Hi Everyone,
Today was a really fun day, if not very successful. We are trying to make our way towards our two southern moorings in the Weddell sea, M2 and M3. We began the day by steaming towards M2, the more northerly mooring, where we released it and waited for it come up. Although it responded and claimed to be released, it remained at the bottom of the sea, which was very frustrating, implying one of the releases didn’t fire properly. Our potential options were to drag for it on the bottom of the sea and try to release it/ pick it up, or to have another go at M3. We went for M3.
As previously mentioned, we had encountered a lot of sea ice the previous day looking for M3 so we tried a different route and hoped to find a lead or some clear water to get through. We sailed almost 80% of the way to the mooring without any issues (about a 6 hour transit) through some beautiful sea ice and icebergs. We tried to take some pictures out on deck, there was a lot of snow blowing in. It turns out that taking pictures in a mild snowstorm surrounded by icebergs is much less aesthetic than you might think and was actually incredibly unpleasant, with a lot of wincing and cries of pain. We didn’t last long and I don’t think the pictures will go far. Chris did actually manage to take a good picture with the ice and one of his Antarctic flags. This is a project where schools around the UK send us flags they have designed which we then take to Antarctica and photograph in exciting places among the ice or near South Georgia, before sending them back to the schoolchildren. Hopefully it inspires them with an interest in Antarctica and science in general!
By the end of the day, we had seen a lot of cape petrels (strangely almost all of the wildlife today was composed of these birds, thankfully they are very pretty and fly close to the ship), but had come across a significant ice edge. The sea had been getting icier throughout the day, with more iceberg and flat ice being sighted, and then as we got towards midnight, we saw a strong ice edge on the radar. I was standing up on the bridge in the dark as we explored around through the icebergs looking for an opening on the radar that might take us towards M3. It felt very Antarctic exploration as we hunted through the icebergs with a thin “ice-light” piercing ahead through the pitch blackness.
Sadly, we didn’t find a safe passage (especially as the ship is not ice-strengthened) and were forced to turn back.
18/01/23
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