On Saturday night we got some new satellite images showing that much of the new pack ice that’s been forming off of Cape Royds had sheared away from the landfast ice in McMurdo Sound, leaving a very large lead open west of the Cape. Not wanting to waste the opportunity Shelly and I made a last minute decision to head out and see if frost flowers were forming. Dan graciously gave up his day off to join us. We got off to a late start, we’ve all been pushing pretty hard of late and are getting slower in the morning! The need to bridge a large crack in the ice that’s gotten worse over the last couple of days slowed us further, and by the time we got to Tent Island (roughly half way to the ice edge off of Cape Royds) we were running out of time and the weather was deteriorating.
A kilometer or two later we noticed a funny bump on the horizon, almost directly on our old tracks heading out to Cape Royds. Visibility was still okay in that direction but we couldn’t really make out what it was. Distances are very hard to determine on sea ice, it could have been an iceberg at the ice edge 10 km further on or a seal much closer in. As we got closer the bump slowly resolved into a clump of Emperor penguins just off Inaccessible Island, the first penguins we’ve seen on this trip!
We expected to run into the smaller, more numerous Adelie penguins at some point; they have a colony at Cape Royds. Finding Emperor’s was quite a surprise. They are truly bizarre birds, and it’s difficult to imaging just what they were doing so far from either their colony (the closest one is at Cape Crozier, on the other side of Ross Island) or the ice edge. Both Emperors and Adelies are known for wandering long distances for their own purposes however, researchers in the Dry Valley’s have been surprised by Adelie penguins wandering past them in the direction of the Antarctic interior.
These Emperors weren’t nearly that lost – the ice edge was only 7 km away. I don’t know too much about these birds, but my understanding is that we are now in the time when both parents have left the chicks (who hatched back in late July, early August) at Cape Crozier and the other colonies to hunt. So these foraging parents probably decided to take a little sidetrip deeper into McMurdo Sound.
We spent around 30 minutes watching the group, they seemed to be hunkering down in anticipation of the approaching bad weather. By the time we were ready to move on the weather had deteriorated to the point where we decided to turn back. Conditions haven’t improved much, there’s no wind but heavy snowfall and little visibility. We were supposed to get the first two flights of the summer season today (the first flights in a month), they’ve been delayed for 24 hours. This is no problem to us, but frustrating for the McMurdo staff who have been here all winter – they can leave once these flights make it in!
