All: The Expedition Begins

The time has finally come to say goodbye to land and begin heavily medicating ourselves against sea sickness. We've attached pictures of the ship and the room where we will all be bunking together. Due to previous experiences with E.B. having nausea and being on the top bunk, Whitney will be taking that bunk on this trip.



During the next two days we will be proceeding through a 400 mile crossing of the Drake passage. At some point tomorrow we will cross the Antarctic Convergence, a meeting of cold polar water flowing north and warmer equatorial water moving in the opposite direction. From everything we've read, this pleasant-sounding description gives absolutely no indication of how miserable this crossing can be. On a scale of 1-6, the last two crossings the ship has done have been rated as a 1. We are hoping for this as well. The worst crossing this season was a 6, in December.


Friday we will finally arrive at Antarctica. We will navigate southwards making stops in the South Shetland Islands then through the Bransfield Strait and to the Antarctic Peninsula. We will return Thursday, February 24. We will have limited internet access along the way but will do our best to update the blog daily. We won't post pictures en route but you will be amply rewarded after we get back. We won't be checking e-mail or Facebook on the seas so if there are any major personal crises that you need to communicate, please do so in our very public forum where our closest friends and acquaintances can read everything.

Basic facts about the continent:
The continent itself is roughly circular with a spindly arm, called the Antarctic Peninsula, reaching northwards towards Tierra del Fuego. South America is the nearest landmass, some 600 miles away. Considerably larger than either the United States or Europe, and twice the size of Australia, the continent is surrounded by a frozen sea that varies in area from one million square miles in summer to 7.3 million square miles in winter. Ninety-five percent of the continent of Antarctica is ice covered and contains the freshest water on earth - about 70 percent of all fresh water on earth in fact. The highest point in Antarctica is Vinson Massif, with an altitude of 16,864 feet above sea level; the lowest point is the Bentley Subglacial Trench at 8,200 feet below sea level, located in West Antarctica. Antarctica has the highest average elevation of all the continents at about 7,500 feet about sea level.

Antarctica is a continent of superlatives. It is the coldest, windiest, driest, iciest and highest of all the major landmasses in the world. It is the continent with the longest nights and the longest days and it is home to the world’s greatest concentration of wildlife. It is also one of the last true wilderness areas left on earth – largely unchanged since the early explorers and whalers first landed on its inhospitable shores less than two centuries ago. The lowest temperature ever recorded anywhere on earth, -89.2°C, was recorded on July 21, 1983, at Vostok Station. Winds have been recorded at 200 mph in the interior of the continent and the average annual water precipitation in the interior is only about 50 mm.