James’ and Sara’s Excellent Antarctica Adventure

Day 10: At sea in the Weddell Sea

Ok first let me respond to some of your questions. Sammy, I didn’t get close enough to smell the red pop but as soon as you land on the beach there’s a strong stench of something that resembles ablutions!

Rob, yes it is true that another difference between fur seals and elephant seals could well be their size. But it’s handy to know that elephant seals don’t have external ear flaps! They have internal ear canals .

The other key distinction is that when elephant seals are on land, they move around by belly flopping ; while fur seals can use alll 4 of their limbs to move around( you never know when you might need this information).

When we sailed out of the South Orkney islands yesterday, we saw lots of whales spurting on the horizon ( they were mainly fin whales and a couple of orcas )and some of them came close enough for a picture ( if you are a seasoned photographer, which james and I are NOT. However james did take a couple of great pictures of the moon over the horizon, and some penguins sitting on an iceberg in the middle of the ocean

What is great about the ScenicEclipse is that they are prepared to deviate from their route….that’s how we got to South Orkney and to all the whales spurting.

Each day there are a couple of lectures about the wildlife and landscape we are witnessing.

So it’s time for a lesson in ice……there are glaciers, icebergs and ice sheets.
In order to be glacier there are two attributes…

1. You need dense ice with air confined to unconnected bubbles so the air bubbles are trapped in their original atmosphere. Dense ice is dense enough to absorb lower energy light wavelengths so it absorbs red, yellow colours red. But the blue colour is higher energy and can pass through the ice. That’s why we see iridescent blue (am sure I can back this fact up in a couple of days when we meet lots of ice)
2. The glacier has to be moving, anywhere from a few millimetres a year, to 50 metres a year Apparently a glacier moves in 3 ways:
   A. Basal sliding..gravity forces it to slide down a mountain 
   B. Bed deformation. ….some glaciers sit on debris which sits on bedrock…and the debris may move 
   C. Internal deformation…flows like molasses

Antarctica’s two ice sheets exist on a scale which is non existent anywhere else on earth. One of them rests on a major land mass, and holds approximately 61% of all fresh water on Earth.

in case you are worried that we might be starving, here’s what the luncheon buffet looks like ( it changes every day)