Our current position is: 64 degrees 52'south 60 degrees 05.5' west
From Martina Krueger, Campaigner.
28th January 1997
We left Admiralty Bay Sunday night and sailed through the
strait on the tip of the Peninsula, down the eastern side
of the coast. The weather changed - the brilliant sun that
had made us wear protective sunscreen factor 1 million, had
hidden behind a thick layer of dark clouds. Fog moved in
on us and then it started to snow.
In the afternoon we picked up Jorge Lusky at a place which was appropriately called Snow Hill Island . He is a scientist with the Argentine Antarctic Institute and will stay on the ship for a couple of days to conduct a research programme with us in the area where once there was a giant iceshelf.
A group had to go onshore and hike up a mountain to get the scientific tools - and came home late and totally exhausted. I volunteered to take over a watch from 4am to 8am. Because we are now in the ice, there are always 3 people on watch -the captain and a mate plus a deck hand, or two mates and a deck hand. My job was to go around the boat every once in a while and check that there was no fire, and for the rest basically stand on the bridge, stare out of the window and look out for a way through the ice. We had very poor visibility, and Lena had to climb up into the crows nest to look for a path through the labyrinth of icebergs and ice floes. We literally zig zagged for two full hours, then it cleared a bit and we could make soft turns around gigantic icebergs. Saw lots of penguins and a couple of seals on the ice.
At 3pm Jorge Lusky discussed with us the findings of his research team in the area. The area we were about to sail into had been his studying subject and a 4200km2 ice shelf. Ice shelves are made up of continental ice and glaciers which are slowly floating into the sea. This is where the icebergs are coming from - they break off in big chunks at the front, as ice is being pushed down from the land.
But because of the warmer temperatures this balance has been totally disrupted, deep rifts appeared in the ice and in January 1995 what was left of the ice sheet collapsed over a period of just 50 days. While this happened, the area was shaken with tremors and those in a nearby station described it as quite scary. These catastrophic events, which Mr Lusky said are definitely not a natural phenomenon but caused directly by human influence in adding greenhouse gases to the atmosphere, are yet another alarming signal of the impacts of climate change.
And yet - the bay that was created through the collapse of the ice is of stunning beauty. One can not help an eerie feeling though to think that just over two years ago, people were walking 30 m above us on what then seemed impermeable ice.
We launched an inflatable to film some of the scenery. Two Minke whales swam around us and under our boat. A bit later a leopard seal checked out whether we would make a good entree for his evening dinner, so it seemed. He leisurely swam around the Arctic Sunrise and our little inflatable, showing off his remarkable swimming skills and looked out of the water at us from just a meter away from the boat. There is so much immense beauty in this place and it is the first to suffer from our use of fossil fuels.