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Showing posts from December, 2018

The finer points of time travel

So I'm sitting at the airport in Buenos Aires waiting for my flight to arrive (we board in 15 minutes and they haven't put up the gate yet...) and I'm thinking about time.  Not only to avoid missing my flight (which seems entirely possible) but also in an entirely different sense.  When you travel, time changes.  You go from one time zone to another, you encounter cultures that eat later, go to bed later, wake up later, and that affects how you view time.  But when you go to a place that has no time zone, a place where all time zones come together to a single point, time starts to become less and less relevant.  You start to see how it really is a human construct.  Couple this with almost total daylight and your in for a strange trip indeed.  I was speaking with Carol Devine (a special guest invited by Lindblad and totally amazing and nice person) and Alex (a houlie from Hawaii who was on our expedition and equally nice) about this a few minutes ago as we collectively waite

Homeward bound

What can you say about heading home after experiencing something like this?  Its not something you can put into words, but because I know that memory can be fleeting and writing can help make those memories more permanent, I'll try and put some thoughts down.  I'll start with last night. I didn't get seasick, but that definitely doesn't go for everyone on board.  Many people looked a little green and the dining hall was a bit empty.  As it approached 11, the ship began to toss more as the seas grew rougher and me and my companions headed down to our bedroom to try and get to sleep before the rough water hit in full.  Lets just say it was an interesting attempt at getting some shut eye. The ship tossed all night, smashing me into the wall and a couple times it felt like I was being lifted right out of it. This morning its calmer, and we're working our way into stiller seas.  Its still rough, and hand lines are up in all the common areas.  Donnie and I decided to

Port Lockroy and the REAL penguin plunge

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Howdy folks!!! Today we're offloading for Port Lockroy, an English outpost here in Antarctica.  It was used for whaling, staging operations and now it serves as a historical site that has a gift shop, bar, and post office.  There is a good sized colony of penguins there and there are some rules set up for interacting with the natives.  For instance, if a penguin walks toward you on a penguin 'right of way,' one must defer to the penguin. I'll post an update once I land.  I'm borrowing a crazy lens from Lindblad's B&W cabinet, so I should get some good shots there. BTW yesterday we went for a zodiac cruise into Paradise Harbor.  Interesting name for the ocean terminus of a glacier bound by giant peaks.  You know the giant peaks are something I didn't really expect.  This place is beyond picturesque.  We went out twice (the Fellows) and examined blue eyed shags - a subspecies of the imperial cormorant, Antarctic turns, the ugly snowy sheathbill, and p

Killer whales!!!

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WHAT!!!???!! At 5:30ish a pod of killer whales showed up and was right off the the bow.  They were harassing a young humpback whale, and hunting for something.  They came right up to the port side of the bow and you could see the distinctive markings of the Antarctic killer whales - sort of a grayish color above what would be the lateral line if they were fish. I got some cool pictures.  Interestingly the ships whale biologist Connor Ryan said that he believes killer whale is a better name than orca, and that he suspects that orca is a named pushed by Sea World in an attempt to separate them from a negative image (the whales that is).  These guys are known as 'little B's' - as opposed to, well, big B's.  They're a subspecies its believed, but in order to figure out if its a separate species they need a carcass to examine, and as of now, they have never found one.  The whales with the large fins are males, and the shooter ones female.  The pod is led by the grandmot

Falling ice!!!!

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Man, what a day!!! Short recap because I'm presenting tonight to everyone at the nightly debrief and doing a video interview with the National Geographic videographer. TODAY WAS EPIC!  I know I may have said that before, but it was.  We went out by zodiac into Cierva Cove, the site of an actively calving glacier with glaciologist Dr. Erin Pettit.  Cierva Cove is the site of amazing icebergs and lots of brash ice.  The glaciers face was about 80m tall.  Dr. Pettit was attempting to determine the salinity and the temperature of the cove.   Even cooler than that though she listening to the glacier.  I'm serious.  She had a probe called a hydrophone with some sort of microphone on it lowered down into the cove and was recording the sound of the water melting.  Glaciers have gasses bound in them, and when they melt underwater like that, they make a popping sound.  By doing this she could determine the rate it was melting and other variables associated with how it was changing.  W

Iceberg shots

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Incredible!

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I can't tell you how incredible this place is.  I can't type either. My fingers are frozen from being outside on the bow of the ship for too long, taking pictures of the most beautiful icebergs floating on a perfectly still sea.  In the hour and a half I as out there I saw crab eater seals, several humpbacks, storm petrels - but the ice!  Just amazing.  I wish I could upload a ton of images for you to see, but the internet is abysmally slow and I keep getting bumped off. Yesterday I took a kayak around some icebergs and coasted on the ocean.  I believe we were in the Weddell  Sea, but I'm not sure.  Its all blurred into some strange and frozen dream.  The day doesn't seem to have an ending, and we got to bed out of obligation and not from exhaustion.  I'm not sure how I have the energy to keep going like this - I guess I'll sleep when I'm home.  Our captain, a Swedish man name Leif who is considered the best in the industry put the bow of the ship into the

Island living is easy...if your a penguin.

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HELLO WORLD! We have icebergs!  We'll make landfall sometime around 11 today.  Keep posted! We landed on a small archipelago island call Aticho Island.  In order to do so, we went though a decontamination process of first vacuuming and thoroughly cleaning all bags boots, etc.  We then were loaded onto zodiacs and across the sea we went.  When we landed, we were instructed on proper penguin protocol.  Just in case you're curious - 1.  Stay 15 feet away. 2.  If one comes toward you and gets really close - stand still and let it figure out what it wants to do. 3.  No picking up the penguins and putting them in your bag, no matter how cute they are. 4.  Stay within the traffic cones so you don't ruin their environment. So the penguins we saw today were gentoos and chinstraps.  The gentoo's were funny to watch.  They make nests out of rocks and continually keep working on it even when the they are incubating their egg.  One penguin will go out and steal a rock from a

ICEBERGS!

HELLO WORLD! We have icebergs!  We'll make landfall sometime around 11 today.  Keep posted!
Tomorrow we land on Antarctica!  By 10 i'lll be walking on the ice and stone of a place I've been dreaming about since early February. Tomorrow.

From the southern most point into the Drake...

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What a day!  A day of days.  A king amongst days.  Okay, that may not make a lot of sense.  I'm exhausted.  But in a good way.  Like I said in the last post, things started out pretty darn early, and the jet lag, sleeping on planes, etc. didn't help.  Let me give you a little more detail.  From Buenos we went to the airport - the local one this time, so it was closer and smaller.  From there it was a 3ish hour flight to Ushuaia, most of which was spent in either deep conversation about the fate of society and/or education, or sleeping.  As we got closer to the airport, the landscape grew more and more dramatic - ragged mountains sticking out of the earths surface like a bones, dusty gray and sharp, and wholly unlike the time rounded peaks of our weathered Appalachians.  The descent was one of the roughest I've been party to in some time - our charter passenger plan was buoyed and dropped continually as we made our way down to the tarmac that lay between the sea and the land

3:21 AM Suffield time

Good morning folks, Its 5am in Buenos Aires, and the wake up call just ripped me from my dreams.  Man that phone was loud.  We leave for Ushuaia at 6am, and I thought I would give you a quick update.  Yesterday we got a whirlwind tour via bus of greater Buenos Aires and then went out for a foot tour on our own.  We - being the 100 some odd folks who will be on the expedition, which was pared to Dan (my 6'7 Hawaiian roommate), Donnie (the other National Geographic teacher fellow) as well Scott (from Savannah and his father Greg (from Washington DC).  A few months ago Scott was at the North Pole, and he and his father are celebrating his fathers recent retirement by heading now to the South Pole.  Nice folks.   We had dinner in what was something like an old fashioned speak easy - you entered the restaurant through a flower shop flower cooler door.  Honest to God.  One would have no idea it was a restaurant outside of the recent New York Times review Scott had read.  Cool place.  Al

On the cusp of a dream

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I leave for Antarctica in one day.  One day.  ONE DAY.  My bags are packed.  Okay, that's a lie.  Everything is lying in piles on the floor our study.  But its laid out in logical piles.  Batteries are charged, camera gear is packed away (shout out to Ryan Winiarski for all of the gear he let me borrow and the advise he's given me), gloves, hats, long underwear, shell, etc. its all there, just waiting to be shoved into a duffle bag.  Recent web searches have included 'weather, Drake Passage' and 'wave height predictions, Drake Passage' and 'Dramamine vs. Bonine' and 'does candied ginger really work for motion sickness.'  I guess you can see where my heads at.  Just how rough is the dreaded Drake?  Inquiring minds (like mine) want to know.  Its not like i'm a big puker or anything.  I was totally fine going through rough water in the Adriatic years ago.  People around me were reduced from jet setting beauties to barfing adolescents in a mere t

High school magic

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Tuesday's are meeting days around here.  That means when you get out of work you either sit down with some folks and talk turkey in a classroom, or you head down to the library and meet with the entire faculty.  Way back in the day in a former life as a substitute teacher I would walk by faculty meetings and look in from the outside with a bit of sadness, sort of like I had yet to arrive, and maybe I never would.   At this point I have sat through my share, and they have run the gamut from fun and lively to something akin to watching a cat sleep for a few hours.  Lately, though, they've been good.  And this last one was really good.  Let me explain that a bit.  Faculty meetings  lately involve food.  Each month a different department takes the helm and makes something topical.  It could be that everything is green because your department picked March and there's a Saint Patricks Day theme.  So on this fateful day I walked in and everything was, well, ice colored.  As I stoo