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By Antarctic standards we lucked out when it came to weather. For more than two weeks, we've seen almost entirely blue skies and sunshine. Our lips are peeling, our faces sun-browned.
Typically here, no matter the season, you get that kind of day once or twice a week, but our blue-sky days have been lining up one after the other. According to the weather report, which we download every morning by satellite, northerly winds are on the way almost guaranteeing gray, wet skies. With that knowledge, we luxuriate on our private ice floe as long as possible.
Standing on its edge with powerful binoculars, careful not to stray too close to the floe's fragile edge, all I can see for 2 miles is ice piled upon ice. The floating ice abuts fast ice -- still frozen in one sheet to land -- which runs up to the edge of tall, blue glaciers, which have slid down from the tops of mountain peaks.
While the sights are nearly impossible to describe, so are the sounds of Antarctica. In the sea to my right on an amazingly warm (45 degree) day, a small chunk of clear ice crackles. It is the sound of ice melting in the sun, which may be the most common sound heard along the peninsula this year and in those to come if scientists studying here are correct in their predictions that global climate change is coming first to Antarctica.
In such a remote, quiet place it's easy to stop and tune in to the sounds that surround you. Melting ice is just one. The lightning crack of glaciers caving is the second most heard -- and most frightening, since it is often followed by big waves emanating from wherever the falling ice has landed.
The squawk of penguins is everywhere in the air, parents imprinting their bleating voices on chicks since soon they will not be able to pick them out of a crowd of 10,000 by sight, only by sound. The breathing of humpback whales as they surface is most often heard long before you spy them breaking the surface.
But the almost ever-present sound of Antarctica is the wind blowing down off the continent, onto the glaciers and then over the sea, a constant reminder of the most powerful element down south.
Jon Bowermaster is an adventure writer based in Stong Ridge, N.Y. Click here for his Web site.
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