Amalia Glacier, Chile

Viking Jupiter. Amalia Glacier. Day at Sea
Sunrise 5:25 and Sunset 10:10 PM. Cloudy raining 10 Degrees C.

Nautical Term of the Day. As the Crow Flies. When lost or unsure of their position in coastal water, ships would release a caged crow. The crow would fly straight toward the nearest land, thus giving the vessel some sort of navigational fix. This is also why the tallest lookout platform on a ship came to be known as the “crow’s nest”.
We woke later today and then realized we had a 9:30 lecture on the making of the fjords. Quick breakfast and hurried down to get good seats in the Star Theatre.
The lecturer was Dr John Rennie Short who is Scottish and very good with a great sense of humour. He told us he was going to talk about Plate tectonics, the Ice Age and Post Pleistocene (ice age)
He talked about the geology of the world, that the earth is made up of the molten boiling core then the mantle full of minerals, and the crust on top which has cooled and is deep in some areas and very thin in others. 5 miles in some areas and 200 miles thick in others. Heat from the mantle makes the crust break up so it is constantly moving. The crust as it is breaking up creates parts to move, called tectonic plates. In South America there are 2 major plates the Nazca and the South American Plates. They move like bumper cars and grow at the same rate as our fingernails. These are subduction plates that push against each other and one slides under and pushes the other up to produce mountains hence the Patagonian Mountains. Volcanoes are eruptions of the mantle as the plates move. The ice Age was 2.5 million years ago. The ice sheets started to form and got thicker. During the Post Pleistocene period the ice sheets shifted, they opened up and created deep V-shaped fissures. Glaciers entered these V-shaped valleys and carved out, U-shaped valleys and filled it with water quite often creating hanging valleys and hanging rivers. When the ice age stopped and the glaciers started to recede and melt, the sea levels rose and rushed into the U-shaped valleys. The result is the creation of Fjords. The walls of the valleys are precipitous with rock outcrops and the bottom of the valleys are now very deep-water channels. Dr. Short called them “drowned” u shaped valleys.

We decided to get lunch at the World Café and took it to the pool deck so we could watch the land as we cruised along. At 1:30 we started to see the Amalia Glacier and Lee went out on deck to get some photos. It was still drizzling but not too bad. She came back in to have lunch by the window and waited until the ship turned around the corner to enter the channel towards the Glacier. It took about an hour to get close and then Dr. Richard Bates gave a running commentary from the bridge about glaciers. We were all out on deck to watch as we slowly moved forward. He said that they are always on the move pushing the base under it in front like a bulldozer. He said that where the glacier was coming down from the mountain it is now calving into the water and the debris that it is bringing down from the mountains is dumping into the water. Cruising past the Amalia Glacier, part of Bernardo O’Higgins national Park, you cannot help but marvel at the power of nature. This massive Glacier skirts the northern rise of the recluse volcano located directly behind it, slowly eroding the hulking mound’s slopes. Amalia’s ice flow journeyed here millennia ago from the heights of the Andes mountains – a fractional segment of one of the world’s largest continuous ice fields, the southern Patagonian ice field. This sheet of ice covered the entirety of southern Chile during the Ice Age. We had hoped to see some forms of sea life but nothing at all. A bit anti climatic but still very interesting. We heard from several people that you see much more spectacular glaciers on the Alaska cruises and see a lot more calving as well.

We spent part of the afternoon in the fitness room and spa which have very extensive facilities. In addition to the usual stem and sauna rooms, hot and cold tubs and swimming pool, they even have a snow room where you can lie on the snow to cool down

We had dinner in The Restaurant Don had a mushroom Risotto and Lee had a Norwegian Salmon and Lump Crab Gratin. We were a bit late leaving the restaurant but were able to see the last part of the entertainment, the assistant cruise director, Corinne Bach who was a very accomplished Opera singer, singing Jazz, Broadway Musicals, Pop, and music from “Popera”.
As we headed out of the theatre and came into the atrium, we looked down to the 2nd floor and saw that the first Christmas decorations were out, including a display of gingerbread houses made by the kitchen.Read more