Flipped Bergs
We’re still in Pine Island Bay collecting data. The bathymetry map has been filled in so we know what the bottom looks like, and from all our sailing we have most of the surface sampled at one point in time or another. We’re slowly filling in the space between the surface and the bottom with CTD samples at regularly gridded locations. This will give us a 3D view of the bay.
You’ve seen the photo I posted earlier of the Minke whale. Yesterday morning there was a pod of 20 or so of them that spent a few hours within view of the ship. Not close enough for any good photos, but with a pair of binoculars you could see dozens of fins at a time and blowspouts all over the place.
Later in the day we sailed by a massive iceberg that had rolled over. If the image is attached to this post hopefully you can see it. We aren’t sure of the scale but we estimate the ridges at about 25 feet. That puts the berg at around 600 feet long or so. These things move slowly and often in circles and it might remain here for weeks if not months and years. If we sail by it again we can get our distance with the radar, and then use a sextant or shadows or even just a ruler and parallax to get accurate measurements. Or maybe a penguin will be sitting on it for scale. Then one could start to ask and answer all sorts of interesting questions about the bottom morphology, how bergs get stuck and eventually released, how they get scraped apart from below and how they in turn change the ground beneath them…
