This a huge wall of ice stretching more or less 800 Km east-west-ish. I kept ducking out of bed to watch - I was fascinated and wishing I was on deck or at least on the bridge but ...... Incidentally these pix were taken through our cabin window. A balcony cabin it was NOT but we had a front cabin so we had relatively reason views - relative to the majority of cabins.
We had travelled one tiny corner of this immense sea. it's quite overwhelming in it dimensions - and half of it is solid floating ice, in fact the Ross Ice Shelf is the largest body of floating ice in the world.
Indeed it feels like it! This morning I woke with a sore throat, the result of spending too long out on the frozen deck last night -12c soaking up the breathtaking beauty, so I stayed rugged up in our cabin for the morning. In the meantime, the ship was ploughing on to Cape Crozier, the most eastern point of Ross Island, and then on to the Ross Ice Self. So I had a little time to recap snug in our little cabin.
Where to begin? Since the 1st century AD, people believed there must exist a vast southern land to ‘balance’ the mass of the northern land of the ‘known’ world. The first confirmed sighting of that mythical southern continent however wasn’t made until 1820 by a Russian expedition captained by Bellingshausen. His expedition circumnavigated Antarctica between 1819 and 1821. And as they say, the rest is history and a fascinating one at that. We have been tracking some of that history on this voyage with a series of lectures and visiting expedition huts from British Antarctic expeditions dating back to the early 1900s.
The vastness of the continent has been sneaking up on me gradually as we have sailed down the western part of the Ross Sea as far as the Ross Ice Shelf. The Ross Sea was named for Explorer James Clark Ross who sailed into it in 1841. Among other landmarks, he discovered Ross Island which is home to the infamous Mt Erebus and Mt Terror (named after his two ships) and from where a number of expedition parties set out seeking to reach the South Pole. Ross sailed along a huge wall of ice that we now know as the edge of the Ross Ice Shelf. That shelf was formed by the convergence of numerous glaciers flowing seaward from the high ice plateau. Its age is unknown but supposedly the ice cap of East Antarctica reached its current expanse 6 million years ago and continues to grow. The ice from that frozen plateau gives birth to great glaciers which push immense ice tongues many kilometres into the sea - the Drygalski Ice Tongue which we sailed past extends 80 km into the Ross Sea. On the eastern aspect of East Antarctica, these giant glaciers ‘squeeze’ between gaps in the high Transantarctic Mountain Range that divides the continent into two distinct geological regions, East and West. Geologically West Antarctic (which is in the east from us!) closely resembles the Andes mountain range of South America. East Antarctica predates it with some rocks dating back more than 3 billion years, part of the earth’s old crust.
But back to the Ross Sea .... it doesn’t look that big on a map but it is almost 1000 km across and covers an area of 960,000 square km. It’s coastline measures over 4,000 km. It is home to ~40% of world’s Adelie penguins, a quarter of all Emperor penguins, 50% of the world’s Weddell seals and, among other species, it is home to over 2000 invertebrate species. The Ross Ice Shelf, home to one of the largest populations of Emperor penguins (20,000 pairs), has an area of over 500,000 sq km, about the size of France. It’s big! We sailed in the western part of the sea from Cape Adare to this huge ice shelf.
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