Monday, April 21, 2008

Ice Camp

This was a view our ice camp from the helicopter. You can see Mount Erebus in the background, and it was steaming away, as it is still an active volcano. We were really away from everything except nature, and could hear the silence of the night, broken by the pinging of the ice on occasion when new cracks formed. I always wondered what happens to the tide when the ocean is frozen over. We certainly were not going up and down with the tide, though, because off to the right was land, to which this "fast ice" was attached. It did move though, we could tell, as cracks would form. Sometimes "pressure ridges" would form where ice broke and the two sides pushed together, raising up a whole line of broken ice, sometimes several feet high. For the most part it was flat. There is something wonderful about having such an expansive view of the landscape. What a sense of space out there!

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