Whale Watching

Yesterday was my second to last full day at Palmer Station. Technically, it was a day off because we worked on Sunday, but had a lot of work to do to get ready. I initially turned down an opportunity to go see humpback whales playing near the station, but when a second boat was organized, I decided to jump in, figuring by the time we go there the show would be over.

Thankfully I was wrong.

For about two hours we puttered around three humpbacks, which put on a quite a feeding display for us. There were even doing something called bubble feeding. Here's the wikipedia definition:

"A group of whales swims in a shrinking circle blowing bubbles below a school of prey in our case it was krill]. The shrinking ring of bubbles encircles the school and confines it in an ever-smaller cylinder. The whales then suddenly swim upward through the 'net,' mouths agape, swallowing thousands of prey in one gulp."

At one point we drove through a pink cloud on the water -- a cloud of whale poo, colored that way because of the pink krill (small crustaceans) that they eat.

A few pics and hilarious video (and, no, that's not me screaming like a little girl).


Mt. William on whale watching day. It's about 5,000 feet high.


The original whale tail.


Taking a gulp of krill.



We had lost sight of the whales and were stopped, when suddenly all these bubbles appeared around the boat.

Birding at Palmer Station

I went birding with the research team that monitors the various seabird populations near Palmer Station, from Adelie penguins to giant petrels. The expedition leader here is Donna Fraser, who has been coming down to the Ice for years. She became fascinated with the giant petrels, a large scavenger that nests throughout the islands here, and went on her own quest to study the bird population. Through patient observation and perseverance, she was able to habituate the birds to her presence on Humble Island, where the team currently monitors 27 nests. They measure the bills of the chicks and weigh them every couple of days or so, and also place transmitters on the adults to track their foraging patters.

I went with the team yesterday to watch them at work. They spend long hours hiking and climbing around the islands to survey the nests, some of which can only be reached by a hard scramble up nearly sheer rock faces. The treks are made even harder because they try to avoid trampling the moss on the island, so you're rock hopping most of the time, watching your feet on the ankle-twisting rocks while trying to avoid stumbling on the nests, which seem to appear suddenly despite the large size of the birds. I was pretty spent by the end of the day, particularly after our final climb up a cliff on DeLaca Island to check on just one nest.




A giant petrel nesting, with Palmer Station in background.

Not long before this chick is done nesting.

Surveying a nest.


Elephant seals in a messy, smelly wallow.

Cormorants and their brown chicks.

Another Penguin Video

Everyone loves penguins, right? So here's a little better video, I think, of the penguin colony on Torgersen Island, which is only a few minutes' ride from Palmer Station on Anvers Island, in the northern part of the Antarctic Peninsula.

No music this time, just the braying of the penguins and my own rather anemic interjections ... one qualifier, however: I mention that the colony has shrunk due to climate change but I don't offer any explanation in the video.

The short story: The ambient temperature has warmed significantly. In addition, the deep ocean water that comes up on the shelf is also much warmer. The changes have reduced the duration of sea ice in the region, which is not only a key habitat for the penguins during the winter but also for its main prey, the shrimp-like krill. All this means that chick survival and recruitment to these colonies has been drastically reduced.

I'll have more on this story when I go out with the seabird researchers next week.



There's also some new articles on The Antarctic Sun Web site, including a couple on different aspects of this trip.

Touring Palmer Station

Most of my blogs and photos thus far have been on the wildlife and scenery here -- and justifiably so. But I will try and do a few on some of the facilities and society here at Palmer Station, which is so much different from the other two U.S. Antarctic Program stations at McMurdo and South Pole.

It's by far the smallest science base of the trio, and we are currently maxed out with 45 people. Ironically, it gets the most visitors by far in terms of tourists. The station typically hosts 12 ships per year, as well as the occasional private yacht or sailboat. It's great outreach for the science program, allowing people to see the facilities and meet the researchers personally. I talked to a bunch of tourists over the last week or so, and all of them were impressed by the station. They get a tour of the station, the highlight being the store:














At the end of the tour, the groups are led to the lounge/galley, where they can chat with station personnel and chow on brownies (apparently famous enough to have been mentioned in the Lonely Planet Antarctica) and have tea or coffee, and grab some brochures as well.

After a day of working and playing tour leaders, the station staff has a great place to hang out. The local pub is BYOB, and everyone contributes very generously to the general stash:














In addition to the recent tourist ships -- whose passengers included Buzz Aldrin -- we got a visit from the RVIB Nathaniel B. Palmer, one of the two research vessels for the National Science Foundation. Stiff sea ice on the east side of the peninsula has rebuffed their efforts to go very far south, so they're on the western side trying to come up with a new plan, though they think they can fly helicopters across the mountainous peninsula to do some of their original work.



A helicopter coming in to land from over the glacier behind station.

At right, the RVIB Nathaniel B. Palmer pulling away from Arthur Harbor, Palmer Station.

Boating Around Palmer Station

Here's a short 55-second video of boating around the local area and visiting Torgersen Island, home to mostly Adelie penguins, though the lone penguin in the video you'll see is actually a gentoo, a larger subantarctic species that is "invading" territory traditionally held by Adelies, who are struggling in the warmer climate here. The island is less than 10 minutes away by Zodiac, inflatable boats with outboard motors that are used for science and recreation here. Access to many of the islands is limited to scientists. In fact, half of Torgersen is actually a preserve that tourists are now allowed to be on. However, one of the birders -- scientists studying the various seabird populations here, including the penguins -- told me the impacts of tourism are pretty low when well managed.

At the end is a leopard seal on an ice floe, where they can often be found lounging after enjoying a tasty meal of penguin.

On the Glacier

One of the highlights of visiting Palmer Station is to hike up the local glacier that sits behind the research base. It's less than an hour's slow hike to the top, which offers commanding view of the harbor, nearby islands and mountains that rise up sharply from sea level.

It's a fairly easy hike, though the walk through the "backyard" right behind the station is a tad treacherous -- a rock-strewn maze of ankle-twisting debris. I came across a bizarre corpse of a what appears to be a brown skua. It's entire chest cavity empty, while it's head other extremities were still well preserved.

The glacier itself seems to be in poor shape. Long-time residents will tell you it's retreated mightily in the last couple of decades, and the face I walked was crusty, flaked with delicate ice crystals that easily dislodged and flew away in the wind, making a musical twinkling as they skipped across the irregular surface of ice. There were several skinny but long cracks that you could hear water running through, as if someone had left the faucet running underneath the ice.

A black flag line marks off the more unstable parts of the glacier, though I wonder how often that trail now moves. In recent years, it's not unusual for new islands to be discovered as the glacier retreats in other areas, revealing that what people had once thought were one stretch of land to in reality be split by open water.

A few pictures from the afternoon hike:


The view from the top of the glacier looking behind the station.


The resting place for a picked over skua skeleton.


A view of Palmer station, bottom left corner, and some nearby islands.


The recreational limit at Palmer Station.

More Wildlife at Palmer

A beautiful day here at Palmer Station, Antarctica, on Friday begged for plenty of outdoor time. Here's a few highlights from the day. (Click on any image to enlarge.)


A closeup of a leopard seal on an ice floe. They look almost reptilian.

A wider view of a leopard seal, just floating nearby the station. Note the brown skua, another predator, sharing the space at the far right.

Lichen on Jacob's Island near Palmer.

My hero shot while scrambling around on the very rocky Jacob's Island.

A view of the island after a short scramble to the top.

A giant petrel nesting on Jacob's Island.

Boating at Palmer Station

I'm finally back at Palmer Station for the duration of my time in the Antarctic. My plan for my first night here was to hike the glacier behind the station -- a towering wall of ice that has been increasingly receding as the area continues to warm.

But then some folks put together a little boating expedition to nearby Torgersen Island, a rocky island less than 10 minutes away from the station by Zodiac. It's home to an Adelie penguin colony, a fact you can smell as well as see as you hit the downwind approach. Nearby at Elephant Rocks, brutish elephant seals slammed into one another like mammalian versions of sumo wrestlers ...





Elephant seals duels at the eponymously named Elephant Rocks.


Predatory skuas attempt to steal an Adelie chick from its parent.

Parental love among penguins.

Palmer Station with an iceberg in the harbor.

A Zodiac boat used for transportation in the area.

Palmer Station

The dreaded Drake Passage was more like Drake Lake.

I arrived at Palmer Station, a scattering of buildings clinging to the coast of Anvers Island along the Antarctic Peninsula, on Dec. 3. The middle of the four-day crossing is infamously rough between the tips of South America and the peninsula because of the Antarctic Circumpolar Current, the world's largest ocean current, which circles the continent completely unimpeded by land. High seas and lying low in your bunk are the norm, I'm told. But Poseidon or whatever marine deity that rules these seas was kind to us, and after a day of precautionary seasick meds, I enjoyed the trip, getting to know some of the scientists and crew aboard the ship.

The captain of the Laurence M. Gould, a stick-thin and amiable fellow named Joseph Abshire, said it was one of the two or three calmest crossings he's seen out of 40 or 50 clips across that stretch of sea.

It's a surprisingly young bunch onboard, recent graduates and postdocs, with a few polar veterans, led by Hugh Ducklow, chief scientist who has been working down here since 1994. It's mostly Americans, though the postdoc, an infectiously cheerful lady named Kim Bernard, is from South America, and the chief engineer, a sort of silent, strong type, is from Portugal.

While uneventful in terms of high seas, we enjoyed some wildlife en route, including a large pod of Commerson's Dolphins in the Straits of Magellan. The black and white dolphins looked a bit like mini orcas, gliding and slicing through the rolling waves during the long twilight. Sadly, no photos.

However, lots of other picture opportunities, as you'll see below, and plenty more to come, esp. with nearly 24 hours of daylight. Technically, the sun sets for about two hours or so right now, but it's always daylight out. Not a lot of time for blogging, as the science cruise is preparing to leave, and I'll be on the ship for another day or two to see most of the operation in action, then back to Palmer Station for about a month.

Not all is white in Antarctica. Lichen on rocks.

Palmer Station. My home for about a month.

The breathtaking Neumayer Channel near Palmer Station.

The ship tied up at the Palmer pier.

A crabeater seal prepares to slide off a tiny iceberg into the water, which is right at freezing.

The First 24 Hours or So ...

The second night in Punta Arenas, Chile. If I may: What a long strange trip it's been to get down here. Saturday morning started with a little snowstorm in Denver, with the inevitable delays to de-ice the plane. Of course, the de-icing machine ran out of fluid, adding another half hour to our time on the ground. Fortunately, my connection at LAX was still a couple of hours away by the time we finally arrive, so plenty of time to make the next plane.

LAX: Still chaotic, still ghetto. And smells like an overused gym locker.

A smooth flight to Santiago, which was warm and humid. The city is hemmed in by mountains, and home to about a third of the country's population. But all I saw of it was the airport for a couple of hours before boarding yet another plane for a final three-hour flight to Punta Arenas. By this time, my eyeballs felt as if someone had been poking them with dry erasers; I hadn't slept much at all during the marathon 24 hours of flying and waiting.

It was a fairly pleasant flight, with tremendous views of the Andes for much of the way. Very different than the Rockies, with some dramatic volcanoes punctuating the endless spine of peaks with their perfectly shaped cones. Punta Arenas' notorious wind greeted us on the descent, rocking the plane back and forth like an overzealous nanny rocking a baby's cradle.

AGUNSA, the company contracted to handle the logistics in Chile, met me at the airport. Punta Arenas is only about a 20-minute drive from the airport. The region and city itself are surprisingly hilly. The town seems to be a mix of ugly modern buildings and some wonderful Old World architecture, including my hotel, Jose Nogueira, which boasts a restaurant in a sort of vine-draped arboretium (quite warm when the sun fights through the constant overcast).

After a much-needed shower, I made for the main square, right around the corner from the hotel. A monument of Ferdinad Magellan dominates the little city park. Travelers are supposed to rub the big, polished toe of an Ona India lounging at Magellan's feet to ensure a safe return to the city. So I rubbed the hell out of that foot.

The food: My Spanish isn't nearly as good as I thought it was, so each meal has been somewhat of a surprise and not entirely what I expected. An order of what I thought would be steak and salad was a sliced beef sandwich covered in tomatoes and drowned in mayo -- a very popular condiment apparently. Seafood is plentiful here, and the local speciality is king crab.

Monday morning was back to work for me -- I went to the AGUNSA warehouse where I picked up my cold weather gear for the trip south and met a few of the people headed down on the other ship in port. The U.S. Antarctic Program has two vessels -- the Palmer and the Gould. The former leaves after we do, headed to the east side of the Anarctic Pensinsula to study the remnants of an ice shelf that collapsed there nearly eight years ago. I'll be aboard the Gould, which will be on its annual voyage to observe the marine ecosystem along the western edge of the Antarctic Peninsula. I'll be with the ship for a while and then spending the remainder of my time at the Palmer research station.

Al Hickey, the point man for Raytheon aboard the Palmer, gave me a tour of the ship in the afternoon. The vessel will be at max capacity with 70 people for its two-month journey, so the deck was packed with equipment. Two helicopters were squeezed into a hangar -- only the second time the ship has sailed with helos.

Tuesday I check out of my hotel and report to the ship, where I'll spend the night before we sail on Wednesday. I'll only have very limited email during the four days it takes to sail to Palmer Station.

Bon voyage!


Helos squeezed into a hangar aboard the Palmer.


A crane lifts supplies onto the Gould.



The statue of Magellan. Note the dangling foot of the Indian on the right.

A view of Punta Arenas outside my hotel window.

Countdown Begins

Only 10 days before I head south once more to Antarctica, my fifth trip since 2003.

This time is different: A visit to Palmer Station, a research base for the U.S. Antarctic Program out on the Antarctic Peninsula, where the spine of the Andes re-emerges after a dunk into the Southern Ocean from South America. I'm scheduled to take a USAP icebreaker, the ARSV Laurence M. Gould out of Punta Arenas across the dreaded Drake Passage.

I'll spend about six weeks aboard the vessel and the station, writing stories about climate science, penguins, the people and other topics for The Antarctic Sun. I'll also post short dispatches, pictures and videos here of the trip as often as I can.

Here are a couple of more pics from the Antarctic Photo Library to whet your appetite:

Leopard seal with an unlucky penguin in its mouth.

A typical scene aound the peninsula.

A freak. A brilliant freak. But a freak.

That's how I described Werner Herzog to someone today, who forwarded me a link to a recent interview by The Guardian with the German-born director. An avant garde, fringe director for decades, Herzog broke into the mainstream (again?) a few years ago with his documentary "Grizzly Man," about Timothy Treadwell, an Alaskan misfit who got a little too cozy with the wild Yogi Bears and paid with his life. 

Herzog is himself attracted to the fringes of society, so he was the natural choice to make a documentary about science and society in Antarctica, "Encounters at the End of the World," which was nominated for a Best Documentary Oscar. The film is far from fluffy, focusing on the quirky characters who live and work at McMurdo Station, most of whom I know to varying degrees. I was working at the station the summer Herzog filmed his movie, though my colleague Steven Profaizer ended up interviewing him for an article in The Antarctic Sun. 

He even came into our office one day with his cameraman, carrying the sound boom like a scythe. At one point, Herzog turned to me, asking a question. He smiled -- a grim smile like one that must greet the souls seeking passage to the Underworld on Charon's ferry across the River Styx. Smiling does not come naturally to that man, who in the Guardian interview admits that he likes to act a bit, playing psychopathic characters. Though he stresses that he's unlike those characters in real life.

Still, I think Herzog would make a good guide to Hades in a film directed by David Lynch and co-starring Laura Dern. Just because.