Forty-foot swells washed over the bow of the ship as it bobbed like a bath toy in the foamy, wind-whipped ocean. A Leviathanine force 11 storm was tormenting the Polar Pioneer’s passage across the Drake, and the passengers nested in cabins beneath its iron hulls woke up to find themselves levitating, their belongings thrown across the room, and their center of gravity off its axis, hurling whatever they had undigested in their stomachs back the route it came down, hopefully landing in a nearby waxed paper bag.
You would not be experiencing the full Antarctica if you didn’t imagine yourself to be feeling a fraction of what Antarctic explorer Sir Ernest Shackleton and his crew suffered aboard the Endurance in 1915, when it succumbed to gale winds and was crushed by pack ice. The Drake Passage, a two-day voyage from the calm and protected Beagle Channel in Ushuaia, Argentina to the South Shetland Islands of Antarctica, is an infamous rite of passage, or rather pukage — the hallways of the Polar Pioneer were ominously decked with barf bags once the ship hit open water. Even the hardiest of sea dogs have not faced the Drake Passage, in all its violent glory, without turning a bit green — at least that’s what I told myself after being curled up in bed for two days, subsisting on apples and helplessly watching them get regurgitated as baby food.
Thankfully, the Polar Pioneer was a hardy Russian icebreaker — that is, a ship specifically designed to navigate through ice-covered waters by propelling itself onto the ice, breaking it, and clearing the debris around the vessel. We sluiced through the storm safely and without incident. The luxury cruise ship Clelia II which made the YouTube rounds last December, though more comfortably appointed, wasn’t so lucky — its engine, windows and ship communications were knocked out by a ferocious Drake wave and had to be aided by a passing National Geographic ship.
Pico Iyer, quoting George Santayana in his seminal travel essay “Why We Travel,” writes, “We need sometimes to escape into open solitudes, into aimlessness, into the moral holiday of running some pure hazard, in order to sharpen the edge of life, to taste hardship, and to be compelled to work desperately for a moment at no matter what.” He reminds us of the connection between “travel” and “travail,” which is also “work” in French. A destination is ever more rewarding after a difficult journey; a holiday makes it worth one’s time when it is earned. When we barreled across the Antarctic Circle at 66º 33’S, leaving the worst of the Drake in our wake, it truly felt like an achievement.
Emerging squinty-eyed into the gray daylight misted over by not-quite snow, I breathed in the cool polar air of this wild, final frontier and could finally say, “Antarctica smells like penguin poop?”
The first landing on Aitcho Island brought a pungent blast, which would embed itself in our nostrils and layers of North Face apparel for the coming days. One important detail the film Happy Feet tap-danced around was the fact that with colonies of penguins come an almost incessant streaming of excreted krill. The rock-mud-snow-ice-algae-fecal mixture would vary from island to island, but it gave Antarctica a colorful Daliesque topography that put to rest notions of the frozen continent being a pristinely white place.
We met our first bunch of gentoo penguins, a scruffy mob with large molting chicks demanding a meal of upchucked krill from their parents. Meanwhile the soldier-like chinstrap penguins stood indifferently further up the hill. Adhering to the five-meter rule was difficult as penguins waddled awkwardly here and there, painstakingly building nests by moving a pebble from one pile of rocks to another with their beaks. Other islands had settlements of Adelie penguins, honking throatily or nervously getting ready for a dip in the ocean. The Adelies have been in decline over the past 25 years as a result of climate change and the reduction of sea ice, where they need to live.
The grislier side of nature was also on display. At Yalour Island, a trail of penguin corpses lay frozen on the pink ice. These abandoned chicks were the unfortunate victims of skua savagery. The brown bird is the penguin’s natural enemy, but if you followed one back to its nest, you’d see that skuas are mothers with hungry children too. A few leopard seals, Antarctica’s top predator, were chilling on ice floes, but when in hunting mode, no penguin is considered safe from these powerful swimmers with jaws that open almost 180 degrees. A penguin caught in its maws would be mercilessly thrashed around before finally being ripped to shreds.
After days of inclement weather, the sun finally broke through and revealed the true beauty of Antarctica in all its icy majesty. With polarized sunglasses on, we took leisurely cruises on zodiacs through sculpted iceberg wonderlands, crunching over the brash ice that covered the water and reflected sharply cold tones of blues and greens. Falling silent, in awe of the surreal splendor before our eyes, we could hear every little sound the ice made, bubbling, cracking, expanding, shifting. These waters were ancient. I put a sliver of thousand-year-old glacier ice in my mouth and felt time dissolve.
One of the most unforgettable sounds you will hear is the crashing of an ice shelf. The icebergs and glaciers are in constant flux, melting as they do in the summer. A particularly precarious ice formation might suddenly electrify the air with a rumbling noise before smashing into the water. The continent is rearranging itself, becoming more liquid, releasing new energy and life. During winter, all of this freezes over, and Antarctica is doubled in size.
There are so many terms for ice, and as many reasons for forming the way they do, but they’re all an important part of the polar ecosystem. It’s alarming that the Arctic region’s glaciers are steadily retreating due to global warming, threatening the lives of polar bears and more. Antarctica has so far been less affected, but temperature increases have been observed over the past few decades. With a shorter winter for sea ice coverage, the all-important krill loses valuable spawning and feeding areas. Antarctica may be a distant and difficult place to get to, an unearthly wilderness most people will never witness, but its fate remains indivisibly linked to the rest of us, through the cold currents that flow and nourish the world’s oceans.