On The Road – arrieve – Antarctica Part 3

An iceberg, taken from the ship in the early morning.

By the time we were out in the zodiacs, the sun had come out.

An Antarctic cormorant nest with two fuzzy juveniles.

This bird is also called the blue-eyed shag, a more charming if less accurate name—their eyes are actually dark, with a blue eye ring.

Whalers called this bay “paradise” because of the many whales they found here, not because they found it particularly heavenly. Maybe they never looked up.

For a sense of scale in this picture, you can see some red buildings in the lower left. That’s Almirante Brown, an Argentine research station.

A closer look at Almirante Brown. I like the way the red jackets in the zodiac match the buildings.

Some kind of monitoring equipment near the station.

We saw half a dozen humpbacks blowing and rolling and diving in the bay. This picture captures the patterns on the whale’s flukes, which are as distinctive as fingerprints.

I had been to Paradise Bay in 2018 and I remembered seeing a glacier calving. This time we got an avalanche.

This is a picture from 2018. I had remembered that the glaciers around the bay were spectacular, really awe-inspiring.

What I saw in January was beautiful, but not on the scale I had remembered, so I went back to look at my pictures from 2018. Even assuming that we might have been in a different part of the bay when I took this picture—we did go ashore by Brown station, though we couldn’t go inside—I didn’t see anything like these glaciers this time.

I found some articles online confirming that there has indeed been significant melting/retreating of the glaciers in Paradise Bay. It’s still paradise, but the change is noticeable.

Another picture from 2018.