Photos from Antarctica

This is the second of two pages of photos that were taken on a trip to Antarctica on the ship Akademik Ioffe, with Quark Expeditions. I had to break this photo gallery in half because it contains so many images. Click here to view the first page.

To see a book of photos from this trip, visit: Icebergs & Albatrosses

The scale of some of these photos is hard to judge. Some of these mountains are enormous, and some of these icebergs are much smaller than you might imagine. This particular iceberg is actually very small, probably only about forty feet high above the surface. That crack was a bit of a worry though - sometimes a slice will fall off a berg like this and the main body of the berg will flip right over. Not a good thing when you're in a motorboat, less than a hundred feet away.

Whale bones.

More shots inside Lockroy.

Pavel, our Russian liasion between the crew and the expedition staff.

The remains of an old boat. I'm not sure why, since there was no base at this landing spot.

Looking out my bedroom window.

The lighting was just right for this. The red stuff in the cliffs is some sort of algae. Some things actually do grow in Antarctica.

This guy is carrying a rock up from the beach to make a nest in the colony.

Sonar on the bridge.

Lots of yellow parkas. Quark issued a parka to everybody on the expedition and we got to take them home. They were pretty warm. I've never felt so over-dressed.

This was really interesting to me. At first we wondered if it was possibly some paint that had rubbed off a passing ship (not likely), but the bright green was embedded in the ice, and so was the smaller concentration of gold that is harder to see here. I felt like these were some sort of varieties of bacteria. Our Zodiac driver seemed puzzled by them too, and he took a sample back with him to the scientific staff, in case it was an unknown type of bacteria. He said that someone on staff had actually discovered an entirely new type of bacteria or algae a couple seasons ago.

That was a particularly odd piece of ice in the background.

The tag board was used to keep track of who was on the ship and who was on shore. I was 306-1, the top left tag (I took this photo just as I was returning to the ship, hence the reason it was still flipped to red). After a shore landing, the ship wouldn't depart until all the tags were green and everyone was accounted for.

Port Lockroy, from the harbour.

Oh dear. This is the only dead penguin that I saw on the entire trip. Where do the bones go? If all the snow melted, would there be hundreds of bones all over the beach underneath?

Slum penguins.

More photos inside the museum at Lockroy.

Imagine living in this and knowing that this is one of the warmest and most comfortable times you'll see in a while. And being comfortable. That's what it means to be a penguin.

That's how close these birds were to skimming the water sometimes. His wing is actually touching the surface here.

An engineering diagram of the third deck, the one I was staying on. We had waves hitting our porthole window one night. There were six decks in total.

This was one of my favorite photos. This was a big avalanche, a couple hundred feet high. I was lucky to get the camera up in time once I heard it start to go. I actually saw four avalanches this same day, although this was the biggest.

He just doesn't seem embarassed by the mess.

Another photo from BBQ night.

Bringing a piece of ice up to the bar for drinks. Our bartender was a patient man, and spent hours attacking pieces of ice like this with his ice pick.

Dreaming of tasty penguins.

I think this penguin must have been thirsty, since it was eating some snow.

I never did figure this out. It looks like a dog sled of some sort at Lockroy, but there was certainly no evidence of dogs. And it didn't make sense, being in the middle of a penguin colony. Maybe it was a human-drawn sled.

The radio room at Lockroy. Short-wave anyone?

Titantic night, dressed up as "a pair of frozen stowaways that have just been discovered in steerage."

This was the last photo that I took on the trip, about three days before we disembarked. I wanted to spend the rest of the time just looking around, and not thinking about the camera. This was a great final photo though - it was the first time that I saw two different species of penguins hanging out together.

This is the second of two photo pages from this trip, since there were so many photos. Click here to view the first page.

For info about the DJ sets that I played while on this trip, check out the links below. All three of these mixes can be downloaded from Bolivia's mixes folder on Dropbox. The second set from November 25th is our top recommendation:

Set #1: 128 minutes of Drum & Bass, from November 22nd, 2010. Click here for the blog post.

Set #2: 66 minutes of Progressive House, from November 25th, 2010. Click here for the blog post.

Set #3: About three hours of tech house, from November 26th, 2010. Click here for the blog post.

And finally, click here for general notes about the trip.