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Expedition Journals
(Dec 27th)
When I first decided to come to Antarctica, I thought I knew exactly what it would be like. I pictured the cold, and I pictured the endless white and the freezing waters. I thought I knew exactly what this trip would be like. Before I ever left the Miami airport, I thought I had everyone figured out, all my friends chosen, and that this trip would be yet another to leave me unshaken and bored. After all I am sixteen, I know everything, right? Never in my life could I have been more wrong. Thousands of miles away, you can have your stereotypes and your distant perceptions of the Antarctic, but this is one place you must really live and experience to fully understand. I can never fully explain to someone the sounds of Antarctica. The avalanches, slicing through the white silence, like a thousand gunshots, the sound of 500,000 penguins, singing in discord, yet in a harmony only nature can create. The sound of ice crushing against the strength of steel. The sound of a hundred teenagers, laughing and talking late into the night. The contrast of nature and human was evident in all.
No manual could prepare me for the things I would feel: the achievement of reaching the summit of that last mountaintop (the one that Geoff constantly reassured us existed), the loneliness that consumes you as you stare across the vast emptiness of white, the warmth of the winter sun against your skin, in contrast with the bitter cold of the wind, the rush of adrenaline as you go flying down a mountain top as you are thrown into the air; the comfort of a helping hand as you are slipping down the climb when you never thought you would reach the top, the connection with the people around me, through hugs and songs and dances, we all found some sort of common ground.
This has been an experience no one could have prepared me for, but I wish everyone could feel the rush you get when you collapse onto the deep snow, making angels on the top of a mountain that .00000001% of the world will ever see.
Go find your own mountain, your own star.
I know I just found mine.
Best Wishes to all of those at home, and much love.
Jess Myers
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Drawing by Brian Sampson
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 The last day of actually exploring Antarctica has come. We awoke to an overcast sky and wet snow fluttering down on us. We headed for Danco Island and were greeted there by a fur seal. It was laying on its back watching the snow fall. Gentoo penguins peppered the landscape and were not alarmed by the seal. A hike up a mountain was on the agenda for the group. I, along with a small group, didn't make the trek, however. (can you blame us after Deception Island?) We instead sat on the mountain side and watched the penguins do their daily routine. We boarded the boat and headed for Neko Harbor. We were to climb up on a mountain for a group photograph. The journey up wasn't a problem for most especially since a spectacular view awaited us. The harbor is home to towering glaciers of blue and white, icebergs half the size of the ship, and a Gentoo penguin rookery. The glaciers every so often would moan, roar like thunder, and drop a piece of themselves into the water. They were calving. The snow on the mountain was frigid and soaked our clothing in an instant. After the photograph was taken we could slide down the mountain on our backs. It was very exciting and a bit like being on a waterslide in January. We returned to the boat and took in the last views of Antarctica. We want to enjoy these moments because Drake's Passage will offer no beauty or tranquility.
Hannah Siebenhaar
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To enter the mind of a glacier
I sit, staring out of the lounge windows of our icebreaker at one of the greatest sights on the planet. A wall of ice up to 100ft high towers over us, and extends for hundreds of meters on either side of the boat. We are dwarfed by the leading edge of an immense glacier, which flows down from the raw, exposed mountains that rise up into the clouds above us. This is its terminus; here it sends forth its oversized infants, the icebergs that leave their home once, to never return. The magnitude and scale of this river of ice defies my imagination. Its beginning and its middle are lost to the clouds; I can only witness its end, here in the ocean. It is a marvel of shadows and textures: cracks, crevices, ridges, and layers are accentuated by a wider palate of blues that Picasso ever used in his Blue Period.
It is alive and is providing us with an amazing show, if we take the time to listen and watch. Time is exactly what a glacier has, time on a scale almost inconceivable to humans. This glacier was born before humans learned to control the power of fire, in a world more innocent than the one that exists now. It has matured, thousands of years later, and, assuming we do not of our own action shorten its life, it will live for thousands of years more. It has a story to tell, and it is speaking to us all the time.
Today, a group of us listened. For a glorious half hour, around twenty of us attempted to see time as a glacier would. We wandered individually down to the edge of the beach, drawn to this wall of blue and white in front of us. Whatever conversations people were having stopped, cameras were put down, and any extraneous motion ceased. We all sat there and simply let ourselves be with that place. We listened, we watched, we breathed. And the glacier spoke to us. It groaned, creaked, cracked, moaned, threw down chunks of ice and snow, and spat down small avalanches. Everyone was spellbound, and we left behind our normal conception of time. We all could have sat there for hours, conversing with the ancient ice, learning from it.
However, inevitably, our own learnings took over again, and we blinked, stood up, spoke again and moved about. We cannot live like a glacier, we cannot exist on its scale or sense of time. Our lives are but a moment to the glacier. But if we are willing to take only a moment of our own lives, the ice will speak with us.
Unsigned
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