Over and over again, I heard how important krill was to the
entire ecosystem in Antarctica, especially for whales and penguins.
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| LeMarie Passage |
Adelie penguins, named after a French researcher’s wife
(quite unusual in itself!) like to nest
in colder weather further south. We
heard a lot about them, saw them during lectures, but didn’t visit a
colony. They are what you think of when
you think of what a penguin looks like.
They like the thicker ice, but that makes it harder for them to find nesting
areas some years and some years, there are no babies because they haven’t been
able to nest. They have become less
plentiful from the days when sailors,
whalers, and explorers subsisted on Adelie penguins and frozen penguins
were stockpiled outside their h ke
cordwood—not to mention Shackleton and his men!!
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| Weddell Seal |
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| a leopard seal |
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| Penguins on shore and the Midnatsol |
We heard many lectures about ice shelves, ice floes,
volcanoes, nanataks, moraines, growlers, grease ice, nilas, pancake ice, pack
ice, and the weight of the ice on Antarctica is so heavy that the continent is
being pushed down, but as the ice melts, it will pop back up. I know why ice bergs and glaciers are
blue. We are coming to the end of an ice
age. I have pages of notes on the
geology of South America and Antarctica.
In 1990, scientists thought there were 12 tectonic plates,
and now they know that there are actually 29. 550 million years ago there was a super
continent name Gondwanda that, as it separated, all our current continents
moved into the position that they maintain today. We had many lectures and
informal discussions about the mammals, climate, ice conditions
and glacier behavior that made the trip very interesting. I won’t rewrite my notes about all of this
because there are so many books that are better written and more accurate than
what I could do!
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