Team members say

My favorite aspect of Antarctica is that it forces me to confront the relationship between beauty and terror. We talk a lot about the beauty of the landscapes we’re passing through, but I haven’t heard many comments on how scary it all is. The landscape presents an insoluble existential puzzle. What possible place could I have here? It is undeniably beautiful, but it is not warm and fuzzy and welcoming; in fact it is the polar opposite of warm and fuzzy and welcoming. I remember Randy Newman singing about the city of Chicago in the U.S.: “That town is a little too tough for you and me, girl.” The continent doesn’t care if you survive or not. Unlike the urban or suburban environments, for example, where most people on the planet now live, comfort and safety have not been built-in. When I walk down Broadway in NYC, for example, every single thing within my line of sight is man-made with the exception of the sky. It is a thoroughly human environment, whereas Antarctica is without apology anti-human. Antarctica is automatically by Nick’s definition outside comfort zone. That can create anxiety, depression, despair, panic. If the Amazon rain forest is a carbon sink, then Antarctica is a fear sink. “Beauty is terror which declines to destroy us,” said Kierkegaard (and I’m probably misspelling his name and mis-quoting him). That could be the source of the heightened beauty of this place – a subconscious gratitude that it didn’t deign to kill us. There was something thrilling about staring out into that desolate valley behind the E-base – a Biblical valley of the shadow of death is what it felt like to me. I kept asking myself, where do I fit in? And looking into that valley the answer always came back, you don’t. There was some perverse satisfaction for me in that.

We’ve already encountered amazing wildlife – and that’s just the people on the ship. Poseidon god of the sea watched over us with a gentle crossing of some of the angriest waters on earth: the Drake Passage was truly the Drake Lake. If nausea doesn’t hit you (and I’ve been totally spared – eating lots of ginger) then the roll of ship can be enjoyable, sort of like a carnival funhouse. The albatrosses that follow us remind me of Colerige and also that line about some birds fly to live and others live to fly. Albatrosses definitely live to fly – or live to glide, as the case may be, since they are forever swooping wingtip to sea and catching updrafts off of the waves. Today (Monday) the first strong hints we are through the Drake and getting close to the continent: a magnicent pod of fin whales first off starboard then blowing and moving to sport off port. An hour later our first iceberg, a towering custard concoction, Buick-blue with hints of pinks and shroud-white where parts of the ice had calved off. The captain stopped the ship and then maneurvered carefully around it at about 100 meters. Ghostly, poking upward and disappearing into the low-ceilinged clouds, a Flying Dutchman of a berg. John from Akzo Nobel says this a contintent of superlatives and firsts, well, that was our first Antarctic iceberg, and I’ll hold it in my memory.