Hi Everybody,

Sorry about both the delay between my emails (just realized it was about 2 weeks!) I always have so much to write because I forget to write more frequently, so be prepared for this one. It is quite long.

...The last email I sent talked about how we were about to enter the Antarctic Circle, which I learned is actually at 66.33 degrees S. We passed it sometime while I was sleeping, but that's no big deal. We ran into some rough weather south of 65, and decided to take a detour off of our planned route and instead sample further to the East in order to both miss some of the worst weather, and to be cautious as we approached the ice.

We didn't actually see any icebergs for quite some time. A couple days after crossing the circle, the first big "table iceberg" appeared off in the distance while we were stopped. One thing two know about ice in the ocean is that there are two types: sea ice and glacial ice. The sea ice is formed from the freezing of sea water, and is at most 2 meters thick. Icebergs are actually pieces of the ice shelf which break off and float out to sea. These can be several stories tall, and even several miles wide. After floating out to sea, and shedding more pieces of ice, they often get to be some interesting shapes. However, some remain as big "tables," or big rectangular ice blocks, which are amazing to see. We went pretty close to this one, but I had already gone to sleep for the day :-(.

Then, it got really cold. Temperatures plunged to a consistent -2 - -3 degrees Celsius (26-28 F) and the winds were blowing and the snow was falling. It wasn't too fun to be sampling water in these conditions, but we turned on some heaters in the hangar, and finished up as soon as we could. Our new route took us up onto the Gunnerus (say it like a Norwegian) Ridge, which is an area close the Antarctic Continent, where the water depth became shallower. The rate at which we were deploying CTDs and sampling became a lot faster, as well, and things were pretty crazy as we approached the ice edge.

We approached the ice edge on the 2nd of March. That morning, we started seeing more and more chunks of sea ice floating by the boat. Some of them came pretty close, and we even thought we were going to bring up a piece with the CTD. We brought that CTD up with a huge iceberg in the foreground. We kept pushing through until we reached an area where the sea ice became pretty dense, and we decided to stop and do a CTD cast. When we stopped here, there were a bunch of gigantic table icebergs around us (one in the distance was over 9 miles wide). Everyone came out on deck to view them and I think our shared photo directory on our ship's server probably had 1000 new photos posted that evening. The captain was quick to get us out of there before sunset, though, because he didn't want to risk being in the dark with all of that ice that could screw up the boat or its new paint job (ooh la la).

I stayed up pretty late this day to look at all of the sights, and I'm glad I did. I made it to dinner that night (which was lasagna!). Then, during dinner, the bridge (pilothouse) called the mess deck to announce that penguins were pretty close to the ship. Naturally, a mob of people immediately left their plates and ran outside with their cameras. There was a little circular sheet of sea ice (probably about 20ft in diameter) that had 4 penguins on it. It drifted closer and closer to the ship, and eventually basically touched the side of the ship. By this time, two of the penguins had jumped off and swam away, but there were still two hanging out for a photo op. The two eventually jumped off and swam away, but gave us quite a show. They were so close!

That night, team perfection took over again at midnight, about 50 km from the ice shelf. We recovered the CTD that morning at sunrise (at about 4am). We were so far south that the sun was only completely set for about 3 or 4 hrs. It became twilight at 3, then the sun eventually rose right before we recovered the CTD. This was exceptionally exciting, as we got to see the infamous "green flash" as the sun came up. For those of you who are unfamiliar with this, at high latitudes, the rising and setting of the sun gives off a green flash as the sun first crosses the horizon, or right before it goes below the horizon. This is due to a bunch of physics, but amounts to the scattering of different colored light rays, which is the same reason why we have blue skies and colorful sunrises and sunsets. We were especially lucky, though, as we saw 2 green flashes due to the swell. The sun came up, green flash. The swell rose above the sun, then it rose again and another green flash. Cool stuff.

Then, we went back to the ice edge again, a little further West and closer to our original planned route. This was great, because we had a lot of data that had to be downloaded from during the night, and my watch basically had 3 hrs to sightsee. We approached the edge even closer this day, and it seemed as if we went to an area where the sea ice had retreated a lot further. In fact, I went up to the bridge to use their high-powered binoculars, and could actually see the ice edge. I SAW ANTARCTICA! From the bare eye, we thought it was just a low cloud, but when we looked through binoculars, you could see the patterns in the ice. Also, the ship's radar showed that it was in fact the ice shelf.

I guess the Chief Scientist and the Captain decided that we had all been hard-workers and gave us a bit of time to enjoy the ice edge. They loaded the small rescue boat into the water, and gave everyone a short boat ride closer to the water so that we could get closer to the ice, and see the ship from the water. It's actually a beautiful ship when you see it from the water! haha. This was one of the best days, and I felt really humbled and lucky to be able to experience such an amazing sight. We left that afternoon, and I was so excited I couldn't sleep and made it to dinner another night. I forget what they had that night, but dinner is definitely the best meal of the day.

We saw two more penguins on the way out, who were a little more shy, but still cool to see. Now we're on our way back, steaming at 12 knots. We should be back in port on the morning of the 16th. We've begun our crossing ceremonies, but I'll save all of that for another email.

- Austin