Day 11 - Snow Hill Island and sea ice near the Ross island

Wednesday, March 4, 2020

In the morning we woke up just a short distance from the shore of the Snow Hill Island, one of several islands around the peninsula known as Graham Land. The island is mostly off limits for tourists as it is the place of a unique breeding colony of emperor penguins - but to see them, you need to come much earlier in the Antarctic summer season. What can be visited though, is the the Historic Monument, a hut on a small plateau, that we can spot already from the ship. It is the place where six men of the Nordenskjöld Swedish Antarctic Expedition were forced to spend two winters in 1902/3. It is amazing that on this isolated place a hut of about 120 years still stands and you can visit its almost untouched interior. Even though - especially seeing the historical photograph from the moment they were rescued - it is impossible to imagine how they must have felt. After visiting the hut, we climbed the small hill above it. A great view has opened up to us on the bay full of small growlers.  The Cretaceous sedimentary rocks are full of fossils and cut by sharp basaltic dikes. I have never seen so plentiful large fossils - ammonites, gastropods, and bivalves.

After lunch on board, we sail in a misty sunny weather  across the sea full of ice. We cannot reach closer to Ross Island but instead we do a “landing” on sea ice. Even a short walk is pretty impressive in the shining sun. We see a crab-eater seal that has an interesting white circle around his eye.