Sunday, November 29, 2009

Frozen water, frozen, water, frozen ...

People who come to Antarctica talk about living on the continent as living "on the ice."
What that doesn't convey is the feeling you get within hours of arrival of how much the ice seems to be living itself. Of course, it isn't alive. But it changes constantly.
When we arrived on Anvers Island, the bay looked like this:

By this morning, after the tide had gone out, it was full of brash, or junk ice and looked more like this:


Likewise, late last night this mini-iceberg that's been hanging around Palmer Station like a lost kitten spontaneously started bobbing and twisting in the water. In the end, it didn't flip over. But it's likely to go bottoms-up, or "turtle," before long.

(Notice its resemblance to a Henry Moore sculpture -- with the added bonus of being noticeably in flux by the day and by the hour.)
(This one, on the other hand, looks like something Tim Burton might put together if he worked in whites and blues instead of blacks and, um, blacks:

The shame here is that the almost black light quality of the blues is hard to transfer from ice, to camera lens to computer to blog -- particularly when your correspondent is pretty sure that ISO stands for "I swear, officer.)

1 comment:

dkenney said...

I am impressed that you refer to Henry Moore sculptures