An iceberg which looks almost metallic in The Grandidier Channel, Antarctica
As we approach the end of the year a beautiful reality is my return to Antarctica. Ice, Ice, Ice! I simply can’t get enough. So hard to describe it because the found beauty is as vast as the continent. I have witnessed ice in almost every color, shape, texture and light that one could ever imagine and yet there is always something new and never seen on each and every trip.
On the simplest level ice is simply water in its frozen or solid form. For most people the iconic iceberg is a towering white hunk of snow-covered ice, but icebergs come in myriad of hues and multicolor patterns, even resembling striped chocolate. Icebergs can be green, blue, yellow or black. The ice can shine like a sapphire or be as murky as frozen New York City ice on the side of the street.
An iceberg’s color is determined by how it interacts with light. As more and more heavy snow accumulates atop an iceberg, the air bubbles get compressed, forcing the smaller ice crystals to grow together and merge into larger grains. When the iceberg is underwater, the air bubbles are squeezed out and washed away. Then, when light encounters the dense, compressed ice, much of the light penetrates it. The ice absorbs longer wavelengths of colors, such as red and yellow. Colors of shorter wavelengths, like green and blue, reflect the light. This “leftover” blue-green light is what gives some icebergs their remarkable colors. Additionally, algae often grow on the underwater sides of icebergs, producing beautiful green stripes in the ice.
We were in the Grandidier Channel and off in the distant my iceberg radar triggered. I bolted to the bridge and asked the captain if he could swing in the direction of what looked like a giant metallic form in the distance. He just smiled but I could feel the ship making a small turn. As we got closer to the tabular beauty the more and more it looked like glistening metal and once again I witnessed something I had never seen before.
Not only is it fun to recall these memories and look forward to the next, ,but beautiful to bring them back tp life on my monitors staring and dreaming about doing all this again soon.
