Weddell Sea, Antarctica
Ice! Ice everywhere, pack ice, fast ice, icebergs and bergy bits, and tabular bergs the size of small towns, then ice so blue, so unexpected, it pulls you in, so beautiful, and no, it is not at all easy to look away. We are exploring the Weddell Sea, cold, capricious, colossal, hmm, just a few adjectives that quickly come to mind. The Weddell Sea is a huge, clockwise gyre that spits ice out at its surface and floods the very bottom of the world’s oceans with its dense, near frozen waters. This morning we are blocked at every turn by ice. Navigating here is like living in a city where roads you have traveled on all year are suddenly gone, or go some place completely different than they ever did before! We move across the chart, across names like Erebus and Terror Gulf and Active Sound, then, back again. Frustrated? No! Certainly not! Delighted! It is gorgeous and the photographers are capturing many pixels. If you are quiet you can just hear the electrons screaming by. The Weddell Sea, this is where you find the big ice.
Later in the day we make a landing on the Antarctic Peninsula at the appropriately named Brown Bluff: penguins, fossil, seals on the beach and even a snow petrel. In the water there are huge jellies being harassed by pintado and giant petrels. A strange meal is made from that one, not very substantial, kind of like a dinner made from plastic bubbles. But it is not bubbles that Lisa Trotter and I are interested in today, it is big ice and its effect on the ocean bottom as it plows through. Our tool is the Remote Operated Vehicle, the ROV. We find a big berg near the National Geographic Endeavour looming about 50 feet above the sea surface. It is obviously grounded, reaching the bottom in over 350 feet of water. Big enough! And it is just one of many behemoths churning up the benthic community here. What would be down there? What could be down there? We leave the berg, its crystalline wall, beautifully scalloped with translucent edges, at about 200 feet and plunge into darkness, the marine snow a blizzard in our headlights. There it is, the bottom just a light brown glow… of what, mud? Well, a little mud and a lot of life! It is wall-to-wall creatures down here: tubby things, mushroomy things and things with arms and things with tentacles, yes, tunicates and ascidians, brittle stars and sea cucumbers, sea spiders and crinoids and a lot more. I think the ice impacts are not too bad for this place, churn up some nutrients perhaps, but certainly the strong currents here bring the food that makes the feast possible. Almost everything here is filter-feeding, by one way or another, the tiny bits of matter that drift by: plant, animal, detritus and worse, like the marine snow. And the nice picture by Lisa? It is a crinoid or feather star taking a bit of a swim, twenty arms, ten go up, and ten go down. Bet you have not seen that before! It is pretty amazing, like this whole day, everyday, but watch out, they can’t see and they are none too steady.
Ice! Ice everywhere, pack ice, fast ice, icebergs and bergy bits, and tabular bergs the size of small towns, then ice so blue, so unexpected, it pulls you in, so beautiful, and no, it is not at all easy to look away. We are exploring the Weddell Sea, cold, capricious, colossal, hmm, just a few adjectives that quickly come to mind. The Weddell Sea is a huge, clockwise gyre that spits ice out at its surface and floods the very bottom of the world’s oceans with its dense, near frozen waters. This morning we are blocked at every turn by ice. Navigating here is like living in a city where roads you have traveled on all year are suddenly gone, or go some place completely different than they ever did before! We move across the chart, across names like Erebus and Terror Gulf and Active Sound, then, back again. Frustrated? No! Certainly not! Delighted! It is gorgeous and the photographers are capturing many pixels. If you are quiet you can just hear the electrons screaming by. The Weddell Sea, this is where you find the big ice.
Later in the day we make a landing on the Antarctic Peninsula at the appropriately named Brown Bluff: penguins, fossil, seals on the beach and even a snow petrel. In the water there are huge jellies being harassed by pintado and giant petrels. A strange meal is made from that one, not very substantial, kind of like a dinner made from plastic bubbles. But it is not bubbles that Lisa Trotter and I are interested in today, it is big ice and its effect on the ocean bottom as it plows through. Our tool is the Remote Operated Vehicle, the ROV. We find a big berg near the National Geographic Endeavour looming about 50 feet above the sea surface. It is obviously grounded, reaching the bottom in over 350 feet of water. Big enough! And it is just one of many behemoths churning up the benthic community here. What would be down there? What could be down there? We leave the berg, its crystalline wall, beautifully scalloped with translucent edges, at about 200 feet and plunge into darkness, the marine snow a blizzard in our headlights. There it is, the bottom just a light brown glow… of what, mud? Well, a little mud and a lot of life! It is wall-to-wall creatures down here: tubby things, mushroomy things and things with arms and things with tentacles, yes, tunicates and ascidians, brittle stars and sea cucumbers, sea spiders and crinoids and a lot more. I think the ice impacts are not too bad for this place, churn up some nutrients perhaps, but certainly the strong currents here bring the food that makes the feast possible. Almost everything here is filter-feeding, by one way or another, the tiny bits of matter that drift by: plant, animal, detritus and worse, like the marine snow. And the nice picture by Lisa? It is a crinoid or feather star taking a bit of a swim, twenty arms, ten go up, and ten go down. Bet you have not seen that before! It is pretty amazing, like this whole day, everyday, but watch out, they can’t see and they are none too steady.
