Journey To The Bottom Of The World

Life Matters News Digest No.059 March 2023

Special Edition

As I have been hinting for some time, I have been working up to making the "journey of a lifetime". That's a phrase that is often banded about for a particularly good holiday or trip, but for me this latest journey to Antarctica, from which I have just returned, was exceptional.

The seventh continent is like nowhere else on Earth. Firstly, it is an ice and snow-covered landmass at the southern pole of the planet (as opposed to the North Pole which is purely frozen water) and secondly, what most people don't realise, is that it is enormous - its total land area is equivalent to the USA and Mexico combined.

When you know how big it is, the achievements of Scott, Amundsen, Shackelton and the others who attempted to reach the South Pole in the middle of it without the benefit of modern technology, start to fall into place.

Our journey to Antarctica, or at least the northern tip of it, was somewhat easier than that of those famous explorers. We, myself and my partner Tricia, flew down from Buenos Aries in Argentina to Ushuaia, which is situated at the tip of South America on the island of Tierra del Fuego.

Tierra del Fuego is 60% Chilean and 40% Argentinian and is separated from the mainland of South America by the Straits of Magellan, the original route used by seafarers to pass between the Atlantic and Pacific oceans before the building of the Panama Canal.

Ushuaia still has something of a pioneer town feel to it, even though it now has a population of 80,000. It was there that we boarded our ship, the MS Roald Amundsen, a 140-metre-long vessel specially designed for sailing in polar waters.

Hurtigruten, the Norwegian company that owns the Roald Amundsen and several ships like it, takes its environmental responsibilities seriously. For a start, the ship is described as hybrid, using 4 truck-like diesel engines to turn generators that produce electricity from which everything, including the propellers, runs.

The ship desalinates and purifies its drinking water and cleans all used grey water to a standard where it is almost bug-free and drinkable before discharging it more than 3 km away from any land. All uneaten food and other waste goes into a bio-digester and heat exchangers take waste heat from the engines to heat the ship and the showers (plus a small outdoor swimming pool and 2 jacuzzis!).

There were only around 360 passengers onboard, so it was not one of those giant cruise ships with 6,000 people roaming around, but definitely at the luxury end of the market. Unless you are a very, very hardy soul (or exceedingly rich), this is frankly the only way to visit Antarctica and therefore, I have no regrets.

The first part of the journey is a 2-day sail (680 miles/1100 kilometres) from Ushuaia across the Drake Passage, a notoriously rough piece of water where the Pacific and the Atlantic oceans collide. Fortunately for us, outgoing and returning, the swell was a modest 1.5 - 2 metres, though the Captain on the return trip did fire up a third engine and increase the speed with a 100km detour to avoid an impending storm.

After 2 days of just water and sometimes being followed by albatrosses and other seabirds, we awoke on the third day to open the curtains on the wonderful world of Antarctica - and it is a wonderful world, like nowhere else on earth. Ice, snow, water and rock - but not one tree, bush or leaf.

Apart from the mountainous landscape along the Antarctic Peninsula where we were sailing, there were icebergs everywhere, constantly floating past the windows of the ship when you were eating food, exercising on deck or indeed, even sitting almost naked in the sauna!

The icebergs come in all shapes and sizes from tiny metre square lumps to the size of two-storey buildings or even "small villages" with peaks, towers and arches. Fortunately, we didn't meet the iceberg the size of Greater London that broke away from the Brunt Ice Shelf in Antarctica in January 2023. Once you began to see how many there were, the Titanic jokes started to fade away! Seals though seem to find the flatter ones a great place to snooze.

Now and again, the almost total silence of Antarctica is broken by a "boom" as another iceberg "calves" from one of the hundreds of glaciers along the coast or air bubbles compressed in the glacial ice can stand the pressure no more and explode.

The coastal landscape is an unrelenting one of snow, ice, and glaciers steering their way down valleys and exposed peaks. Una Peaks, formerly known as Cape Renard Towers, but colloquially as "Una's Tits," are probably the most photographed rocks on the Antarctic Peninsular.

They are two towers of basalt with an ice cap on each and were named after Una Spivey who was a secretary in the Governor's office at Stanley in the Falkland Islands. Una was often the last woman the men saw when they took off to Antarctica for several months at a time. Legend has it that Una did not mind the peak notoriety!

All very black and white but always that tinge of blue or blue-green under the ice flows.

And then there was the wildlife of course - Fur seals and Crab seals, Adélie penguins, Gentoo penguins and Chinstrap penguins, plus Humpback whales, a distant Orca and a Minke whale, and lots of seabirds from Petrels to penguin egg-stealing Skuas and several types of Albatross.

Landings were very well organised by the 21-strong environmental/landing team. All of us were divided into small named groups (we were "Leopard Seals"!) of 20-24 people and we were called to embark on the inflatable Zodiacs as soon as they were ready to take us ashore, without any waiting.

It took about 30 minutes beforehand mind you to properly get into all the cold weather and protective gear! Thermal underwear, thermal socks, a second layer, overtrousers, windproof jacket with hood, neck/face warmer, hat, lifejacket, double layer of gloves, sunglasses and special boots.

We were only allowed to land on Antarctica wearing the ship-supplied boots and when we came back to the ship we had to stand in a boot-scrubbing machine that cleaned and disinfected them. Even a dropped tissue was mentioned in briefings. The motto was to leave no trace of your visit and take only photographs, which is how it should be in probably the last, largely pristine wilderness left on the planet.

One of the best things about the ship was the crew and the environmental team, they were all so approachable and would generously spend time with you whenever and wherever you asked a question. I spent 20 minutes standing in a stairwell talking about cruise ships in cold and hot climates and Swedish politics with the senior engineer; he didn't seem to be pressed for time.

There were also talks every day on birdlife, ice, whales, the history of Antarctica (Scott, Amundsen, Shackleton) and much more besides. You could attend the talks live or watch a livestream in your cabin or video later.

At the tannoy announcement that there were whales nearby, the ship would stop and people from all over would rush to the viewing points on one side or another - I am surprised the ship didn't topple over! The whales were often at a distance but the Humpbacks usually put on a show by diving and flashing their tails.

As for the penguins and seals, we had strict instructions to keep 5 and 15 metres away from them respectively, but they were not in the least bothered by us, pottering about and carrying out their normal activities (in the case of seals, sleeping most of the time!).

There were various optional activities you could take part in too, usually by lottery as there were far fewer places available than the number of people who wanted to do them. I chose kayaking, as I had done a bit back in France, while there was also a science boat and the "polar plunge."

The science boat did serious data collection, in this case taking water temperatures at various locations and collecting phytoplankton samples to send back to universities in Los Angeles, among other projects.

The "polar plunge" involved taking your clothes off on the beach and rushing into the Antarctic Ocean and then rushing out again!

I was less daunted by the actual "plunge" than by spending 20 minutes on the beach in an icy wind getting all the complicated clothing off and then spending another 20 minutes getting it all back on again, just so I could boast I had "swum" in Antarctica!

I have to admit though that bragging rights are probably fairly due to the two young fellas who appeared to be travelling Antarctica in a 20-foot yacht and as we left through the narrows of Deception Island, called "Neptune's Bellows," they were seen wearing wet suits and surfing on boards in the wake of our ship.

Kayaking through ice-laden waters with icebergs and glaciers as a background was great fun, sounding at times rather like boating in an ice-filled cocktail glass, if you see what I mean.

One of the last places we visited before the journey back to Ushuaia was "Whaler's Bay" on the aforementioned Deception Island in the South Shetland Islands. Deception Island is a "caldera," a large depression full of seawater which formed after the volcano underneath it last erupted. The volcano is still active and unbelievably, steam was rising from the shore at Whaler's Bay and handfuls of sand were warm to the touch.

At one time seals were almost hunted to extinction here and it was said that the carcasses of whales were once so thick there you could walk across the bay on their backs.

Fortunately, that is no longer the case, but the remains of whaling stations remain and it is now listed as a Historic Site. There is also a cemetery with the remains of 35 men who died there during that period of massive overhunting.

So, that is the story of my adventures in Antarctica! Next month it will be my 75th birthday, so I feel truly blessed to have had such a glorious opportunity to explore a little of one of the most remote places in the world. The images and feel of it will remain with me for the rest of my life. And if you ever get the chance to go - leap at it! It's like nowhere else on Earth.

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Under Pressure at the South Pole

One of the most famous figures in the history of Antarctica is the Anglo-Irish explorer, Sir Ernest Shackleton, who, after Roald Amundsen and Captain Scott had conquered the South Pole, set out in 1914 to cross Antarctica from sea to sea via the Pole.

His "Imperial Trans-Antarctica Expedition" struck disaster in 1915 when his sailing ship, the "Endurance", became stuck fast in pack ice and under pressure from the expanding ice, eventually disintegrated and sank on November 21st 1915.

The crew camped on ice floes until April 1916 and then managed to sail in three lifeboats to Elephant Island, where Shackleton left most of them sheltering under two of the boats while he and the other crew members sailed for help in the third boat to South Georgia.

From South Georgia, Shackleton launched three attempts with commandeered ships to rescue his men but was defeated by pack ice in every case. He eventually succeeded on the fourth attempt and rescued all of them on 30th August 1916 after leaving them 128 days earlier.

Since then several expeditions have been mounted to find the remains of the Endurance, but none were successful until 5th March 2022 - 106 years after it sank. She was resting on the bottom of the Weddell Sea at 9,869 feet (3008 metres). The remains are in incredible condition.

Under the Antarctic Treaty, which was signed by the most active twelve countries (now 29), in Antarctica in 1959 to only use the continent for peaceful and scientific purposes, the resting place of the Endurance will not be disturbed and will be protected as a historical site and monument.

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Life That Grows Straight Out of the Freezer

I said earlier that no leaf, tree or bush can be seen in Antarctica - but apparently, there is something there held for centuries in the deep freeze.

Peter Convey, an ecololgist with the British Antarctic Survey drilled core samples out of the permafrost on Signy Island, just north of the Antarctic Peninsula. In them, he found samples of moss which he shipped back to the UK still frozen.

After carbon dating, the remains of the moss they put in an incubator and remarkably it started to throw shoots and grow. The oldest moss in the core first grew between 1,697 and 1,533 years ago and had been frozen ever since. When it first grew the Mayan empire was at its height and Attila the Hun had just pillaged Europe and Central Asia.

So don't rush to throw out that packet of 3-year-old frozen broccoli in the freezer - it might last for hundreds of years yet!

Credits: My thanks to Halcyon, Karen and Tricia for input on this edition. Photo Credits: Peter Clifford x 30 + Tricia Dair and Orlando Urena, NASA/Wikimedia Commons, MS Roald Amundsen/Hurtigruten, Falklands Maritime Heritage Trust/National Geographic/NPR.org x 3, Fitzgabbro/Wikimedia Commons, P.Boelen/Phy.0rg

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END PIECE

Well, I hope you have enjoyed my "special edition" of the newsletter about my trip to Antarctica. My apologies for its slow arrival, but I was not back home until the middle of March and sorting through dozens of photographs and researching background information has taken time.

If your email containing this newsletter does not download properly it may be because this newsletter edition is top-heavy with many photographs and a little video. I will send out an accompanying note on how to solve that.

The Antarctica trip was certainly a high point in my life and my sincere thanks to Tricia for generously enabling it to happen. Trips like this are not cheap but everyone on board that I spoke to said that it "was worth every penny," and we felt the same. For both of us, it also completed the achievement of visiting all 7 continents on the planet.

So, maybe not on the scale of this particular trip, but I hope that you can still find adventure in your life, large or small, and the unusual every day. It is there to experience if you have the eyes and senses to perceive it.

Until the next edition, take very good care of yourself - and be kind, caring, generous and patient with those less fortunate than ourselves.

All good wishes,