My cabinmate, Rebecca Woodgate, charms me completely with her British humor. She's a Cambridge/Oxford-trained oceanographer working in Germany. She's also a fiddler with an Irish band! Very fun. It's good we get along-we have no storage space in our cabin, so we trip over the bags piled between the bunks, and over each other!

The BAS (British Antarctic Survey) party has been split between the Wardroom and the Senior Rates Mess. We're not allowed to eat in each other's areas, or even socialize there without permission. The Wardroom is quite comfortable, with a formal dining area and a lounge on the observation deck just beneath the bridge. Why they choose to use stemmed goblets and serve sloshy soup is beyond me! I think the officers enjoy the circus of flying food when the ship rolls. Despite the ubiquitous potatoes, British food isn't so bad. The curries are very good, not surprisingly. But I'm not certain what the stuff they call OJ really is, and coffee is instant only. Our Seattle scientist brought a coffee machine for the lab... We only have to dress up for the final dinner sitting; I usually eat early. We have reel-to-reel movies Wed/Sat nights!

Yesterday I was summoned to the bridge to see my first tabular iceberg! Steve speculated that it's from the Filchner ice shelf because it's such a monster: 50 meters above the water, 700 meters on a side. There were also some "bergy bits" floating about, and several Wandering Albatrosses have been circling the ship. South Georgia Is. is stunning, rugged, highly glaciated, and the waters offshore are literally teaming with seals and King penguins, even a killer whale! I've been hearing ominous rumblings about initiation rites for crossing the Antarctic Circle. Apparently Steve wants revenge for whatever happened on the Coast Guard ship when he first crossed...

The crew had a Man Overboard exercise, but they took 10 minutes to get the dummie back on board. Judging by the way they dumped it out on deck, I think it died. We've also had safety briefings for helicopters and survival gear--I was the guinea pig in the orange suit--
Loving it! Elizabeth

Steve and I started making meteorological observations on 17 Jan, just in time to see a green iceberg float out of the mist and very quickly disappear again. A rare event! Steve has seen only 3 or 4 in 20 years of trips to Antarctica. Green icebergs are formed on the underside of ice shelves; high levels of organic matter in marine ice give them a dark bottle green color. Pure white snow petrels met the ship on 18 Jan, signalling our first encounter with pack ice. It's much as I expected, except for the algae in between the layers of snow and ice. Its brownish color increases absorption of sunlight, rotting the ice from the inside out. Critters: Adelie penguins lounge around on the pack until the ship threatens their ice floe, at which time they suddenly become animated, frantically flapping their little wings, tottering to the side of the floe and diving in. Minke whales were surfacing about every hour near the Antarctic Circle. One of them performed quite impressively: three full breaches with half twists and back-flops into the water--truly spectacular. We've also seen Emperor penguins, which are comically formal when standing up but hilarious butterballs when sliding on their tummies, their preferred mode of travel on the ice. One scene had a belly-sledding fellow desperately paddling directly along our path, as the towering red hulk of the ship's bow crunched through the ice behind him. Lots of seals!

20 Jan began with ice reconnaissance missions in the two Lynx helicopters. Steve left with the first helicopter, flying along the ship's southward track. I was on the second flight, heading due west from the ship for 70 miles before looping back to the south. Every 5 miles we recorded ice concentration in tenths and made a guess at the typical floe size. We sent the info to the National Ice Center, who incorporated it into this week's ice maps. The helo ride was shaky and loud, but not as cold as I had expected. The chilly parts were the 60-second intervals every five miles when the photographer opened the door to make a strip of pictures, at -30 C. Despite kneeling for 2 hours with a harness around my waist, the flight was over before I knew it! We've had some beautiful weather, eg. last night a mirror sea surface reflecting a pink, green and lavender sky.

The ship's been creeping about in the OVERFLOW area (approx 74S, 36W) since Wednesday. A CTD (current/temperature/depth) search for the plume of Filchner Ice Shelf water has been successful, and the oceanographers are ecstatic in typically British understated style: they nod their heads with pleasure and say "Alright, alright," eyes twinkling, when asked how it's going. Drifting ice floes interfere with the CTD hanging on a cable over the side, so the ship often rams its way into a big floe and parks, rather than constantly maneuvering. The cloud of testosterone on the bridge is thick enough to cut with a knife!

The Wardroom has become a happy place to socialize, with plenty of rowdy parlor games, films, music and excellent Chilean red wine. Tonight is Shakespeare Night, complete with costumes.
Cheers! Elizabeth

PS. Rebecca says my horn mouthpiece sounds like a constipated elephant. She brought a tin whistle--we make an ear-cringing duo!

We've just had our second event of the day, a formation fly-by of a BAS Twin Otter (bright red plane with skis) and one of Endurance's Lynx helicopters. The Twin Otter delivered a gear box for our grounded helo; the aircraft rendevous'ed on the ice shelf before flying out to the ship, a couple miles off shore. It's a spectacular day for outdoor activities, sunny and -10 C at the ice front. This morning the ship parked alongside the shelf and we all clambered off for official photos--my first time on the continent! Steve and I have been off the ship onto the sea ice several times, taking ice cores. One floe was only 27 cm thick! Bow and stern thrusters make the ship extremely maneuverable; we just drive up alongside a floe and lower the gangway. Because the pack ice has receded unusually far this year, we've been able to crisscross a large region of the western Weddell never before visited by a ship, collecting loads of new bathymetric data that will significantly alter the current maps and models of the Weddell Sea. Lately we've been zigzagging along the Black Coast of the Antarctic Peninsula, south from Hilton Inlet. Except for a few icebergs we're in open water, and this ship wallows in the swell like a pig.

Besides doing the ice cores, Steve and I have been on the bridge 24 hours a day while in the pack, recording as much as we can determine visually about the ice. I've lost count of the number of times I've been out in the helicopter, doing the same thing. We have made one really exciting discovery: where the Emperors go to molt. They are unable to swim (they would freeze) while their feathers are falling out, and they aren't in the rookeries. The experts have suspected that the penguins go to the pack ice to molt, but it hasn't been documented until now. Steve and I have photographed many piles of penguin feathers!

Earlier in the week we visited an extremely large iceberg, 20 miles wide by 40 miles long. Rebecca estimated (and this was piped throughout the ship) that it contained enough ice to supply every person in the UK with ice cubes for three gin and tonics a day, for the next 100,000 years.

Just so you know, I have been doing some "real work" down here... I believe I've figured out how to get a plastic solution from the ice dynamics code with exactly the same amount of computation as before. It works in the 1D code, at least. I'm happy!
Love, Elizabeth

BTW, I did receive your (first and last?) fax a day after you sent it. Thanks!

4 Feb 1998. Thanks for the birthday fax--it arrived today!--with snippets from everyone. My birthday has been special indeed. The "RPC" party was last night, shared with the Royal Marines commanding officer. We cut the "Hoppy Bday" cake together, wedding style (many laughs), and I played my plastic-tube-and-funnel horn for the Captain (more laughs). Steve got a kick out of rummaging around the ship for spare tubing and nicking the photog's funnel! The officers coated my card, a 3D airplane cleverly constructed out of posterboard, with original poetry/limericks... Everyone stayed up until 00Z to sing happy birthday for me, but eventually Steve, Laurie (our coffee-bearing Seattle oceanographer/Aussie) and I were left reclining in the wardroom's leather chairs, listening to Tom Waits and contemplating the view: a hundred+ iceberg mirages floating above an orange horizon as the sun dipped below the clouds. I wish I could describe how it felt, somehow a mixture of joy for being immersed in this glorious place and surrounded by affectionate friends, and lonely melancholy for being a little ship in a big icebergy ocean. This morning the Continent offered yet another stunning effect: a milky waterfall of "sea fog" pouring off of the ice shelf and streaming out over the sea. It obscured the surface and drifted surreally around the Bransfield's hull, creating a mythical, romantic image of a masted ship floating in the mist. We've spent the last 1.5 days with the BAS research ship Bransfield at the shelf front, jointly supplying a fuel depot on the ice by helicopter--300 barrels. The Ronne ice shelf is straight as a rule and reaches from horizon to horizon, as far as you can see. The sky is crystal clear today; the colors are brilliant white and a million shades of blue.

6 Feb 1998. I received your (third) fax this morning; thanks for more birthday wishes! Yesterday we pulled up another of Rebecca's moorings, moored the ship to the ice shelf, and everyone went out to play. Lovely afternoon for long walks on the ice! This morning we went out again but only walked for an hour; it was -18 C with a 15 knot wind. There are both Emperor and Adelie penguins here, juvenile birds just losing their down. These Adelies present another mystery: presumably their rookeries are only found in rocky areas, for nest-building and solar heating purposes, but here we are miles from land with young penguins who've never been in the water...

8 Feb 1998. Yesterday we pulled up along another picturesque area of fast sea ice for an ice core and a couple hours playtime among the penguins and Weddell Seals. One maniac climbed the face of the nearby iceberg, another paddled and rolled around in his kayak, and several of the Marines skiied off the ice edge into the water in everyday clothes, then climbed out using their ski poles and sprinted back to the ship for warmth, a "normal" part of their Nordic training. Last night we drove around the world's largest iceberg, and this morning we are 4 for 5 on recovering Rebecca's moorings, with one to go. Successful! FYI, the third fax was about the right length, the second one could have been 25% longer (A4 paper).
Cheers! Elizabeth

The trip is winding down now. The oceanographers have packed up their equipment, Steve and I have started analysing our sea ice data, and the nights are dark again after a month of 24-hour daylight. I was delighted to see a full moon that first night, familiar even though upsidedown. We have left the Weddell Sea and are moored in the harbor at Grytviken, South Georgia, one of the world's most remote towns. It's also one of the least populated, with only four more or less permanent human residents, a small army garrison (humans but not permanent), and a variety of wildlife. Grytviken used to be a thriving whaling station but now is a cluster of abandoned, rusting buildings nestled at the waterfront below magnificent, rugged mountains--very picturesque. We walked around the bay to Shackleton's grave (cruise leader of the first Endurance), which is guarded by aggressive fur seals and monstrous elephant seals. Fur seals are quite territorial and will bark, bare their teeth and lunge toward you, even when you're moving away. I stomped my feet and roared back at them, a tactic that worked well enough with the small ones. Other people used stones or whale bones to frighten them away. I think the elephant seals' primary defense against humans is inspiring disgust; they lie in smelly, mucky wallows, make obnoxious belching noises and stretch their mouths into pink, toothless, gaping yawns. There were birds everywhere as well: seagulls, terns, albatrosses, King, Gentoo and Chinstrap penguins. We had snow, fog, high winds and "dodgey" seas crossing to South Georgia. Given the wind and whitecaps in this little harbor, our passage to the Falklands over the next few days is going to be rough too! The wind sings in the superstructure on top of the bridge; it sounds like a distant organ playing no chord in particular, accompanying a didgereedoo.

Last week we unexpectedly encountered the Argentinian icebreaker Almirante Irizar along the Filchner ice shelf. It's been 15 years since the war, but there is still a surprising amount of anti-Argentinian sentiment and distrust on board. We also met the German research ship Polarstern and went to the German base, Neumeyer, to collect some of their scientists for passage back to the Falklands. Except for the Argentinian ship, there has been a high level of logistical cooperation and frequent radio contact with other bases, ships and aircraft in the vicinity, certainly in everyone's best interest in such a harsh and remote place...

This will be my last fax; we're expecting to reach the Falklands by the end of the week and spend a couple days in Stanley before flying back to England. Re the horn workshop, I'd love to but I'd better postpone it another year. I'll try to go to the Brass Band Festival instead.
Love, Elizabeth