Icebergs, and from Wales to whales

After three days crossing the Drake Passage in a storm, we finally make it to the Antarctic Peninsula.

Icebergs...

The improvement in the weather meant that we could all start on the science, basically for us "geos" (geologists) that means selecting somewhere to core the sea bed.

We are trying to select sites that will contain information within the sediments on the extent of past ice sheets over as many as seven glacial cycles going back thousands of years.

Getting to coring sites normally proves quite a challenge to the crew on the bridge whose task it is to "park" the ship and keep it there while all the equipment gets lowered to the sea floor.

(Photograph of the James Clark Ross courtesy of the British Antarctic Survey.)

Their instructions normally come from a few geologists on the intercom "right a bit, left a bit, stop, no hang on, back a bit", quite a challenge in a ship of this size!

After two days sailing down the peninsula, suddenly, we see what we have all been anxiously waiting and looking for. Far off in the distance we can just make it out, our first iceberg. Numerous photos were taken of this distant lump of ice, but we would not have bothered if we knew what was to come in the next few days.

The following day I was up at 3am and had to go out on deck to help with the coring. When working on deck I wear several layers of clothing, although it still gets a little nippy if the wind picks up and it is overcast. As it happens we just managed to get the coring equipment in when another storm blew up.

It is official – I have my sea legs, thank goodness as the weather continued to deteriorate. This time we were sailing in the same direction as the swell. Huge waves began to pick the boat up and propel it forward on the crest. Occasionally waves would break right over the back onto the main deck.

It is quite amazing, the brain somehow adjusts to the continual movement of the ship and it automatically tilts the body to stay vertical. When I want to stand I automatically lean into things rather than against things as I would end up going head over heels across the floor when the ship suddenly rolls.

These rough conditions actually give me a buzz now. I am quite happy working in a lab using various power tools, taking accurate measurements of sediment cores, even making up thin section slides so that samples can be studied under the microscope.

All this I can now do even in stormy weather but the most popular (and least useful) activity during such conditions is darts in the bar – this is probably as dangerous as it sounds because the player has nothing to hold on to as the ship rolls and pitches and, needless to say, there are several stray darts.

Let's hope I don't get a dart in the back of the head!

From Wales to whales...

Each day as we sail further south we start to encounter more and more icebergs. They are magnificent, like giant cathedrals of ice, some hundreds of feet high which cluster together and look like mini mountain ranges. There are also numerous large tabular ice bergs, something for which Antarctica is famous.

We have also had a few snow showers. Even at 27 years old, when it begins to look like a winter wonderland, I still get as excited as I did when I was a small child. Except it is not winter, it is summer and even though the temperature hovers around zero this is "warm" for the coldest place on Earth.

After sailing for over a week we finally spot land for the first time.
It is also my first glimpse of Antarctica and is as spectacular as I had imagined.

The snowy peaks we can see in the distance are Cape Vostok on Alexander Island. It is strange looking at mountains that no human has ever summated and it reminds me of just how remote this continent really is.

The next day we encounter our first sea ice, it was incredibly thick at first which worried us slightly as we still want to get much further south.

I love going out on deck and watching the ship ploughing through chunky sea ice, some of which is more than a meter thick.

When the ship is going through ice it is like being in an aeroplane in slight turbulence, there are occasional shudders and jerks as we hit big bits of ice and sometimes the ship is almost stopped in its tracks. The ship is actually specially designed so that roll is artificially induced to break the ice.

As we continued sailing one afternoon the bridge phoned to say that whales had been spotted on the port side. We all ran out onto deck, cameras in hand, and there all around us were minke whales swimming right next to the ship.

There were about eight of them and they surfaced every now and then blowing spouts of water and would breach on their backs. They stayed with us for over an hour and we felt truly honoured to have witnessed them here in the Amundsen Sea.

Even the members of crew who have been to this part of the world several times had never seen this before. I was convinced that they were attracted by our seismic equipment that was sending out pings at various frequencies.

As well as the whales we have already seen numerous penguins and seals that always appear rather unperturbed at a large red ship crashing through their neighbourhood.

Soon there will not be much time for observing the wildlife as we approach Pine Island Bay, an area of great recent interest as it appears to be undergoing the most rapid changes on the Antarctic continent.

Previous BAS cruises have tried and failed to gain access to this area because of sea ice conditions; if we manage to get in during the next few days we will be the first British ship to do so.

We are all crossing our fingers!