Ashby's dream of flying

Flying above a glacier is an experience I never dreamt would happen to me. And then it did.

As the heli was catapulting itself closer and closer to the massive sheet of ice I could see with
intense clarity the features of HPS 31.

It's mouth was opening into the near frozen sea in the form of a cave the color of blue azur.

She must have been at least 60 meters high and equally deep. From the depths of this blue
abyss came raging water heading straight into the fiord from a source unclear.

It was coming to dusk and the heli was hovering at the entrance while shining lights inside to better
illuminate the intenisity of the blue.

Reflections of the strikingly smooth interior were contrasting completely to the starkly white irregular
ice shelves surrounding the cave. From here we flew up the continuing glacier which was
varying dramatically in and out of pure white ice mounds
and deep unending blue crevasses.

Frozen Thunder

No, it is not the name of a new action movie! It is the sound of the
glacier. When you spend a little time around glaciers, you start to have a
feeling that they are alive. You can look at the mass of ice, turn away
from it and when you look back again it will be completely changed. This is
because of the glaciers amazing way of reflecting and absorbing light. A
tiny little cloud makes a huge difference.

José Pera, our on board mountaineer, has also walked on the ice at night and describes it like this:
Sleeping on a glacier is great; the sound of the wind is
special. If you walk on the glacier during full moon nights you have the
impression that you are walking on the surface of the moon. The blue colour
of the ice disappears at night. It is beautiful and isolated at the same
time. It's a weird feeling. You walk on top of a cold surface with metal
nails on your feet to avoid slipping, and make a chipping sound every time
you take a step.

The glacier sounds like rolling thunder when a
piece breaks off and falls into the water. I've seen icebergs roll around
like big whales. This happens when the iceberg melts more on one side, or
looses a part: rolls to regain its stability. It is a humbling experience,
especially if you are sitting in a boat of the smaller kind!

Today we visited the San Rafael glacier, one of the highest glaciers of the Northern Patagonian Icefield.
The San Rafael retreats about 70 meters every year. A local company that brings tourists to the glacier have started painting
numbers on the mountain wall by the front. These numbers mark the years,
and show how much the ice have retreated. They started doing this in the
seventies. The glacier is now very far from where it was in 1976.

Dancing ship

Had to stay away from the laptop today, fearing I would do something
terrible all over the keyboard. It is still rocking and rolling, so this
update is just to tell you we are still here.

We have left the fjords and are now crossing Golfo de Penas, heading
further north. There is not much sea, but the Arctic Sunrise loves to
dance. We don't have much option but to dance with her, with various results.

Today I learned the hard way that you have to wait for the right moment
when you open the fridge in the mess, find what you want and close it again
quickly. There is food in there just waiting to attack when the ship rolls
towards starboard side. We've made sure everything is secured. Well...
almost. Lying in my bunk feeling poorly, I could hear smaller objects such
as cups crash and fall, but also laughter from crew members stumbling into
each other. The cooks have done a brave job cooking with their pots and
pans flying around. Unfortunately some of us were incapable of having lunch.

Now and then we get a call from the bridge: "dolphins at the bow" or
"whales on starboard side". Of course you hurry outside, seasick or not!

Magellan Strait to HPS31

25th of January - here we are

Ice around the ship, woke up by the sound of the bow thrusters. As you can see it is a rainy day, hope it improves so that the visibility gets better. Talk to you soon, have to get my gear sorted.

Yesterday we left Punta Arenas. We had all been set to go for quite some time, and there was that little excitement in the air that you experience when leaving port. It was not all happiness though; we were very sad to leave the local Greenpeace team of Punta Arenas, a bunch of wonderful people that made our stay a nice experience.

Dolphins came and played around the bow as we sailed. I tried to take a couple of pictures of them to post for you, but all I got was some UFO like appearance in blurry waves.

We are now going through the Magellan Strait, which Cecilia has written a bit more about here below. Tomorrow we arrive to the glacier HPS 31. We are not really sure what to expect: will it be easy to reach? What will the weather be like? Will it have changed a lot since Jorge Quinteros was here 50 years ago?

I might be camping on the glacier for a couple of days, will back and tell you all about it. Hope this gets posted, sending updates via email from here on, and have no idea of what it looks like from your end.

--- Posted by Iréne

The Magellan Strait

Punta Arenas is the heart of the Magellan Strait. Looking from the sky, the Strait looks like a stretched and snaked where bays, fiords and coves are born. The Strait is about 600 kilometres long and its waters are a mixture of two oceans, the Pacific and the Atlantic. In a golden misfortune of winds and storms, in October 1520, Portuguese seafarer Hernando de Magellanes was the first European to sail the Strait. Later on, historians would call it Magellan Strait in his honour.

The city of Punta Arenas is the principal port of the Strait and main gate to Antarctic waters and ices. On board of Greenpeace ship ‘Arctic Sunrise’ we started to sail yesterday evening. The southern sunset was a spectacle of shapes and colours while we were leaving the port. It’s now summer time, where the nights grow longer with an ineffable dusk until midnight. The sea was calm, the wind soft and we couldn’t avoid being fascinated by the company of three dolphins who were playing and swimming fast under the bow.

This is how we started our trip to the Patagonia glaciers region. Chile has 75% of South America glaciers. The majority of them are retreating.  This phenomenon is a consequence of global warming and rains decreasing. Our purpose during this trip will be to document the retreat of the Patagonian glaciers. We are now sailing to the north channels and fiords.

Twenty thousand years ago this region was covered by ice. Nowadays,  the principal vestiges are the great South Patagonian Ice-Fields. The zone, without considering the Antarctica, represents the main reserve of fresh water of South America and it is characterized by a unique beauty throughout its 13,000 km2. The retrocession of ice during the last glacier era drew the Magellan Strait geographically, excavating the base and creating all the system of valleys, fiords and channels which identify the region. An irregular topography characterized by mountains covered with snow and ice mass that often fall directly into the sea.

This is the last part of our tour, and maybe the most important one. We are sailing towards the Fiord Peel to find the glacier HPS 31.

---Posted by Cecilia

Preparing the expedition to HPS31

Jorge Quinteros and José Pera are gearing up for the glacier expedition to the North Patagonian icefield. Quinteros crossed the ice 50 years ago. José, whom we met on the Perito Moreno glacier in Argentina, is an experienced glacier climber and guide. His dream is to follow in Quinteros footsteps and cross the glacier. Yesterday evening they set up tents in the hold of the ship to check that everything was in order. There are also crampons, ropes, harnesses and a million other things I hardly know what they are for.

Daniel Antunes geologist from the Chilean Ministry of Agriculture is also joining the ship to do GPS (Global Positioning system) measurements on the ice. Space based and aerial measurements are also done, but field measurements are required for more precise scientific positioning.

Jorge Quinteros spend 5 months in the area in 1954-55, and went across the icefield from the area with the very romantic name HPS31 to the Perito Moreno in Argentina. It took him and his companions Tilman and Marriot about 1,5 months, there and back. They stayed only for one hour at the Perito Moreno glacier before heading back, since they were afraid that the ship would leave without them on the other side. The worst part was sailing back to Valparaiso: they crashed into an iceberg and lost a propeller, and the sails were also lost. They experienced heavy storms and it was necessary to pump water out of the ship all the time. Fishermen saved them after about 15 days at sea.

Punta Arenas, aboard the MV Arctic Sunrise

Today I woke up aboard the MV Arctic Sunrise that we joined yesterday here in Punta Arenas, Chile. I can see Tierra del Fuego through the porthole of our cabin.

When we arrived there was a very long line of people on the quayside. After a while I realised they were all waiting to get onboard our ship! The port authorities say that about 2000 people visited the ship during the five hours we were open.

We are stuck here a couple of days waiting for some spare parts. This is an opportunity for me to edit all the material I’ve collected so far, and also to update this diary that has been sadly neglected.

It has been a busy couple of weeks in Patagonia. Yesterday feels like a week ago: so many new impressions! Two days ago we stayed at the Estancia Christina (estancia is a farm or a ranch), close to the Upsala glacier in Argentina. The only way to get there is by boat or horse.

Tourists arrive every day to see the glacier, but at large the estancia has not changed much since the first people came here in 1914. Pablo, one of the guides, said: “the estancia has not changed, but the glacier did”. Pablo has only worked here for two years, but he has already noticed how glacial retreat, how the distance from the ranch to the glacier increased.

Perito Moreno, Argentina

Yesterday we arrived in the Argentinean part of Patagonia, to the small town of Calafate.

Today we visited the glacier of Perito Moreno, the only glacier in the area that is not melting. It is also the most famous and visited glacier in Argentina. This might be due to the fact that the Argentinean president is from Calafate, and he often brings his visitors to the icefield. Calafate has more than doubled its inhabitants during the last ten years.

Equipped with crampons we started the glacier walk, led by glacier guide José Pera. He believes that the fact that the glacier is not melting is because the accumulation area (the area where the glacier builds up, where it snows 300 days a year) is very big, in relation to the melting area.

Visible impact

We’ve now spent a little more than a week here in both the Chilean and Argentinean part of Patagonia. Most days we’ve been up early and come back late in the evening. We’ve visited glaciers and talked to people living and working in the area. This is one of the most beautiful places I’ve ever seen, but it has also made me very sad: climate change is no longer something abstract – the impacts of climate change are very real. The glaciers are melting at an accelerating speed and changes can bee seen from year to year.

Wearing a sponge

We set off in the morning, down the Serrano River. The sky was grey and the rain felt like little needles on our faces. The mountaintops were hidden in the clouds. The boat driver gave us thick waterproof clothes to wear. They were great. For about ten minutes. We were travelling through one of the most beautiful landscapes I’ve ever seen, so I didn’t really mind being a bit cold and wet.

We eventually arrived at a part of the glacier that looked majestic up on the mountain. One of the boat drivers told me that 15-20 years ago it reached all the way down to the lake. His comment made me very sad: that little piece of land has been covered by ice for thousands of years, and in only a few years it melted away. Why do I have to be part of the generation that will see it happen?

I remembered how a teacher in school illustrated the history of our planet by unfurling a roll of toilet paper and attach it on the classroom walls. Then he marked the different eras on it. At the very end, hardly visible, there was a very small field, more like a line, that marked how long mankind has been around. Changes on our planet normally happen very slowly. During the last hundred years changes have all of a sudden happened so fast: Temperatures and sea levels rising, draughts, floods and melting icefields - we are actually changing the climate! Just think about it for a little while.

Walking back

The boat that was supposed to take us back across Lake Grey couldn’t come due to the strong wind; the lake was a bit too choppy. We therefore set off on a three hour hike to a place where we could take a catamaran back. The sun was shining from a clear blue sky, and I was happy to do this beautiful walk instead of catching a boat straight away. We only brought the most necessary things in our smaller backpacks: the photographers took their camera equipment and I brought my laptop and the sound equipment (and my toothbrush!). We left the rest of our luggage in the camp, hoping it will arrive on the boat tomorrow afternoon.

Half way we stopped for a break, and as you can see Ricardo tried his wings! Luckily the wind was helpful and went in the same direction as we did.