Day 10 snapshots

Again, throughout the night the captain moved the ship from Brown Cliffs. We arrived at Half Moon Island, the site of a whaling and sealing station. You can see an abandoned, rotting dory with Chin-strap penguins in the foreground. They are also call Police cap penguins.

There is quite a variety of animals including Adelie penguins, fur seals, elephant seals, and Blue-eyed Shags.

Before factory ships killed and processed whales in the open ocean, dead whales were brought to areas like this to be butchered and rendered into commercial products. It seems that most of the little island has been cleaned up, the remains of one whale are still on the beach. Here Beverly is looking at a shattered whale skull and one side of a lower jawbone.

While we were back on the ship having lunch, the captain was again busy moving us to another location. This time, we entered the caldera of a not-so-old volcano. I climbed up one ridge while many of the others in our group hiked up and around a hill in another direction.

The island is called Deception Island because it was long time before an opening to the interior was found. The narrow opening itself is called Neptune's Bellows. At one time, this was also a whaling station and littered with 30,000 whale carcasses.

After that quick hike, we moved to another section of the interior to a beach where the heat of the underlying magma warms the water above. I say warms with some caveats. Only a narrow band of water is warmed and that right at the shore line. Sticking a foot or hand into the sand below at a depth of three inches can burn an appendage.

Here you can see me kneeling in the water while two others are submerged and another has only hands and feet in the water. You will notice the person on the beach taking photos from inside a warm, yellow-hooded jacket. While the ambient temperature was mostly around 40°F, It felt much colder, like freezing, so most of the time we too wore winter jackets, hats, and gloves.