otherworldly

Although I don't know for sure, I have a hunch the science is
starting to get old for my audience. I'm going to take a short break
from it. Everyone begging to hear more about tracers is just going
to have to wait.

Today, we crossed back into the western hemisphere and it's friday
again. again, my schedule is such that the days of the week are
irrelevant. they also end up confusing me. a lot of the time on the
ship is GMT (greenwich __ time) and to convert from ship time (which
changes, but I think we're still on NZ time) to GMT back to the east
or west or any other coast is confusing, especially when we jump back
and forth between dates, much less days of the week.

yesterday (was it really yesterday if it's still friday?) there was a
conversation over dinner which I missed most of -- people were
talking about a crack in the ice shelf. The crack it turns out is an
area where the shelf appears to double back on itself, creating maybe
a half-mile wide channel with sheer faces on both sides. Right after
my shift and before dinner we took a right turn and followed the
"crack" to it's dead end 2-3 miles into the channel. Along the way
we passed orcas and penguins, and stopped at the ice edge where we
could see a small ice plateau extending into the distance of the
"crack". There were at least 2 groups of stark black Adelie penguins
on the pure white background. Even though the ice was rough and full
of boulder-sized chunks of ice, it was difficult to pick out anything
in the white-on-white on grey sky. Contrast is difficult to come by.
It felt like the end of the world, a porthole to a mythical place
(the chronic - what -- cles of Narnia?). Anyway we took a CTD cast
to see what the ocean looked like below. We were maybe 50 meters off
the ice, with walls made of ice pinning us in on 2 sides, and the
ocean floor was 630 meters below.

With all this otherwordly scenery, I don't want to miss anything by
sleeping. I missed out on a big event last night as I was trying to
get into my new schedule of 3 am to 3 pm watches -- as we were
travelling along the shelf, a large area of the shelf cracked, dove
down, and popped up as an iceberg. Although iceberg "calving" is
somewhat more common on temperate or sub-polar glaciers, it's
actually pretty rare to see chunks of significant size break off of
the ice shelf front like that. Disappointed to have missed it but
hoping there's more good stuff to come, I remain:

Chris