No. 4 - King George Island
The Cape Shirreff field camp is first class. The three buildings
are solid and well insulated; they survived their first winter in
good shape. There is a vast store of food and an abundance of
equipment, backups, fuel and water. And best of all, one can sit
on the front deck, when the wind isn't howling and the fog has
raised, and watch humpback whales gorge on krill in the bay. We
reluctantly left our colleagues, who had been there since
mid-November, and headed over to visit a couple of bays on the
south side of King George Island, or KGI as the locals sometimes
write.
If you can think of the large US Base McMurdo on the Ross Sea,
where more than 1000 people work, as industrial Antarctica, you
might consider KGI on the opposite side of the continent as its
cosmopolitan center. Our first stop is in Maxwell Bay to drop
off a Chilean colleague at his country's air base for a 5-hour
plane ride back home. Also arranged around the bay are Korean,
Uruguayan, Chinese and Russian bases (Russians being among the
first to scientifically explore this area just before the
revolution). We go to the next bay over, Admiralty Bay, where
The Poles, the Brazilians and the Argentines have bases. These
bases are staffed by less than 30 people, fewer in the winter,
and there is much collaboration among the KGI'ans. We drop off
provisions for a camp at the mouth of the bay and then move deep
inside to anchor in quiet water. We must calibrate our
instruments and prepare for a large-scale survey of the waters
surrounding these islands.
The beauty of the bay is inspiring. It's wide and T-shaped,
filled with floating rafts of bergy bits and smaller junks of
ice. We ease up into one of the arms of the T and catch a
glimpse of the Brazilian base at foot of a glacier that has
plunged a thousand feet. All around us are high mountains with
glaciers tumbling down the ravines between them. Below the ship
pass swarms of small krill - easy pickings for a humpback whale
off in the mist that seems to be feeding in ultra-slow motion.
Across from us is the Polish base, rusty and run-down on the
outside, a comfortable Nordic hunting lodge atmosphere on the
inside. Their supply ship is also anchored in the bay and they
appear to be closing up shop early for the season. The sun shows
its face periodically making fantastic reflections on the ice and
the water. We sit here until well after midnight, anxious to get
started on our survey but reluctant to leave such a place.
-Roger