Brown Bluff & Joinville Fast Ice, Antarctic Sound
Take one atom of oxygen and get it to hold hands with two atoms of hydrogen. Then you have water…..what an incredible chemical chameleon it is. For a whole day we floated across it, rolled, lifted, lashed and latterly lulled by its many moods. We swept in on it to the beach at Bailey Head yesterday, and hiked up a rushing stream of it to the chinstraps. Today we awoke to find huge lumps of it floating like tables along the horizon: great tabular icebergs. As we sailed down Antarctic Sound at the tip of the Antarctic peninsula, we were passing great fields of it inland, in the form of sweeping snowfields which blanket the mountains on either side. Here it has accumulated to build an icecap, the snow compacted to the glassy glacial blue transparent form of water, solid as rock.
Coming up to Brown Bluff, our first landfall this morning, we could see it on all sides. Solid as rock but still flowing downhill like slow motion molasses, to form the glaciers on all sides of this dramatic 2,200’ foot yellow cliff. At its foot, like pied limpets, sit the tough little Adelie penguins, guarding their precious double clutch from the merciless swooping skuas. We sat in sunshine and gazed in awe at this frozen landscape, inhabited by such tiny, tough people.
In a brief but unforgettable Zodiac cruise, we patrolled the glacier face, where melting strings of water had frozen hard to ice curtains and hanging ice needles. A wounded Weddell lay recovering on a bergy bit, water now a floating hospital ship.
But the afternoon brought water in a new guise: for between Joinville and Bransfield islands the Captain found fast ice, and drove our ship into it like a knife into white marzipan. Fast ice: frozen sea-ice still fixed fast to the land. First tentative steps, ice tested by the orange penguins before the precious blue penguins could be released.
We walked on water, crisp and crunchy like sugar, solid water floating on its own liquid sibling, as tiny flakes of frozen water fell around us, like feathers from a sky full of dark clouds of water vapour. Amazing.
And here, lost in their own strange dreams, orange, blue and black and white penguins mingled happily in the white wonderland that is Antarctica, strolling on a flimsy skin of oxygen and hydrogen.
