Its a good idea to pick the right ship. After three accidents, Liz thought we could pick anyone and be okay. This was the Nat'l Geographic ship that was going to duplicate shackletons trip. It did almost; It sank a little further west and north of where shackleton sank. we navigated over the sunken ship for a moment of silence, etc....
Ahhh, "The Spirit of Shackleton"... http://www.abcnews.go.com/International/story?id=3905858&page= Who did you sail with? Orion? Corinthian?
A small line Azamara. Small ships can go into tighter places and turn on a dime (our just spun without forward or aft motion.) The explorer 2 had 215 passengers our ship had 500 about. my preferance is the research ships but Liz will not go abroad on that size (50 passengers) My fav which is a little larger is the FRAM. I would go anytime and we could do daily exchanges when moving from place to place (mostly done at night, though with ice pilots running the show)
As you see it; it is over 1500 feet thick with 1 /10 showing. In JAN the pieces we photographed that broke off were a mile on a side and showing over 200 feet above water By FEB the pieces were running 5 miles on a side In early MAR all hell broke loose. The shelves are setending over the water by moving faster and faster since there is better lubrication going down under them through vertical cracks. As the ice comes off the continent onto the salt water and forming a shelf it sort of floats. Some shelves went out over 100 miles but that is over now because of global warming. That is the MAR pic of the largest ever shelf breaking up. This is much bigger than glaciers coming to the coastal interface. The center of Antarctica and Greenland is a couple of miles thick. the Ice forms from snowfall and radiates from the center to the coasts. We took about 4500 pics and cruised about 5440 miles. We got to hang out (sail in the same water and science stations) with the ship (Nordnorge) who saved the Explorer 2 passengers. That shot is from a twin about 1000 feet up. That is a big scene. I have to redo each pic to get them to work on ET. Each shot was about 1.5megabits so I could crop and enlarge 500% to just get details.
A shot from 10th deck as we went down Iceberg alley which connects western antarctic ocean to the Ross Ice shelf. I met Admiral Bird in 1939 in Akron before WWII. He was interested in kids and getting them interested in exploration. He ran Little America in Antarctica. Because he was picking up tires and my dad was connected to Goodyear, I got to get in his aluminum vehicle and we shook habds, etc..... I did a lot of northern exploration, etc but I never worked in Antarctica. I used llamas about as far north as the Arctic circle; last month we put our last two llamas down. Liz is a real swetheart and goes the extra mile....so we get to go where we want and do what is possible. Ohh you can do the copy shortcut from bottom of edit using keep current attachment reference. I can learn to figure out this stuff maybe.
As you can see, there can be be an undesirable side effect (stretching) on browsers with large photos Wow...From the 10th deck... Massive! I imagine pics dont do it justice. Could you elaborate on the scale.... How big is the one in the pic? How close was the ship?
That is over 200 feet high and goes down in the water about 1800 feet. That guy is twice as long as the ship and we are about 75 feet away and doing the weaving and bobbing routine. They all leave wakes in the water as they move and the wind (there it was under 40mph) does not affect them. In that area you could see five deep from ship to shore and each one could be a mile on a side and sticking up over 200 feet. I took shear and torsion effects shots and everything else to understand the action. The grand canyon is zip compared to this stuff. It is like the whole earth's action is speeding up and everything has become unstable. For example, the seal and penguin roosting sites are moving 50 miles a year at this point. They do move about and they have to adapt to temp changes to keep things straight. But at one time they used fences and automatic weighing gates (the animals are banded with microchips) for several years. Now yearly change prevents this. The antarctic Strait (iceberg alley) research station has 28 buildiing (two stories) and to get to equal conditions nowadays takes a lot of travel. We always have an evening slide show in the offing simply because of the local interest in climate change, etc... Liz is softened up for Greenland, etc....but I will probably not sneak it in this Summer. Maybe trader's Expo could use some comic relief.
Awe inspiring to be sure... Time for me to read some stories to my daughter and brush our teeth before bed. Have a great night and Thanks again for sharing.
I have to ask: why do you paint the iceburgs? I'm sure you're not just another a cold weather graffiti artist. There must be a scientific or research reason for developing this. Iceberg tracking?