reflections, pt. 3, Antarctica

hi everyone, and thanks for the email to those who've sent it over
the past few days! I'm still looking good on the quota front so if
you're thinking of writing, the next few days are your last chance to
write to my nbp address. it leaves me when i leave P.A.

we've made a lot of progress given the great weather which we've
experienced on our travels through the southern ocean. at some deep
dark level i'm a little disappointed in the calmness of this transit.
In part because it may be my only time to experience this, and
because i built up the drake passage to those who I've talked to.
Unless something sneaks up on us though, i'll only have stories of
gentle swells to relay.

We have seen our share of albatross -- is that plural? -- since we
left the coast. They'll follow us for hours, just out of range of my
camera.

Like the albatross, Antarctica can not be done justice with photos.
The best pictures from the trip are of the smaller things, penguins,
snowflakes, etc, taken from up close.

The icebergs, ice shelves, ocean, fields of sea ice, etc. are too big to convey (at least in a
picture taken by me). Not that this will stop me from showing you
hundreds of pictures of icebergs. But I can already sense the
impatience.

Icebergs may still look cool, but what really gets to me -- their
size -- is minimized when it's taken out of context. And the problem
is that even if the scale of the icebergs is adequately captured,
their smallness relative to everything else is left out. The bergs,
even the biggest ones, are just a tiny piece of an ice shelf, which
is a tiny piece of a glacier which comprises a tiny fraction of the
ice sheet. Which, even though it has enough water in it to raise sea
level by 60 or so meters, is just a tiny fraction of the water that
is in the ocean already. I don't know how to take a picture that
will be able to put that in context. Following the coast for a 3000
kilometers or so only gave us a window into the bigness and iciness
of it (and science-wise, hinted at more questions than answers).

So it might be better that I haven't been able to post pictures of
the trip. I've tried to convey some of this with words instead -- I
hope that the fact that it's taken a month and a half to get the
snapshot that I've had impresses some idea of the scale. Everything
we've done and I've written about on the cruise -- the planning, the
traveling, the watches -- has been in an effort to understand a
little more about a small part of this place.

Anyway, we're moving away from Antarctica now at 10-11 knots, hoping
that we managed to collect the right information while the window was
open. We're just about to cross 57S, within Chile's 200 mile limit.
I've finished (i think) the cruise report. We watched Dodgeball and
Rounders last night, Wonder Boys tonight; tomorrow, ping-pong will
interrupt the movie marathon.

two days out from P.A, I remain,

Chris