Paradise Bay and Port Lockroy, Antarctic Peninsula
The Endeavour dispatched Zodiacs this afternoon at Port Lockroy landing people ashore beside rusting chains where factory whaling ships once moored. Snowy sheathbills nested in discarded whale skulls and gentoo penguins tended ballooning chicks around historic huts of Antarctica’s first long-term settlement. Here a museum preserves the British base that ran nearly-continuously from World War II until 1962.
We toured rooms filled with meteorological and communications instruments, polar travel gear, food rations, reading material and other artifacts of the era, and took advantage of an Antarctic post office and giftshop. A complete whale skeleton lies nearby as legacy of whalers’ earlier successes in this bay. Despite the enormous takes in the Southern Ocean in the last century, we have been enjoying excellent encounters with both humpback and Antarctic minke whales.
Earlier today we explored another research base and ice-encircled bay. The Argentine station Almirante Brown currently lies inoperative in a corner of impressive Paradise Bay. Twenty years ago the station doctor burned down the original base because he didn’t want to overwinter. With distant booming, the near-360° panorama of glaciers occasionally calved soft blue ice into the sea as we walked around the closed orange buildings. By Zodiac, we found that the snow-packed hummock we had climbed for an expansive view sat above a cliff coated in organic colors of lichen, moss and copper where blue-eyed shags nest along a jagged ledge.
Following the icy path of explorers, whalers and scientists along the Western Antarctic Peninsula, we continued our explorations through breathtaking LeMaire Channel. Here steep rocky outcroppings project from caked glacial fields in a narrow iceberg-filled passage. As the serene polar light slowly swept into evening hues and with imprinted images of penguins and ice, the Endeavour steamed south in hopes of crossing the Antarctic Circle by morning.
The Endeavour dispatched Zodiacs this afternoon at Port Lockroy landing people ashore beside rusting chains where factory whaling ships once moored. Snowy sheathbills nested in discarded whale skulls and gentoo penguins tended ballooning chicks around historic huts of Antarctica’s first long-term settlement. Here a museum preserves the British base that ran nearly-continuously from World War II until 1962.
We toured rooms filled with meteorological and communications instruments, polar travel gear, food rations, reading material and other artifacts of the era, and took advantage of an Antarctic post office and giftshop. A complete whale skeleton lies nearby as legacy of whalers’ earlier successes in this bay. Despite the enormous takes in the Southern Ocean in the last century, we have been enjoying excellent encounters with both humpback and Antarctic minke whales.
Earlier today we explored another research base and ice-encircled bay. The Argentine station Almirante Brown currently lies inoperative in a corner of impressive Paradise Bay. Twenty years ago the station doctor burned down the original base because he didn’t want to overwinter. With distant booming, the near-360° panorama of glaciers occasionally calved soft blue ice into the sea as we walked around the closed orange buildings. By Zodiac, we found that the snow-packed hummock we had climbed for an expansive view sat above a cliff coated in organic colors of lichen, moss and copper where blue-eyed shags nest along a jagged ledge.
Following the icy path of explorers, whalers and scientists along the Western Antarctic Peninsula, we continued our explorations through breathtaking LeMaire Channel. Here steep rocky outcroppings project from caked glacial fields in a narrow iceberg-filled passage. As the serene polar light slowly swept into evening hues and with imprinted images of penguins and ice, the Endeavour steamed south in hopes of crossing the Antarctic Circle by morning.
