Every place along the Antarctic Peninsula tends to be my favorite. Bailey Head. Neko Harbor. Paradise Bay. Cuverville. The Lemaire Channel. The Grand Didier Channel. Crystal Sound. The Fish Island Group. Marguerite Bay. And on and on and on.
Tabular Ice, Weddell Sea, Antarctica 2009
But in Antarctica places can tend to run together thanks to one commonality: Here it is truly all about just one thing, The Ice. Sure, we all know there’s rock and snow below (even petrified forests and most likely dinosaur bones). But for the moment still, I still come to the far south each austral summer for the ice.
I admit to having a favorite: The big, tabular icebergs that litter the Weddell Sea like giant white dominoes. Set free from their role as guardian of the coastline gives them an independence apparent in their grandness. Frozen sea built up over centuries of falling snow, these particular tabulars are broken off from, remnants of the Larsen Ice Shelf. They are drifting (very slowly) north through the Antarctic Sound, where they will eventually float (very slowly)from the Southern Ocean into the Atlantic where they will, in a decade or so?, melt.
Today they are significant for more than just their size. These were once the grand guardians of the glaciers lining the eastern side of the Peninsula. That they have broken off and drifted away means those glaciers are at risk of disappearing ever faster.
They are long (on average a mile, sometimes up to ten and twelve miles) and high (one hundred and fifty, two hundred feet) and barely on the move. At the moment most are grounded and lodged on the ocean floor, shearing it clean of all living things. Their role in Antarctica’s future is powerful. Free to roam, and to disappear with the assistance of wind, rain, and warming temperatures, they’ve given up their role as protectorate and taken on the role of floating idols, reflecting sky and sea in new patterns every single minute.
The M/V “Ocean Nova,” operated by Connecticut-based Quark Expeditions, has been stuck on the rocks in Marguerite Bay for more than 24 hours. For the time being, the ship is not leaking oil and its captain is hoping it tides will lift it off the rocks. But having been in Marguerite Bay twice this past December, and seeing photographs of how the boat is lodged, it would appear he’s going to have to depend on unusually high tides to float the ship.
The ship apparently ran into trouble due to high winds, not unusual more than one hundred miles south of the Antarctic Circle. According to Quark, the 64 passengers and 41 crew are “following a normal programme of lectures” while the ship is stuck. They are awaiting arrival of the Spanish Naval ship “Hespedrides” and another Quark passenger ship, the “Clipper Adventurer.” If the ship cannot be unlodged, passengers will be transferred to the “Adventurer.” [14:00 EST, ALL PASSENGERS HAVE BEEN PUT ONTO THE "CLIPPER ADVENTURE," WHICH WILL SAIL FOR USHUAIA, ARGENTINA. DIVERS HAVE INSPECTED THE STILL-STUCK "OCEAN NOVA" AND ARE REPORTING NO LEAKING.]
In early December I was fifteen miles from the site of another Antarctic grounding, the M/V “Ushuaia,” which rested on the rocks for a couple days before being dragged off by a Chilean naval ship. It ultimately limped back to dry dock in Punta Arenas, Chile, its season cut in half.
It has been a rough season for Quark-chartered Antarctic ships. Earlier in the season the “Lyubov Orlova” – which the company was chartering for the season – was held at the dock in Ushuaia for several weeks by Argentine port authorities for failing inspection. Its passengers were either sent home or placed on other Antarctic-bound tourist ships.
Though overall tourist visits to the Antarctic Peninsula are down, probably due to sour economic times worlwide, there will still have been 40,000+ during the 2008-2009 season. More demand combined with less ice means more visits and more statistical risk of accident. Tour operators contend that it is still a small number, which is true relative to how many people visit a national park in the U.S. on any given summer day. But the consequences down south are potentially severe. If any of the ships currently plying the Peninsula were to run aground and sink – which the “Ocean Nova” could still do – it would leave behind a very tangible, and very difficult to monitor or clean-up, mess.
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
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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