Displaying items by tag: icebergs

After Great Wall Station we get back on the ship and head off through the Antarctic Sound on the Eastern side of the peninsula. Lots of spectacular tabular icebergs and humpback whales breaching, showing off their tails, and flipper slapping make for a glorious evening’s sailing. 

Paulet Island is our next landing spot (4^thJan). This island is home to a massive Adelie penguin rookery (100,000 breeding pairs) as well as skuas, kelp gulls, Antarctic sheathbills and cormorants.

The Adelie’s have fluffy brown chicks and so the challenge was to walk along the beach keeping enough distance from the penguins and other nesting birds to reduce our impact. While the younger Adelie penguins were quite curious about us, the nesting birds are understandably wary of visitors especially with so many predatory skuas on the hunt for food. Paulet island also has the remains of a hut built last century by shipwrecked sailors from the Nordenskiöld ship the Antarctic. Today the hut walls are high-rise nesting sites for Adelie penguins. 

There is also a massive lake in the middle of the island which is green with algal blooms from all the penguin guano. Even in the cold, the smell from such a large colony is pretty overwhelming.

Despite there being so many Adelie penguins on Paulet, this species is one of the losers from climate change. Adelie penguins are reliant on sea ice and cooler water to provide food and so are losing out to the more generalist feeders, chinstrap and Gentoo penguins, which are expanding southwards especially on the western side of the Antarctic peninsula.

 The Ushuaia crew are Argentinian and Chilean. Our female voyage leader Monica Schillat, is an historian and has many tales to tell of her years of working on Antarctic vessels.  Kata, one of the expedition guides, has just finished her PhD researching orcas which means we have lots of expertise to draw on. Leandro and Juan like plants too so I am in good company. Because the weather is so calm we get to take many iceberg cruises and see lots of humpback whales and orcas. One night I am sure I can hear the humpbacks calling and in the zodiac boats we get close enough to smell their fish-oily breath. We often see weddell and crabeater seals hauled out on ice flows or swimming along beaches.