Sea and ice

There is so much ice. We see a tiny part of what presents itself to the sea at the northern tip of a peninsular tongue sticking out from a giant continent, itself covered with hundreds of thousands of cubic miles of ice, ice, baby. Looking at it is like having a white crystalline clamp on your head that squeezes you just hard enough so you almost, but not quite, imagine how much ice there really is. Every mountain is spilling ice into the sea from every possible place. These walls of glacier or just ice are 50 or 100 or more meters tall. There is an infinite variety of ice in the sea itself. Giant iceberg blocks, tall and squarish. Sometimes hundreds of meters across. Irregular pieces bobbing and on the move. In some places, there are only huge pieces. In many places, there are tens of thousands of pieces, from baseball sized up to 30 meters across. Most are white, some are an ethereal blue – especially on the bottom and in the sea. A few are completely transparent, even black-looking, and these ones tend to have a scalloped texture for reasons I can’t guess at. Even though I’ve seen countless thousands of pieces of ice, every new one that swims into view makes me want to look it over. At Akademi Vernadsky station, the ice flowed together into a slushy commonwealth of sea ice, lumpy and mushy and chunky. When the sea is swelling, the ice moves together in slow waves, giving you the disorienting impression of being in a white earthquake. Some ice has multiple snow falls as cover, others are scoured clean and sharp. Occasionally, a berg will have penguins on it, or tracks of penguins. Very rarely, a seal sits on one.