Underwater Roving in the Antarctic
A low rolling swell lifts the Endeavour’s hull today as we steam north across the Drake Passage. Still south of the Antarctic convergence, we are enveloped in a soft chill fog, which adds to the quiet contemplative mood aboard the ship. A day at sea gives us all a chance to think back and reflect on our seven days exploration of the Antarctic Peninsula and the surrounding islands. There is so much to remember. Bright blue skies and sudden snow squalls, squabbling penguins and soaring petrels, busy days of hiking and kayaking, quiet evenings ashore in the hours-long twilight.
The seas and winds were kind to us, so I was able to dive or use the ROV every day of the trip, bringing back video images of beautiful anemones, purple seastars, strange sponges and stranger creatures of the depths where eternal darkness rules. There were tiny fish surviving in this freezing water (the temperature beneath the surface is a very consistent 29ºF) with a remarkable kind of natural antifreeze compounds in their blood and cells, and we found lovely comb-jellies caught in tide pools and drifting in the currents just off shore, their cilia refracting the light into tiny rainbows chasing along their bodies like the lights of a marquee. Four hundred feet down in an iceberg-filled strait, strange seastars spread their arms to feed in the current and a large crinoid climbed onto a boulder to do the same. Looking into the undersea realm added not one but many new aspects to our exploration of the seventh continent.
At a depth of 45 feet in the inner harbor of Port Lockroy I found several individuals of this exquisite dorid nudibranch (Austrodoris kerguelensis), quietly feeding on sponges growing among the enormous bones of whales that litter the bottom there. And best of all, near our southernmost point at Pleneau Island, I was visited in the water by curious gentoo penguins. After surfacing I followed them into the shallows and was able to film them cutting graceful arcs through the wonderfully clear water, disappearing from my perspective as they porpoised and then diving again with quick strokes of their wings, banking around each other and me in a triple-time water ballet. It was a case of being in the right place at the right time, and that, for me, is the essence of expedition travel.
A low rolling swell lifts the Endeavour’s hull today as we steam north across the Drake Passage. Still south of the Antarctic convergence, we are enveloped in a soft chill fog, which adds to the quiet contemplative mood aboard the ship. A day at sea gives us all a chance to think back and reflect on our seven days exploration of the Antarctic Peninsula and the surrounding islands. There is so much to remember. Bright blue skies and sudden snow squalls, squabbling penguins and soaring petrels, busy days of hiking and kayaking, quiet evenings ashore in the hours-long twilight.
The seas and winds were kind to us, so I was able to dive or use the ROV every day of the trip, bringing back video images of beautiful anemones, purple seastars, strange sponges and stranger creatures of the depths where eternal darkness rules. There were tiny fish surviving in this freezing water (the temperature beneath the surface is a very consistent 29ºF) with a remarkable kind of natural antifreeze compounds in their blood and cells, and we found lovely comb-jellies caught in tide pools and drifting in the currents just off shore, their cilia refracting the light into tiny rainbows chasing along their bodies like the lights of a marquee. Four hundred feet down in an iceberg-filled strait, strange seastars spread their arms to feed in the current and a large crinoid climbed onto a boulder to do the same. Looking into the undersea realm added not one but many new aspects to our exploration of the seventh continent.
At a depth of 45 feet in the inner harbor of Port Lockroy I found several individuals of this exquisite dorid nudibranch (Austrodoris kerguelensis), quietly feeding on sponges growing among the enormous bones of whales that litter the bottom there. And best of all, near our southernmost point at Pleneau Island, I was visited in the water by curious gentoo penguins. After surfacing I followed them into the shallows and was able to film them cutting graceful arcs through the wonderfully clear water, disappearing from my perspective as they porpoised and then diving again with quick strokes of their wings, banking around each other and me in a triple-time water ballet. It was a case of being in the right place at the right time, and that, for me, is the essence of expedition travel.
