UUuurrrgghh....

I keep meaning to write a post, and then it's a week later. As time keeps on slipping slipping slipping into the future, the weather gets worse and we get closer to leaving the ice. Somehow I think I am mentally prepared to be back in a world with trees and grass, but not quite ready for taxis and smog. Yesterday I went on a journey, to find a fountain of legend. I trekked east of station to the foot of the glacier, armed with a pick (aka a big screw driver) and a container to harness the blood of the glacier. I walked along the ice edge until the gentle slope became a steep face, and occasionally tapped the wall with my pick like a syrup harvester would to a maple tree (I read that climate change is seriously affecting the syrup harvest, that relies on freezing temps at night and warm days in the spring. I can't imagine a world without maple syrup, nor do I want to...) . At first I saw a drip, but in filling the first container I sunk to my ankle in thick mud. Battling against the mudpit, I stabilized myself and saved my shoe. Then decided to move on. I rounded the corner on a narrowing stretch of land between the cliff to the water on my left and the towering wall of ice on my right, and there it was. Beneath an overhanging, soon-to-be-bergy-bit, was a flowing stream of glacier water. Carefully, I crept over the loose morraine to bottle the water. In a single 20 ml scintillation vial, I captured 10,000 years of history, locked in the ice. The entire era of the modern human and the development of civilization. The atmospheric changes since the last ice age. The algae and bacteria. All locked for eternity in a jar the size of a roll of film (remember those?). Then I went back to station and had some delicious pumpkin lasagna.

A few days, maybe a couple weeks ago, we were out looking for krill and I saw what looked to be like a pod of humpback whales flashing their pectoral fins. But as we got closer, we realized it wasn't a pod of humpies, but rather a pod of killer whales. Unfortunately, they were heading the opposite direction from the boating limit and we had to stop before we got too far outside of it. We watched as the 20 or more whales (spread out in a strange pattern) slowly swam northward. Then, behind them, we saw two humpback whales, travelling the same direction. Tempted to follow, we realized we had forgotten buckets and had to go back to station before we could catch any of the huge school of krill we were seeing on the fish finder (yes, we really do work, all these other things just happen in the meantime). On our way back, we saw two humpbacks really close to one of the islands, one very small one, the other only slightly larger. When we got closer, the larger of the two pinned the smaller one against the shore and turned on it's side, creating a wall between us and the small whale. This strange behavior, both from these two whales and the ones we saw following the killer whales (and possibly a little bit of imaginative daydreaming), led us to the conclusion that the killer whales tried to eat the small humpback, and the other ones chased them off and were protecting the baby. But we didn't see an attack. And no killer whales since.