Cuverville Island and Sunset on Anvers Island

After the Christmas holiday on board, we made a landing at Cuverville Island, then to the south side of Anvers Island at Arthur Harbor where the US has their peninsular station. Have a look!

December 26

Cuverville Island in the Ererra Channel. In 1993, I was on a trip that brought three researchers to this island where they lived for four months studying the impacts of tourism to penguin breeding. They replaced real eggs with artificial eggs that monitored the parents heart rate as they sat on an egg. Turns out there was very little disturbance to the birds.

Sorry about all of the iceberg photos but that's what makes a person go back to Antarctica time and again.

Near Cuvehrville Island.

Differential melting between harder more dense layers of glacial ice and less dense glacial ice.

The World framed by a beautiful berg.

All the colors of the spectrum enter the ice but only the blue wavelength is able to escape the ice, thus the apparent blue color to some bergs. The denser the ice, the bluer it will be.

Cross-bedded ice!

Not really - but it sure looks like a southwestern sandstone.

See the darker "lip" of ice in the upper left - it is rather flat and about 5 feet thick. It represents where the iceberg used to float on the water with everything else you see being the submerged portion. Remember that 9/10's to 1/7th of an iceberg is submerged. These are the kinds of things I point out while on a zodiac cruise. This iceberg has since broken smaller and then rotated to its present position such that 9/10th's or 1/7th of it is still underwater. Wow!

December 27

All the photographs for this day were taken between 9:30 and 10:30 at night. The sun sets here for about 2 1/2 hours but it never really gets dark. That's Mt. Français again in the cloud at 9,268 feet.

Large lenticular cloud over Anvers Island.

Large tabular bergs were seen while sailing into Arthur Harbor. This one measures about 1/4 mile wide and is about 60 feet out of the water.

More giant bergs in an Arizona-type sunset.

Sunset.

Reflections.

Like the Grand Canyon, it is difficult to grasp the scale of things here - there are no human reference points. These mountains remain unclimbed, unexplored, and for all intents and purposes might as well be located on another planet due to their remoteness and glacial ramparts.

Anvers Island scene on December 27.

Iceberg and mountain on Anvers Island.

Evening glow at Palmer Station, Antarctica. Another great night in Antarctica.