Bill Guest's Antarctica Travels

Bill Guest, a long-time member of the Yale Club of Houston and current Board member, was gracious enough to share a clip from his journal on a trip to Antarctica, in 2004. If you have fond, interesting details of your travels you'd like to share, please send us a brief write-up and a picture. ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

The trip to Antarctica was with a group that met in Santiago, then flew to Ushuaia, Argentina, a small port-town located on the southern tip of Tierra del Fuego (which is a very large island, separated from the southern tip of South America by the Magellan Strait), boarded a cruise ship and sailed along the Beagle Channel out of Ushuaia into and across the Drake Passage (some 700 miles) to the Peninsula of Antarctica. The Drake Passage is the meeting place of the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans, known to have some of the roughest seas on the globe. The continent of Antarctica is huge, 90% covered year-round with ice. Its rainfall is comparable to the Sahara Desert, so the abundance of snow, icebergs, glaciers, and other ice displays is the result of accumulations over millions of years. Antarctica holds some 75% of the earth’s fresh water, locked up in ice. It is surrounded by the Southern Ocean. It doubles in size from the Antarctica summer (November – March) to winter. To make this happen, the freezing winter causes the ice shelves to expand at various edges of the continent. Does seawater freeze? Yes, by one of nature’s water miracles, which is that, when seawater is converted to ice, beginning a couple of degrees below the temperature at which fresh water freezes, a large amount of the salt content is expunged. Antarctica has the coldest temperatures on earth, and the fiercest, most stormy winds. Even in the summer much of the continent is not readily accessible. Except for some 20–25 modern-era research stations (only a few are maintained year-round) there is no history of human habitation.

This trip on a cruise ship (a typical one – the Orion was newly built, so quite modern), requiring 2½ days to cross the Drake, was to spend 5 days on the Peninsula (mostly the adjacent archipelago islands) which extends northward in a long curved “narrow” stretch of land, pointing toward the southern tip of Chile/Argentina. (By a meandering border, the two countries share the southern region of South America – a region known as Patagonia.) Virtually no islands exist in the passage between South America and the Antarctica Peninsula – one is Elephant Island (about a hundred miles north of the Peninsula). A thick chain of islands hugs the west coast of the Peninsula, relatively near the continent. The landings were mostly on some of these islands, with one landing on the continent itself. (A “landing” is a transfer by a zodiac boat, with a capacity of some 12 persons, from ship to shore; there are no facilities for ships to dock.) Ice at Hope Bay defeated the effort to make a planned entrance there. The southernmost reach of the trip was slightly less than one degree of latitude short of the Antarctic Circle (66, 33 minutes, south latitude), which may have been because of the amount of ice in the proximity of the Circle. So, the “trip to Antarctica” was to a small patch of Antarctica, compared to the huge size of “Antarctica,” and consisted only of “touching” the northwestern coast of the Peninsula and coastal islands. (One accepted definition of “Antarctica” is: that area south of 60 south latitude.)

However, this was, indeed, a lot. Animals were in abundance. The southern ocean and environs comprise an extremely rich feeding area for whales, seals, penguins, birds and other animals. (Vegetation, limited to appearances such as moss and lichen, is, of course, quite scarce.) The extremely cold water from the icy continent encounters the warmer Pacific and Atlantic waters, churning up low-level nutrients, feeding the growth of krill and shrimp, and so on up the food chain. The ancient continent, known as Gondwana, through the process of plate tectonics beginning some 180 million years ago, divided into South America, Africa, India, Australia, New Zealand and, of course, Antarctica. The drama and grandeur of the landscapes resulting from the geological dynamics are awesome. And the roughness of the oceans, the grand scale of ice formations exhibited in so many ways, and the animals: some whale sightings, birds, birds, birds, seals, seals, seals and penguins, penguins, penguins, penguins! There’s so much.

Some very important topics, such as global warming, the breaking up of the ice shelves, environmental concerns, political interests and scientific research, are not the focus of this trip.