Daily Image - Sep 2018 Archive

All the Daily Image mailings for the month of Sep 2018

26 Sep 18 Let's pick up - sorta - from where we left off yesterday. Today we are looking down on a group of colonies of Adele Penguins, home to the birds if you will; perhaps where those guys were heading yesterday. I need to describe some of what you are seeing. The light tan irregular "circle-like" shapes are guano and the black specks are the penguins standing on top of it. Each of these colonies is comprised of from 50 to several hundred individuals. We choppered out to this research site but stayed far away from the birds and the researchers so as not to interfere with either. The researchers are shuttled to these sites by chopper in late September / early October and left there for the duration of the summer research season and then picked up again at the end of the season. Should they run short of necessities or should some kind of emergency occur the choppers provide the needed support. If you are smart you are not on the flight returning them to McMurdo after several months of no showers working with the critters. Even from the top of the hill from where I shot the photo you could easily smell the colonies!!!! The blue area at the top and left of the frame is the ice edge (McMurdo Sound) and the curvy white area a frozen river that hadn't yet completely thawed at the time I took the shot. You obviously can't count the individual birds, but there are several thousand in the photo. There is in excess of 30 colonies in this single frame. One thing you can count on, there is no shortage of Adeles in this part of Antarctica! The photo isn't as "clean" as I'd wish but it, like the others, is a scan from a 35mm slide. This is the full frame of the original 35mm slide. Count'm Nikon F2As; 135mm; ISO 100; likely 1/125 @ f /11. As it was quite windy I likely should have tried for less dof and a faster shutter. Oh for digital back then!!!!
27 Sep 18 A mainland Antarctic adventure in cold all starts with the National Science Foundation (NSF) which in one way or another is, or at least was, back during the Operation Deep Freeze program, in charge of it all. For me as a military member assigned to VXE-6, the Antarctic Support Squadron, it began in Pt Mugu where I was stationed. If you were a part of the initial wave that went to the ice you flew in a KC-130 from the base to Christ Church, New Zealand and then from there to McMurdo Island in the McMurdo Sound to spend the summer months in the community on McMurdo Island colloquially named Mactown. If you were not in the first wave you flew commercially from LAX to Australia, then took a hop to Christ Church, and then flew via KC-130 to McMurdo. For the duration of your time on the ice you would live in Mactown. You are looking at same today. Isolated as we were Mactown provided just about everything you could desire, so long as your desires were modest, quite modest. But there was plenty to do and photograph and I spent most of my free time (between the hours of 1600 - 0730 the day following) wandering around the island. There wasn't much I didn't see or do and that which I didn't was limited only by not being in the right place at the right time. One of the fun things to do was to climb the 1000 foot high mound of rock in camp named Observation Hill, but more commonly called Ob Hill. From the summit you could see for quite a distance as you will note from the photo including ALL of Mactown at once, a goodly amount of McMurdo Sound, and the frequently steaming Mt Erebus, an active volcano located on Ross Island not far from Mactown. When you first arrive in late Sept / early Oct Ob Hill is covered in ice and snow but it melts each year and by Christmas at the latest it is just bare rock. What took the better part of an hour to ascend in the snow was easily accomplished in 15 minutes once it all melted. This photo shows the vast majority of what is located in Mactown which is an accumulation of all the activity since the first International Geophysical Year back in 1957. While I was there they were starting to clean up a lot of the accumulated trash and to be honest it needed doing. For any of you who may be thinking about reading the book I recommended this photo will b a bit helpful as the paperback edition has no photos. I've removed a little needless sky, other wise this is what the camera saw. Summer Residence Nikon F2AS; 24mm ( which gave the foreground rock some amount of distortion) ; ISO 100; likely 1/125 @ f /11.
25 Sep 18 Yesterday we looked at the hunter, today at the prey. Where we were on Antarctica the majority of penguins were Adeles. In fact, there were lots of them! Emperors and Kings, which are the ones most folks identify with, were not generally around although the Emperors were occasionally seen but I wasn't fortunate enough to be among those that did. But the Adeles I saw lots of, and they were always fun to be around. Another good title for them might be "The Inquisitive Ones" as they showed no fear of humans, were very interested in what we were doing, and always presented me with a major dilemma; be seen touching one and incurring the $10K fine or just throwing all caution to the wind and giving one a big hug. I never paid a fine so the jury is out on which way I went. One of the fun sayings down on the ice is what color is an Adele Penguin? The answer, in case you are curious, is "white if coming towards you and black if moving away." Interesting little birds in that they travel both on their legs when walking and on their bellies when scooting over the ice. They actually make much better time on their bellies than they do on their feet. Though the belly feathers are identified as being white, in truth they are much more of a ivory color due to waste contamination as you can observe in the photo. In reality they are rather dirty birds when on land during the nesting season. And while not the most pleasant critters to smell, they are cute and fun to be around. You are viewing them with the ice edge in the background. Beyond the ice edge in open water you can see two different ice bergs both of which dwarf the icebergs you've been hearing about in the news and about which much fuss is being or has been made. These bergs are just two of many we saw while I was there in the '94 -'95 summer and to put things in perspective, the one in the upper right corner would dwarf 10 aircraft carries placed end to end. The one at the top center would dwarf the one at the right. These things are BIG and you have to fly over them to even begin to get a true perspective! Normal conditions however for Antarctica! Not sure where this group of individuals was heading while we were photographing them, but for sure it wasn't into the water where I had just snapped the shot of the Killer Whale which, by the way, was just one of several hunting while we were observing. In this shot the hunters are at by back about 50 yards away. This shot, like all the ones I'll be sharing from Antarctica, are scanned from 35 mm slides. Two Methods of Transportation Nikon F2AS; 135mm; ISO 100; likely 1/125 @ f /11.
28 Sep 18 Not sharing something small for this close-up/macro Friday I was trying, unsuccessfully, to come up with something mathematically clever dealing with division by zero to contrast today's submission with the type of thing I'd normally be sharing. Just couldn't do it. So our big thing for today is a ruptured pressure ridge. With nothing of known size by it for comparison, you'll just have to take my work for it that the piece of ice you are seeing is in excess of 70 feet in height. While most of the world's glaciers move at the rate of a few inches a year, those in the McMurdo area move at the rate of 2 - 3 feet a day! There are several glaciers that end up at McMurdo Sound and they are moving all year round. In the winter 6 months they effectively butt up against the frozen Sound and the pressure from these glaciers moving - or trying to move - into the sound results in the ice on top of the Sound forming pressure waves, much like you see waves on the ocean, called pressure ridges. These waves in the ice can reach substantial heights and eventually the pressure is such that the ridges just buckle thrusting up the ice. The results of these ruptures are irregularly shaped chunks of ice, often huge!. We got to see a lot of these ruptured ridges and I took a number of photos of them. A few years back I shared a shot of McMurdo Sound showing multiple concentric rows of these ridges. I've never seen another picture of these concentric ridges like the one I took; had I not taken it I don't think anyone would have believed what three of us saw one morning around 0200. I've adjusted the exposure from the original as it was about a stop over-exposed. Cold Storage Nikon F2AS; 135mm; ISO 100; likely 1/125 @ f /11.