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Published: January 25th 2014
Mighty, glaciated mountains towered from the ocean. Massive, vertical cliffs rose from the depths and mighty glaciars spilled through every valley. This was the welcome I got from Antarctica!
"I am in Antarctica" I said to myself! It's an amazing place! I stood in awe on the continental mainland and looked around. I was completely surrounded by jagged peaks soaring more than a mile into the sky. Giant rivers of ice, several miles across spilled through every valley. The emptiness, loneliness and remoteness of this place is overwhelming. It has
an icy strangeness ... It is like nowhere else!
Antarctica is 99.6% covered in ice! It is the coldest, windiest, driest and most mountainous of all the continents. It's also the least visited and has no permanent human population. It is difficult to comprehend the scale of this ice-bound land at the bottom of the planet! The sheer vastness and dazzling whiteness is mesmerizing...
It's captivating... Everything down here is of epic proportion!... I sat on a rock... An ancient rock on an otherworldly land.
...Instead of hiking several hundred metres with the group to see the massive penguin colony, I chose to sit on a small metamorphic
Xanthoria Lichens
A splash of colour to an otherwise black and white worldrock by the beach and watch the few penguins that hung out by the shoreline and just to absorb the fact that this is Mother Nature at her finest! It was amazing!
Penguins are so much fun to watch as they fall over and slide on their bellies and as they peck each other whilst squabbling and squawking! It was a pleasure to spend an hour or so getting to know their personalities...
We spent a few days exploring the western edge of the peninsula before the ship came to an unscheduled stop at an inpenatrable barrier of sea-ice and icebergs 12 nautical miles across. The Sea Spirit could not continue any further south so we decided to do the polar plunge at the most southerly point of this amazing voyage. A bunch of crazy people (me included) decided that jumping from the ship into the icy water was a good idea! The air temperature was about 4 degrees Celcius and the water was less than 1 degree... It also happened to be New Years Day. Happy 2014 from Latitude
65.20S - What a vista!
Enjoy...
D.
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D MJ Binkley
Dave and Merry Jo Binkley
McMurdo
In 1989-90 I worked at McMurdo Base on the Ross Sea for 5 months. It was an experience of a lifetime.