TRAVEL continued
with low profile sheets of ice known as pancake ice for as far as one could see and that would go on for hours on end as our vessel made its way from Norway to Greenland. It was
Argentina, the southernmost city in South America. A scientist on the trip studying the presence of microplastics and nanoplastics found them in one form or another every time
on the ice and on some islands where one might see polar bears, their foot- prints, or the evidence of their kills. In other locales, herds of walruses are sometimes encountered, although we struck out on my trip. That’s wilderness. Various seabirds trailed our boat many miles from land, thriving in settings that seemed overwhelming to me. Then there were towering icebergs, structures of greatly varying ages that calved from glaciers. Some were roughly the size of our 297-foot-long boat. Others were large enough to dwarf our ship many times over. The colors of the icebergs varied due to their age, where and how they were created, and by how heavy various layers were as the combination of age and weight can create veins of brilliant blue that high- light some “bergs” and mountainsides. Glaciers and icebergs are melting and shrinking. That is the reality of climate change. In Iceland, we hiked a glacier, a big tourist attraction for years. We are told it will be gone in 7 to 8 years. Not 700 or 7,000 or 7,000,000, but 7 short years. Greatly accelerated by our species, climate change is changing the natural beauty of seascape and landscape on a minute-by-minute basis. That
but one when he took a water sample. Human-made plastics are in so many products, and they are also in the food consumed by krill, whales, seals, fishes, seabirds etc. That’s on us! On my trips, we encountered more wildlife in Antarctica. Penguins – gen- toos, chinstraps, and Adelies – were al- most omnipresent. We also spotted a few emperor and king penguins. The various species display similar, yet differ- ent behaviors when chasing prey at breakneck speeds, courting, nesting, caring for their young, and socializing or quarreling amongst themselves, thus providing unending entertainment. Other seabirds ranging from tiny terns to colorful cormorants also commanded our attention. We witnessed pods of killer whales, humpback whales that were feeding and others that breached repeatedly. On the ice we saw a variety of seals with the highlights being several close passes with eagerly sought after leopard seals, impressive carnivores with a well- deserved reputation as a very capable predator. How This Might Involve You: Unless you are one of a relatively small handful of dive centers, it is unlikely that your
Filmmaker Trisha Stovel thinking about a shot in Norway.
A humpback whale breaching on a windy afternoon in Antarctica.
The textures and hues of icebergs are seemingly endless.
makes me feel ashamed. It is all too easy to blame others, but the reality is we are all connected to the issue in some way. On the trip to Antarctica, we traversed the legendary Drake Passage and were more than 600 miles from Ushuaia,
store will put a large enough group together to charter a full boat to either Arctic waters or the continent of Antarctic. Group sizes vary, but you need a big, seaworthy vessel, and that requires a lot of divers and/or snorkelers to make a trip
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