Paradise Bay, Antarctica lives up to its name
Lee NarrawayStudents on rock: Look closely, and you’ll see several members of the Students on Ice expedition at the summitOn our final outing yesterday, I ended up with a small group riding in a boat driven by Sonja Heinrich, touring the aptly named Paradise Bay. She’s a teaching fellow at Scotland’s University of St. Andrews, and the leader of its contingent of marine biology students, who have been (I hear) taking to the outer decks of the ship at obscenely early hours each morning to count wildlife. She introduced us to the animals we were cruising past, like the continent’s only land-based bird, the white, chicken-like sheathbill (which subsists, unglamourously, on guano and whatever else it can grab, earning it a variety of shit-themed nicknames). We idled in the ice-riddled bay — towering glaciers loom over it precariously, coming down from the peaks on all sides, and distant thunderings had us hoping to see some ice fall in. But with only a few falls of snow making their way down the mountains, and with dinner looming, we eventually headed out to see something more exciting, particularly for someone with Sonja’s interests: seals had been spotted a little further out.
It didn’t take long to find the group of four crabeater seals out basking their pale, torpedo-like bodies on an iceberg about the size of a small house (which qualifies it as a mere “bergy bit,” according to our group’s glaciologists). Sonja advised us to stay quiet: these seals were more skittish than other breeds we’d been encountering, liable to disappear if disturbed. As our Zodiac drifted up to the berg, however, another crabeater showed up in the water, nosing its way over to us. As it spent more time near the boat it became emboldened, sticking its head up right beside us, swooping around and under us, circling the iceberg only to suddenly pop up again on our other side. As it became clear the seal had decided to hang out with us, Sonja started taking out her hydrophone, an underwater microphone on a long cord, hoping to get a recording of its sounds. While we stood and craned our necks trying to get photos and video, she wore headphones, listening for seal vocalizations. (The only distinctive sound she could make out was what she thought might have been our buddy briefly nuzzling or mouthing at the mic.) Sonja was as shocked and thrilled by this encounter as the rest of us — she’d never seen a crabeater so curious.
Awesome events like this are fast becoming too numerous to list. Humpback whales have visited us repeatedly, baring those iconic, knobbly bodies right by our ship, and one reportedly passed quite close under a Zodiac. A leopard seal stalked, killed, and ate a penguin near one of our Zodiacs; possibly the same seal followed and frolicked around a boat I was riding in, raising its head up to our pontoons and finally exiting with a slap of the flipper that splashed us. It later brought one of our boats a fresh penguin. In the evening, just before a scheduled group meeting, we came across a huge iceberg far out in the water on which hundreds of penguins were standing together, for reasons unclear. One of our staff, the naturalist Olle Carlsson, who has been regaling us with ever-entertaining stories since the trip began, remarked, like Sonja, that he had never seen anything like it before. For my part, of course, that could be said of pretty much everything so far, but the other veterans concur. Students On Ice’s Alex Taylor, making about his twentieth visit to Antarctica, told me: “Something you might miss on your first time here is that you could come a hundred times and never see some of the things we’ve been seeing.” Even the weather has been glorious; I didn’t expect a string of bright sunny days when I found out I was coming down here.
Before our Paradise Bay cruise we’d hiked up to one of the nearby peaks. My cabinmate Jean-Francois Carrey, a professional guide and the youngest Canadian ever to climb Mt. Everest, probably did not have to draw on his expeditionary expertise too much in order to lead us on the brief, straight upward march. But once we’d reached the summit he showed a different kind of expertise. “Let’s just have five minutes of silence,” he requested. “No beeps” — the compulsive photographing had to pause too. We sat and soaked in the magnificent view of the bay and the mountains. Our ship’s engine was rumbling in the distance; a pair of sheathbills were angrily sending off a circling skua; a couple of glaciers let out muffled “boom”s in their inexorable journey downward. The more we were silent, still, and out from behind our cameras, the more I liked it that way.
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