The other kind of ICE

There's a big winter storm headed our way this weekend and, assuming it doesn't change course, we are supposed to get at least a foot of snow on Sunday. I'm old enough to remember when that happened multiple times every winter, and also old enough to be grateful that I don't have to be anywhere until Tuesday. (The ice in the picture was in Cierva Cove, last January.)

Sunday bird blogging

Since we've been revisiting Cierva Cove, here are some more of its resident gentoos, just enjoying their penguiny lives.

Leaving Cierva Cove

Bringing the kayaks back to the ship as we prepared to set sail.

It's several hours till midnight, but I can already hear the helicopters flying over Times Square a few blocks away. I usually manage to sleep through the cheers greeting the ball drop and hope to do it again.

I think I speak for many people when I say that 2025 sucked in so many ways that I'll be very glad to see it in the rear view mirror. But it helps to remember that it wasn't all terrible, that I saw so much beauty along the way.

Two views

Some amazing blues and greens. I couldn't decide which view I liked better, close up or more perspective (with more ice) so I'm posting both.

And still more color

I'm guessing the green here is lichen, rather than iron in the glacier water, but I could most definitely be wrong.

And more color

I have no idea what made this ice look this way (iron oxides are supposed to give glaciers and icebergs a greenish cast, so maybe?) But it's beautiful.

And a little color

Those deep blues always look tropical to me, but that's marine ice, which forms underneath ice shelves and is highly compressed, so nothing remotely tropical about it. That color comes from the way the light refracts on the dense ice.

The big(ger) picture

All of this zeroing in on the wildlife was of course taking place surrounded by towering mountains and huge icebergs. Sometimes I had to force myself to quit watching the penguins and just look around me.

I am fairly confident I did notice the whale

But if you look closely, there is another porpoising penguin in the background.

Another OMG I missed this!

I had previously posted a video showing one of the gentoos flying out of the water and landing on the rocks. (You get some idea of how crazy fast they can move through the water by the amount of momentum they have when they're leaving it.)

This picture captures two penguins in midair, about to land. I missed it at first—oh look, more penguins—but the water trail caught my eye and I realized what I was looking at.

And some gentoos too

I've already posted many pictures of the mobs of gentoos along the shoreline in Cierva Cove, but this pair were hanging out by themselves on an ice floe.

This landscape of unbroken ice and snow is more like what most people imagine Antarctica looks like, but there's really less snow than you'd think in the summer (and less every year.)

And still more chinstraps

There weren't as many chinstraps as there were gentoos in Cierva Cove, and we didn't get as close to them. This picture brings it all back, and I love the wild water with the bergy bits floating in it.

More chinstraps

Bonus bird blogging

Cierva Cove was the only place I saw chinstrap penguins in Antarctica on this trip (there was one in South Georgia).

Sunday bird blogging

I planned to start going through some of my photo backlog this week, and I was going to start with South Dakota. But it's Sunday, and time for some birds, and I was sure I had plenty of penguin pictures I'd never posted, so I went to the Antarctica folders instead.

And found more than 100 photos I'd never even processed from Cierva Cove alone. Many of them, it's true, were ignored for good reason, but there are some gems there as well. Such as these rather mundane icebergs, which turned out to have a gentoo porpoising in the background.

King iceberg from the zodiac

Another look at the ice cathedral (to be honest, I thought of it more as the ice parking garage or the ice train tunnel) from sea level.

King of the icebergs

This was definitely the largest, if not the most spectacular, iceberg we saw, in Cierva Cove.

We circled it, from a safe distance, in a zodiac. Later, when we were all back on the ship, the captain made an announcement (the only time during the trip we heard from him, except for a brief speech at the farewell dinner) that we would be passing a large iceberg on the port side and photographers might want to be ready.

So we were. As usual, you can't really judge the scale by a picture, but it was taller than our ship.

Hola? Hola? Is this thing on?

It's almost one am in Santiago, and I'm not going to attempt to say a lot tonight.

I'm back, after what turned out to be an eleven day trip rather than ten -- a snowstorm kept us grounded yesterday when we were supposed to be flying back to Punta Arenas. I'm tired, because it's late, but I'm also experiencing major culture shock. I left Santiago less than two weeks ago, but it feels so much longer. So much happened. I saw so much.

It was wonderful in every way. The beauty was almost literally unbelievable. We drifted past icebergs under snow-capped mountains and steely skies. The tour operators were superb. And the fact that there was no Internet was a plus, even apart from the obvious benefits of no work email. We were isolated, and that was a good thing. The ship was our community as we shared the experience, and there wasn't anything to distract us from it.

Much much more to follow.

But to end on a less philosophical note, here are some penguins.