We have undertaken a journey through space and time, very compressed indeed. Starting in Tierra del Fuego with its beech-tree-clad, glacier scoured U-shaped valleys, we sailed to the tip of the Southern continent, to the land “forever doomed to lie hidden beneath eternal ice and snow.” We awed at the life, which has adapted to the harsh conditions offered. We awed at the friendly and inviting moments the climate can offer a visitor in the window of a brief summer.
We turned north-east and ploughed for 800 miles the freezing surface water of the Southern Ocean to visit South Georgia, a wilderness Eden speck of land, 60% ice-covered at latitudes south where we find Denmark and Britain in the north. Here, from the ice fields embracing the foot of the mountainous backbone of the island, glaciers flow down to dip the tips of their tongues in the water.
Filled to our brims with impressions of teeming wildlife along the ice-free beaches we have ventured west, sailed across the Antarctic Convergence and left the Southern Ocean for the South Atlantic. Suddenly the air turned warmer. We could free ourselves of one layer of clothes as we stood watching the vagabonds of the oceans, the tubenoses, from deck today. The influence of the Great White Continent has weakened a bit. Tomorrow we will arrive in the Falklands, to a different lifestyle, to a much balmier climate and a wider range of plant and bird life. Still, the islands hold evidence of the last glaciation, but has moved away from the deep freeze about 10,000 years ago.
The loop we have made through space, climate and time covers some 3700 NM and a mere three weeks on our ship. A black browed or wandering albatross – the latter with feeding ranges of 9000 NM and more – would be able to make that loop in three days or so. But then again, only making swift stops to devour some squid. Our prolonged landings to aquaint ourselves with the beauty of these untamed wilderness areas luckily slowed down our progress quite a bit!
