5-Feb Storm

5-Feb Storm

Storm - Some heavy seas last night at about 65 degrees South. I got rolled out of my bunk a couple of times and heard some big ‘kathumps’ from the Captain’s cabin next door. It turns out his computer went for a good tumble last night.

At breakfast I heard that there was a nice Aurora Australis display last night. I made a pact with the night watch keeper to put me on the shake if they came again tonight. I thought it would be a good challenge to try and paint them in watercolours.

I finished my first commission of an iceberg and delivered it to the bosun yesterday. He was stoked. It was a painting from a photo that he won a prize for two years ago. It showed a snowstorm brewing over and a huge tabular iceberg. More commissions arrived and more swaps negotiated.

We entered pack ice later today. The ship’s speed is reduced to about 3 knots as the pack ice thickens and the mates look for fingers of clear water for the ship to pass through. The sea is flat but still there’s a slight swell coming through from the rough seas outside, bobbing the growlers and white islands around. Pack ice is basically large masses of broken up sea ice that can be made up of one, two or three year ice. The ice consists mostly of frozen sea water, sea ice is formed by sea water freezing when its temperature drops below 1.8 degrees.

The ship is graunching and groaning and shuddering its way through it all until we can get a patch of clear sea. There is a lot of talk about growlers and I learn that they are the mini icebergs, a little bigger than two-year pack ice. The next size after growlers are “Bergy Bits” and then I think come the Icebergs. I am slowly coming to terms with the new unusual terminology.

Antarctica

Antartica is Earth’s southernmost continent, surrounded by the Southern Ocean. At 14.4 million km², it is the fifth-largest continent in area and 98% of it is covered by ice. It is the coldest, driest and windiest continent, and has the highest average elevation of all the other continents. Antarctica contains 70% of the world’s water (as ice) - in fact 29 million km3 . If this all melted, it would be enough to raise the sea level by 60 metres. It was thought that the amount of snow falling equates to the rate that icebergs melt, thus keeping the cyle in equilibrian. However this could be changing due to global warming.
It is so dry in fact that the continent is technically the largest desert in the world. It dawned on me that we are actually going to the opposite to the Arctic, that is “Anti Arctic”. A bit of research tells me that Antarctica actually comes from the Greek word “antarctikos” meaning opposite to Arctic. Further research shows that between the 15th and 18th century the imagined land was refered to as Terra Australis (Southern Land). Terra means ‘land’ in Latin and ‘Austral’ means ‘southern’. This became “terra Australis ingonita” meaning “the unknown land of the south”. The first confirmed sighting wasn’t until 1820 by the Russian expedition led by Mikhail Petrovich Lazarev.

The Antarctic Treaty
The Antarctic Treaty was signed in1959 by twelve countries involved in Antarctica, including New Zealand. It was set up to preserve the area, prohibiting military activities and mineral mining. The Treaty supports scientific research and protects the continent's natural wilderness. The Treaty suspended all territorial claims and no nation may enforce sovereignty or territorial claims on the Antarctic. Many more countries have since signed the agreement.