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.