Iceberg Cruise

Manfred our tour guide

One of the recreational activities that is a highlight for everyone here at Davis, are the iceberg tours. Using IRBs or Inflatable Rubber Boats with an outboard motor on them, you travel around the islands of Anchorage, Gardiner and Magnetic looking at the many different shaped icebergs.  If you are luck enough you also get to see the occassional jade berg and Leopard Seal. 

 

This picture is in front of Magnetic Island.  The island is a breeding ground for a very large colony of Adelie Penguins.  Unfortunately most of them have vacated the island with their young. 

 

Here are a few families.  The chicks are almost as big as their parents and are still losing their baby feathers called down.  They are very funny to watch.  They dont have the surefootedness of their parents and run around tripping over everything.

Shortly into our cruise we were visited by a leopard seal.  This guy was as keen to check us out as we were him.  I dont think he was interested in photographing us.  I think he was sniffing and sizing us up as a tasty meal.

 

Our next big highlight of our trip was a jade berg.  These are fairly rare to find.  No one is exactly sure how they are formed but the best theory is Jade bergs are icebergs formed on the bottom of the ice shelf where fresh water with algae in it has gathered.with a distinctive green tinge.  They are incredibly beautiful and mesmorising, as this Adelie obviously thought.  Very interesting on how this little fella got up to where he did. They must be able to get some height out of the water when they jump.

Some theories also say their colour is a result of highly compressed ice which has had the air modules squeezed out. This compression happens to the ice at the very bottom of a glacier with tons of pressure from above.  I tend to think the algae one is more likely.

  

As you can tell we were all rather excited about the sights that night.  Time flew by.  It was hard to believe that we were cruising around for 2 hours.

 

 There were also normal icebergs which has some weird shapes created by the weather.

 Even though the weather was absolutely perfect for our outing, the night was still rather cold. As you can see by this picture taken at 8pm we no longer have 24 hours of sunlight anymore, with the sun setting at 8pm and rising at about 4am.  We are losing over an hour of sunlight each week.