Cape Horn and Tierra del Fuego

Back in the 1990's and early 2000's I spent a lot of time going to Antarctica. All told, I completed 30 trips to the "ice". And the jumping off point was always on the island of Tierra Del Fuego in either Argentina or Chile. I am quite familiar with these waters and was happy to go on a three day cruise to Cape Horn and Punta Arenas, Chile.

Here is a view of the landing beach at Cape Horn.

Our ship is called the Australis. Landing on the island only has a 30% success rate. So we were quite jazzed when we woke up in the morning and found calm sea's on the landing beach. A flood of wonderful memories came back to me as we ascended the 120 stairs.

The boardwalk at Cape Horn. The Chilean Navy operates a small weather station here. The island was contested between Argentina and Chile until the pope had to intervene in the early 1980s. There are still landmines off of the boardwalk to the north. Most trips to Antarctica try to stop here but we saw no one else today.

View of the monument to the lost mariners who attempted to round the Horn.

Can you see the albatross? There is a marble plate near here with a poem written in Spanish. It goes:

I am the albatross 

that waits for you 

at the end of the world

I am the forgotten souls

of the loss seamen

who sailed across Cape Horn

from all the seas of the world

But they have not died in the fury of the waves;

Today they fly on my wings,

towards eternity, 

in the last vestiges 

of the antarctic winds

It is said that over 10,000 sailors lost their lives trying to round Cape Horn. There are accounts of ships making it around the Horn in five days, while others took up to 94 days to get around the tip of South America. This place looms large in the hearts and minds of the world's mariners. You can see the actual cape in the background over my shoulder. It is a highlight of my life really, to know this place so well.

The lighthouse at Cape Horn

600 miles south of this point lies the northern tip of Antarctica.

Southern beech trees battered by wind at Orange Bay. I gave my fourth lecture of the trip in the Yamana Lounge on the ship, "The Patagonian Landscape and How People Arrived at Tierra del Fuego".

Piloto glacier on the western side of Tierra Del Fuego

These fjords receive huge amounts of rain

Magellanic penguins on Magdalena Island

A fitting end to our three day cruise. On to Buenos Aires!

Touching the toe of the Indian at the statue in the square of Punta Arenas means one will return to Patagonia. So far, it has worked every time for me and will except for once.

Rio de Janeiro, Brazil

We just returned from a three-day cruise around Cape Horn in Chile and Argentina. No Wi-Fi was available in that very remote part of the world. Posts from there will be coming but first here are pictures from Rio (where  I  spent a lot of time in the 1990's as a frequent visitor).

It was awesome to watch the wide Atlantic pass beneath our wings. Most people have no interest and will sometimes ask when I'm looking out the window, "Anything to see out there?" I guess as a geologist I should be gratified that rocks and landscapes are deemed as interesting to see but I'm a little disappointed that the cloud formations are not seen as beautiful and interesting as well. 

We needed to make a fuel stop in the mid-Atlantic and landed on Ascension Island. I took this photo as we made our approach. Note the cinder cone in the center that has a brown-colored lava flow coming out of its left side. The black lava flow coming in from the top looks as if it is younger and was deflected and spread around the outside of the cinder cone. Ascension Island erupted right on top of the mid-Atlantic Ridge, the submarine "crack" in the ocean floor where Africa and South America have split apart. This theme has been a major topic in my lectures on this trip.

Here is the source of the black lava flow - another cinder cone. It's flow has here also wraps round other light-colored cones.

We came through a fantastic summer storm on the way into Rio. I gave my third lecture in this flight, "The Natural Wwonders of the South American Landscape".

The Copacabana Palace on Atlantic Avenus in Rio de Janeiro. What a treat it was to stay here.

Feathered hats in preparation for Carnivale in Rio. I went on a tour of one of the samba school for Carnivale.

This where they make the floats for the four day celebration. There are twelve major samba schools and they each compete for top prize with eight floats for each school. They prepare for one full year and each school might employ a few hundred people. It was amazing to learn about.

Imagine a few hundred of these in each school

Amazon Indian in the plaza of the samba center.

It was a beautiful day to visit the Christ statue on Corcovado (hunchback) Mountain. Surprisingly there were no clouds and the temperatures were in the 90's.

The neighborhood at the base of the Sugarloaf Mountain is called Urca and is where I used to hang out in the 1990's

It' a great location for a city. The Atlantic Ocean can be seen on the right with Guanabara Bay on the left. This bay is one of the original Seven Wonders of the Natural World, along with the Grand Canyon, the Great Barrier Reef, Paricutin volcano (Mexico), Victoria Falls, the northern lights, and Mt. Everest. I've been to all but Paricutin. 

Copacabana Beach from the Sugarloaf. In the summertime, this beach can easily hold 1 million people and offer does.

Looking the other way we can see the downtown district and Flamenco Beach. The jet is coming in to land at the domestic airport right in the city.

Guanabara Bay and Urca neighborhood

Looking west to Copacabana and Ipanema beaches. Rio de Janeiro will be in the spotlight for all of us soon as the World Cup of soccer will be held here in just five months and in two years the summer Olympics.

View from our jet as we fly south to Cape Horn. This really was a great stop.

Dunes and Critters of the Namib Desert

The coastal dunes of Namibia might just be the perfect modern example of a Permian (or early Jurassic) landscape in northern Arizona or southern Utah. I took a tour one afternoon with the infamous Tommy, the pre-eminent naturalist of the Namib dunes (just ask him).

"Hereees Tommy!"

Tommy is keen to catch anything that crawls, slithers, burrows, or stings in the desert. Here he holds a Namqua chamaeleon.

It' a beautiful creature and they seem to enjoy Tommy's arrival each day.

That's because Tommy brings ample quantities of dune beetles for the chamaelons to eat! Their tongues are 1.5 times the length of their body.

There's plenty of worms too

How about a venomous sidewinder snake that was detected by using a hand-held temperature gun

I've never see a southwestern sidewinder but this one locomotes in a similar way

Spade-foot gecko. They use their spade feet to dig into the cooler sand.

Dune portfolio

Avalanche pattern

Are there really more stars that grains of sand?

Where the dunes meet the Atlantic. This very we'll could be a scene from the Toroweap/White Rim environment in northern Arizona and southern Utah 272 Ma. Gotta love it!

Namibia's Wonderful Rocks and Plants

I've been to Namibia many times now and to the village of Swakopmund as well. But I never tire of seeing the strange and interesting flora or the beautifully deformed rocks from the Pan-African Orogeny. Check them out below.

Welcome from traditional Hiero women

The first morning we went on a field trip with a geologist from a nearby uranium mine. Namibia produces 15% of the world's uranium anda. Boom is occurring in the deposits not far from Swakopmund. They are primary deposits found in granite, meaning that the uranium is held in the very rocks that brought it up from the earth's interior. Here a geologic map shows the field relationships to trip participants.

As my structural geology teacher once told me, "Rocks don't suffer metamorphism, they enjoy it!" If so, these rocks have had quite an enjoyable ride. They began life about 800 Ma as sandstone, shale and limestone deposits, only to be caught up in the Pan-African Orogeny, about 650 Ma. This is when the Kalihari craton (ancient continental fragment) collided with the Congo craton. The rocks between the two were squeezed and accordion-folded, such that some of them were brought down 18 to 20 miles below the surface. The folds and metamorphism can be seen in this outcrop along the Swakop River.

Note the black dike intruding the rocks. These dikes are common in this part of Namibia and belong to the Karoo intrusive event about 150 Ma (mere youngsters in the scheme here). These intrusions are related to Atlantic rifting in the separation of Africa and South America, and so are perfect poster material for this itinerary to both continents.

More dikes. The uranium host rocks are seen in the light-colored granite bands trending to the upper left.

Dikes

The strange and fascinating Welwitchia plant. This specien is likely a few hundred years old.

Male plant

Female plant

This is a showy little gem called Everlasting. The species name is Helichrysum roseaniveum.

I missed out on the name of this one but it too was exotic looking