February 12 Are we there yet? Water water everywhere

 

As we travelled further and further south it got colder and colder; sea spray froze on our window.

We were all at sea for the next 5 day and it was pretty rough. Some days it was best to stay in bed rather than risk falling over as the ship tossed and bucked through towering waves and frighteningly deep troughs that threatened to swallow our little ship.  Needless to say I didn't get a lot of photos during that time. Most people suffered with a bit of seasickness but blessed Scopoderm patches helped a lot. Given the remoteness of our journey, in addition to the usual lifeboat drill, we had a demonstration of the suits we would have to don in the event of an abandon-ship alert. Struggling into an immersion suit looked like a challenge but in the temperatures we were experiencing, essential. On a previous voyage they had to abandon ship for some hours - don’t recall the reason but it was rather sobering to contemplate. These were designed to protect you from the icy waters of the Southern Ocean.  The thought of that happening put the wind up many of us. 

This is Samuel our expedition leader demonstrating how to get into those immersion suits.

As we rode the waves south and when the seas allowed us to venture down to the the lecture room, we had a number of lectures. So from me during this intervening time here are a few bits of polar trivia to go on with. Some people confuse the Arctic and the Antarctic - or perhaps it is simply the names they confuse because they sound alike. The locations are certainly very different in so many ways. The clearest difference between the two polar areas is that the Arctic is sea surrounded by land whereas the Antarctic is land surrounded by sea. The word Arctic comes from the Greek word arktikos, ‘near the Bear, northern’. The name refers to either one or other of the bear constellations prominent in the northern sky. Antarctica comes from the Greek word antarktiké  meaning ‘opposite to the north’. I believe the Antarctic deserves its own name, distinct and indicative of the huge land mass that it is, rather than being simply antipodal to the Arctic. 

Unlike the Arctic, which is a region with a relatively sparse land mass, Antarctica covers 14 million square km (Australia is 6.7 million square km).  If we want to talk about the ‘land down under’, this truly is it. In contrast to the Arctic, in Antarctica there is little vegetation other than moss, lichen, some fungi and algae most of which are phytoplankton. Yet once there was lush life on the land mass we now call Antarctica. It was once warm and forested; Shackleton found coal seams as well as fossilised wood and leaves. And since then the list of fossil finds in Antarctica has been dated to species living between 40 and 100 million years ago when Antarctica was pretty much in the same location, relative to the equator, as it is today. I know we love our frozen polar regions but what most of us don't realise is that for the majority of Earth’s history, the planet has been hotter than it is now. In fact hotter periods make up a good part of the past 2.5 billion years and are called Greenhouse Earth. They can last hundreds of millions of years, with CO2 levels 10–20 times higher than today, with no ice anywhere on the planet. The Earth swings from Icehouse to Greenhouse. During Greenhouse periods, the Earth actually explodes with life but that's a whole other story which is endlessly fascinating - to me! Getting back to this story ...... Antarctica is also colder than the Arctic because it is covered by an ice sheet and has been for the last 15 million years. Today that ice sheet is almost 3 km thick and it continues to grow. The sea ice at the North Pole is only 1-3m thick and is shrinking. 

And then there’s the wildlife - why aren’t there penguins in the Arctic or polar bears in the Antarctic? Distance and proximity - amongst other factors. Terrestrial animals on Antarctica are predominantly insects, invertebrates that are able to survive the extreme cold because they have glycerol in their body fluids - anti-freeze. On the other hand, there are oodles of marine animals and birds. Incidentally penguins are said to have been named such because of their resemblance to the great auks of the far north. In Welsh, pen - head and gywn - white. Or so the story goes.