Sixty-Eight, Sixty-Eight

Before dawn our ship was greeted by ominous mountains and glaciers. The expedition leaders finally announced that we would go ashore in Antarctica today. We landed at a place I call "Sixty-eight, Sixty-eight," a site whose latitude and longitude are the same. Its real name is Pour Quoi Pas Bay. The French name means "Why not?" and is the name of the first ship to land at this island. Today it is the place where we meet Antarctica, the Temptress, the Ice Queen, the Monster. Only once before has this passenger ship traveled so far south, and that trip occurred four years ago. Our group, "the Crab-Eater Seals," were scheduled to go ashore around mid-day. Adellie penguins, fur seals, and five spouting humpback whales welcomed us ashore as we stumbled along a rocky beach to a ridge overlooking an active glacier. The good news is that the penguins are still here. The bad news is that the snow and ice have gone, melted so that the beach appears as a rock-strewn strand without a trace of snow or ice. Some of the glaciers, which take millennia to build, have receded up to twenty miles in the last four years. Antarctica is having a heat wave. The week we left North Carolina a research station near here reported the highest temperature ever recorded in Antarctica--67 degrees Fahrenheit. Today the temperature is about 40 degrees, and we are sweating underneath three layers of UnderArmour. We need hiking poles to traverse the beach, covered with irregular rocks the size of cantaloupes. While most of the penguins have already left the beach for their four-month-long swim in search of food, a few Adellies still stand here like statues, moulting in stolid silence. Our ninety minutes here whetted our appetites for more adventures among the glaciers, icebergs and animals of this mysterious land.Read more