Frozen Wonders

The journey to get here was a one of a kind experience and to think we get to go back through the passage after our brief visit to Anatarctica .. Oh, boy! Here's a photo of the spray reaching deck 11 and a link to a very brief video I took of our 20 foot waves just before we went to dinner at 5:30PM last night. Things calmed down slightly by the time we went to bed and we were rocked to sleep. https://youtu.be/rk9YGXqUYnE

Here's our position early this morning. We headed to Gerlache Strait which is a remote point in the Antarctic Peninsula that is home to humpback whales, seabirds, penguins, and seals. The dotted line shows our route for today and tonight:

It's snowing now and we've already been advised that there are icebergs on our port side. The nautical definition of various sizes of icebergs is as follows:
Growler: Less than 1 meter in height and less than 5 meters in length.
Bergy Bit: 1-5 meters in height and 5-15 meters in length.
Small: 5-15 meters in height and 15-60 meters in length.
Medium: 16-45 meters in height and 61-120 meters in length.
Large: 46-75 meters in height and 121-200 meters in length.
Very Large: More than 75 meters in height and more than 200 meters in length

In addition to size, icebergs can also be classified based on their shapes. Tabular icebergs have steep sides and a flat top, with a length-to-height ratio of more than 5:1. Non-tabular icebergs have different shapes, including dome, pinnacle, and wedge. Here's a selection from this mornings viewing:

Notice the bright white and electric blue color in the photo of the icebergs. It is more visible in older icebergs, as they have undergone tremendous pressure over hundreds of years, releasing and eliminating air that was originally caught in the ice by falling snow. This process leaves the iceberg with little internal air or reflective surfaces, causing it to absorb rather than reflect light.

As for the arches, they are formed due to a combination of natural processes. The edges of the Antarctic ice sheet, mainly composed of floating ice shelves, are free to break along their natural crystal structure, resulting in icebergs that often have straight edges and smooth tops. As time goes on, waves erode these edges, creating large arches and causing the iceberg to break and crack, losing chunks of ice around the edge.
Additionally, the cracking can arise from stresses that come from floating and flexing that occurs from waves in the open ocean. In a floating iceberg, the buoyant force of the water squeezes the sides of the iceberg, causing the ice to arch up a little on top,

Our skilled ice captain brought us incredibly close to the icebergs, as you can see from these photos taken on Deck 12. One of our fellow passengers commented that the arches were made by other inexperienced captains who accidentally headed their ship directly into the berg.

As we traveled through Gerlache Strait we spotted a few humpback whales. It's hard to capture these majestic creatures with a few photo shots but here's the best I could do ...