the island, and our hope to climb up and over the island was thwarted by a literal boom in penguins. They’re everywhere this time of year, so thick they block every possible path. Their stone nests generally boast not one but two fat, all-gray chicks.
1903 hut, home to twenty men for a long winter
Just up from the rocky shoreline is the remnant of a stone hut built in 1903 by members of Norwegian Otto Nordenskjold’s expedition. They had sailed down in a ship named “Antarctica,” captained by a skipper named Larsen (for whom the giant ice shelf just to our south is named), but over the course of two years the team was accidentally split into three parts. Six on one island, three on another and twenty here on the tiny, rock-covered island of Paulet. Though separated by less than one hundred miles, no group knew the other was stranded and each kept waiting for the rest to sail or sledge to the rescue. Little did they know that while the “Antarctica” did attempt a couple times, it was fated to be squeezed by the pack ice near Joinville Island (ala Ernest Shackleton’s “Endurance,” more than a decade later) and sink.
It’s hard to imagine being stuck here for a year, living cheek-to-jowl with nineteen of your now-closest friends. They killed and stored 1,100 penguins and a handful of seals, built a stone hut – roofing it with sail cloth – out of the path of the heaviest snows but on the top of a windy hill, I imagine so they could constantly observe the sea in front of them, which varied from frozen to almost frozen. They heated with blubber, the fumes of which eventually blackened their skin. They had only a few books between them and little to do but stare at the walls. Against all odds, all but one of the twenty survived (the victim, who suffered a heart attack, is buried on the beach here) and ultimately met up with the other two stranded teams by chance. Theirs is another of Antarctica’s great stories of survival.
The scene, starker on a gray day than a bright and sunny one, reminds me how glad I am not to be stuck here, whether alone or with travel mates. This side of the Peninsula reminds me every day just how remote and foreboding Antarctica can be.
View a slideshow of the Paulet Island Peuguins.
Photos - Fiona Stewart
PORQUOI PAS?, MARGUERITE BAY
Far south again, more than one hundred miles south of the Antarctic Circle, on Christmas morning we successfully landed at Bongrain Point, on the western edge of Porquoi Pas Island. It was a success too, because we’d been here eleven days ago and could only look at the beach through binoculars. A six-foot-thick lip of hard ice and snow lined the beach; we tried hacking steps with a hand ax, but it would have been a half-day’s work.
Instead today we rolled straight onto the beach, unimpeded by anything but underwater rocks exposed by the withdrawing tide and some floating growlers. That six feet of hard snow and ice? Gone. Completely gone. In eleven days. Think it’s not warming here, and warming fast? This isn’t some Denver suburb after a spring snow dump but far south Antarctica. Even in December – the equivalent of June in the northern hemisphere’s summer – the ice is disappearing faster and faster each season.
I love the place names around Marguerite Bay, which was named for the wife of the region’s earliest explorer, Jean-Baptiste Etienne August Charcot, who spent most of 1909-11 in the neighborhood explorig. Porquois Pas? comes from the name of Charcot’s ship; the tallest mountain on the island is Mt. Verne, for Jules Verne, and Bongrain Point for the ship’s first officer. Charcot Island was originally Charcot Land; the Frenchies mistakenly thought they’d hit continent at that point, but it later turned out to be a very big island.
In the afternoon we move up to the end of Bourgeois Fjord (named after Joseph E., director of the Geographic Service of the French Army) … where I had a great, long Christmas Day walk on the fast ice, surrounded by some of the most magnificent scenery in Antarctica.
WATCH VIDEO FROM BOURGEOIS FJORD, ON CHRISTMAS DAY!
Photos, Fiona Stewart
We had big, choppy seas yesterday, churned by strong gale force winds and twenty-five to thirty foot swells. Classified on the Beaufort Scale as class 9, if measured on land these same winds would “break larger branches off trees and blow small trees over, blow over construction signs and barricades and do (considerable) damage to circus tents and canopies.” Made me glad I wasn’t out in a kayak.
A wild Southern Ocean
Today we woke to a completely different, nearly windless sea, surrounded by a sizable group of humpback whales. On their way further south this time of year to feed, we found them doing exactly that. Stopped in almost one place, circling, lunching. There were so many it was hard to count, but many tens were breaking the surface simultaneously. At any one point you could easily see the backs, fins or tails of twenty big animals, all under a glorious-if-cold morning light.
• Forty-five-year-old Pennsylvania businessman Todd Carmichael is the first of what will most likely be half-dozen adventurers to reach the South Pole under their own steam this season. He covered 700 miles from the coast at Hercules Inlet to the U.S.’s Scott-Amundsen base fast – 39 days, 7 hours, 49 minutes – some kind of new speed record, reportedly an hour or so quicker than the last record … though I find speed in Antarctica to be extremely irrelevant. It’s such a tough place that physical feats down here are all successful; as long as you accomplish what you set out to do. Along his route he described the snow as a combination of “talcum powder, moon dust and laundry detergent.” In regard to solo travel in Antarctica, I will always bow down to my friend Borge Ousland, who skied across the continent alone and unsupported in 1996-97, from Berkner Island on the Weddell Sea to the U.S. McMurdo base on the Ross Sea. It took him 64 days to cover 1,764 miles.
• It’s not just tourist ships that get in trouble down south. The vaunted British Naval Ship HMS Endurance – the Royal navy’s Sole ice patrol ship – which works Antarctica each season, had to be towed back to Chile during the past few days after her engine room flooded, leaving her without power and propulsion in the Magellan Strait. A cruise liner, the Norwegian Sun, stood by, ready to evacuate the one hundred people on board. Eventually a few passengers were offloaded from the Endurance by helicopter and Chilean Navy missile boat; meanwhile a Chilean Navy helicopter made an emergency landing on the Norwegian Sun to uplift a 47-year-old California woman suffering from an encephalic hemorrhage.
The British Navy ship – which last January “discovered” the exact location of the sunken tourist boat Explorer, 4,200 feet below the cold surface – has been towed to dry dock in Punta Arenas, Chile, where it will undergo inspection for damage alongside the tourist boat Ushuaia, which ran aground along the Antarctic Peninsula earlier in the season.
A PROUD DAY
Though I’ve been in Antarctica since before Thanksgiving, I’ve had the good fortune in recent days of gaining a couple media distinctions. The New York Times included my account of travels in Vietnam (“Descending the Dragon”) on its ‘best of list’ … and yesterday Fox News honored me as one of 2008’s ten “liberal loons.”
I’m not sure if it’s yet an annual list, but Fox.com put together a top ten of what it regards as the year’s “wackiest” takes on global warming, including my National Geographic report from the Antarctic Peninsula last January of penguin chicks dying thanks to a new combination of daytime rains and freezing nights. Headlined “No Matter What Happens, Someone Will Blame Global Warming …”, and the blogosphere has quickly picked up the story, with several publicly missing Al Gore’s inclusion. “10 Liberal Loon Lies Blaming Everything and Anything …” is typical of the rest.
On the left, a healthy and dry chick; on the right, a wet and freezing chick.
So, as the year winds down, time a little reflection. Praise by the New York Times, derision from Fox News. Keeps me in pretty good company, I imagine.
SPEAKING OF PENGUINS …
It’s clear from my mail that blonde penguins definitely have more fun … so … a few more photographs of some of Antarctica’s more unusual pengies … (compliments of my friend John Carlson and his Antarctic wildlife surveying friends at Oceanites).
An odd bird ...
Dalmatian ... or penguin?
A true albino.
A rare, nearly all-black Emperor
Photos, Fiona Stewart
Just as every day is different down south, every landscape is wildly different too.
We’ve moved to the other side of the Peninsula, the eastern edge of the five-hundred-mile long finger jutting out of the continent, into the Weddell Sea. We tried to get in here last year, by sailboat and kayak, but were shut out. The winter of 2007 had been a particularly cold one, even by Antarctic standards, and the entry to the Antarctic Sound had been blocked long into summer by a pair of giant icebergs, each tens of miles long. That blockage, combined with a lack of wind, meant that where we had hoped to paddle – circumnavigating Vega and James Ross islands – was choked by frozen sea, passes between the islands still filled by one and two year old ice.
Weddell Sea tabular
This year is very, very different. The winter of 2008 was warmer and windier and even though we’re a day away from the official start of summer, much of the Weddell is already clear of the same kind of thick pack we saw last year.
That said it is never a picnic over here. The landscape is stark, the islands short-hilled and rust-colored. Other than a solitary Argentine base, there’s no one around for one hundred miles, and you sense that remoteness. If more than 100,000 sizable bergs calve off the Antarctic continent each year, about one-third of them come from the glaciers lining the Weddell Sea. Remember in 2002, when a chunk of ice the size of Rhode Island dramatically broke off from the Larsen B ice shelf? The Larsen B is just south of where I am today and some of that ice and its brothers and sisters are still grounded here. As I write I’m standing alongside a flat-topped berg a few stories tall and at least two miles long.
The ice here is different too. The sky is bright blue, the wind howling at thirty to forty miles an hour and I spend the better part of an hour looking through a spotting scope towards Seymour Island, following “the pack” being pushed by wind and current. It is miles wide, floating on the surface, exactly what you would not want to get caught in. Imagine being surrounded by a fast-moving pack tens of miles wide, unable to escape. You could be stuck for days, or worse.
The Weddell’s icebergs are mean and tough too, none of that soft, slushy stuff you might see at this time of year on the western side of the Peninsula. Hit one of these, and you’ll suffer. They are extremely hard, toughened by years of extreme cold and wind, often studded just below the surface by giant, sharp continental rock. Even the name of the water here is ominous – the Terror and Erebus Gulf – named for a pair of historical wooden sailing ships that first risked exploring the region.
At the north end of the channel, I take a long walk on Paulet Island, known for its 100,000 pairs of nesting Adelies. There are so many birds it is nearly impossible to clamber up the boulder-strewn beach. Beneath many of the birds peek the first chicks I’ve seen this year. As the day goes on, the sky grows evermore blue, the winds stronger.
Some of the 200,000 Adelie pengins on Paulet Island
Wind swept and rocky, islands in the Weddell Sea are vastly different than the opposite side of the Peninsula
ANTARCTICA EXPEDITIONS UPDATES
For a summary of who’s doing what down south this year by ski, kite and foot, check in with my friend Kraig Becker’s The Adventure Blog. While I remain curious about the various attempts, admiring of the incredible physical stamina each requires, when you’re on the edge of the continent as I am, all of that seems very … foreign … very far away.
Photos, Fiona Stewart
BLAILOCK ISLAND, MARGUERITE BAY
I spent the afternoon walking on a piece of fast ice the size of a small town – floating on the surface, about six feet thick, still attached to the continent – in a fjord known as Bourgeois, dead-ending in the Jones Ice Shelf. Many of the landmarks in the area bear French names, like the big island of Porquoi Pas, for example, thanks to the early exploits this far south by Frenchman Jean Charcot.
Surrounded on three sides by breathtaking tall mountains and glaciers and on the other by the black Southern Ocean, this is as far south as I’ve ever been. Further south than all but a few ever get along the Peninsula. The reward was a long walk on new snow-covered ice. A dozen leopard seals play along the ice edge and small squadrons of Adelie penguins walk and scoot on their bellies alongside.
Leopard seals along the edge of the Jones Ice Shelf
Adelie's strolling
We tried to get here last year, by sea kayak, but our attempt to sneak through the Gullet just north – a narrow sliver of sometimes-open water – was for naught, and we only got as far as the bottom of Crystal Sound. Our goal last year was to get exactly to this point, to Blailock Island where, on the northeast corner, an old friend, Giles Kershaw, is buried. I think we may have spotted the sight today, marked by a stone cairn, as we trekked.
I met Giles in the mid-1980s, when he already had a reputation as the very best Arctic and Antarctic pilot in the business. He had flown for the British Antarctic Survey from 1974 to 1979 and had around the world, over both poles, and provided air support for many major expeditions. In 1983 alone he landed at the North Pole twenty-three times. In 1980 he was awarded a medal from the Queen of England, after he flew across a thousand miles of trackless Antarctic white to rescue three South African scientists who had been marooned on an iceberg for eight days. Even among his adventuring peers Giles was considered the most adventuresome, the most curious, and the most visionary.
In 1985, after successfully helping a pair of wealthy American climbers scale the tallest peak on the continent, Mt. Vinson, he and two Canadian partners (Martyn Williams and Pat Morrow) started what is still the only private business operating in Antarctica. Then called Adventure Network International, they set up a seasonal base camp at Patriot Hills, near the Thiel Mountains in Antarctica’s interior, and flew in climbers, expeditioners and South Pole-bound tourists. Along the way they helped out a fair amount of international scientists, which is why the Antarctic Treaty and its membership – which bans private enterprise here – looked the other way and allowed them to operate.
In 1988 Giles helped lay supply caches between the tip of the Peninsula and the South Pole for my friend Will Steger’s Transantarctica Expedition and, on March 5, 1990, he was killed just near where I walked today. His Antarctica season had just ended and he was on a boat anchored just offshore from here, making experimental flights with a homemade gyrocopter. It crashed into a glacier at the edge of the Jones Ice Shelf. Several years later the mountain that anchors the northeast corner of the island across from where I stand is named for him.
That personal history notwithstanding, this spot on the map is one of the most remarkable places I’ve ever put my feet. Remote, stark, and unrelentingly beautiful. Even turning a full 360, twisting my boots in the soft snow, I can’t take it all in, too enormous to describe or articulate. You’ll have to come see it for yourself one day!
Jon strolling ...
Pack ice breaking off the Jones Ice Shelf
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