30.01.2013 - A blue iceberg in a soup of snowballs

30.01.2013 (Wednesday). Again a foggy day into the ice. Again the ice is shaking the ship.Early in the afternoon, there is ice everywhere around us. Everything is white. This is a harsh world: a world of ice. I go outside. It is cold and windy. White landscape all around me. Big plates of ice interconnected by a magma of fluid or pasty ice. The whole is slowly moving, slowly undulating under the wind or internal waves. I really have the feeling that the Polarstern is riding the back of a gigantic ice-scaled sea monster. I take some videos to record the feeling. 

 World of ice

Soon after that I came back into my cabin, Marc told me that we are leaving the ice. I look again by the window. I see a galaxy of half-molten snowballs swimming into a wavy sea. I have to photograph this. So I run outside. To starboard, I see a very beautiful iceberg, elegantly striated by straight oblique lines, and partly tinged with blue. A small group of pinguins are resting on this drifting island. Just in front of the iceberg, there is an abrupt frontier separating the soup of snowballs and the real open sea. The snowballs are fast behind us. I go aft, to the helideck, where I am rejoined by Bruno David, Chantal De Ridder and Phipippe Dubois. Our eyes follow the blue iceberg drifting away. Sometimes huge waves explodes on its right side in a plume of foam. Just after that, we see whales blowing far away. And then a group of pinguins came close to the ship, swimming and jumping out of the sea, just like dolphins. Then it becomes too cold for me, and go back inside, as the Polarstern continue her journey towards Elephant Island.  

A blue iceberg in a soup of snowballs. 

A very pretty iceberg.

Wave exploding on the blue iceberg.

Cape petrels.

Cape Petrel, ventral view.

Jumping pinguins.

In the evening, we start to identify the samples from the dredge and the Agassiz trawl. Since we have not much material and a lot of time due to the krill survey, we will try to identify this material as carefully as possible. We manage to work efficiently, despite the ship is moving more and more under the swell. As concerns the material, which we will collect during the second part of the cruise, we will get a lot of samples in a very short period of time and we will probably have very little time for identifying specimens.

After 22:00, I go to the fitness room. I am biking in facing the swimming pool. It is stormy outside ...and inside. A huge wave rythmically goes from one side of the swimming pool to the other, roaring like thunder. The system is well conceived because the water is really confined within the pool system and there is no inundation resulting from the wavy condition. In our cabin the beds are superposed and I am on the upper bed. We have belts in the beds for stormy conditions and I consider that this night it is safer to put them on.

(Cédric)

After lunch, I’m heading outside. I love when we go through ice, you never get tired of watching the ice-breaking of the ship, the slow up-and-down movement of the ice-plates above the remaining waves and the crab-eater seals or colonies of small funny penguins resting on them. There’s always something to see. One could think it’s always the same story, it’s just water and ice everywhere, all the time. But somehow, it manages to be always different: the shapes, the lights, the movements. I’m going to the bridge after some time outside. Some people are already there, watching with the binoculars, taking pictures. It was the right time to come: soon the complete ice-covering is replaced by a layer of crushed ice interspersed by small remaining ice blocks. This thin layer of very small ice fragments makes the surface of the ocean very shiny and with the blue sky and sunny weather, it gives a summertime feeling, despite the cold temperatures.  From afar, we can see a very big iceberg, getting closer and closer as we´re approaching open-water. Soon, we can see that this ice-monster is covered by small dots : a big colony of penguins . With the binoculars, I can see them clearly, moving around, swimming in the water nearby, sometimes jumping out to get on the iceberg and sometimes missing it and slipping back into the water. At the top of the iceberg, a cloud of birds are flying around. A lot of life on this bare floating island. The boundary between the ice and open-water is really abrupt, there is a clear line marking the limit of the frozen world. This view was really spectacular, all the elements were there to build an amazing atmosphere. It is so far the most beautiful landscape I had the chance to admire during this cruise, and probably of my entire life. But the adventure´s not over yet! 

We keep busy trying to identify the small amphipods that we catched during the last samplings. We didn´t have the time to look at that, so put everything together is the same jar. It´s usually the case, when we´re sampling everything has to be done fast, so we identify first the bigger animals. If we really have to rush it´s at the family level and genus-species level only for the best known-most common ones. Now we can sit down and watch those tiny little crustaceans under the stereomicroscope and look in the literature to identify them as precisely as we can, and it´s very formative for me. 

(Marie)