ps: Day 12 post has now been updated.
We navigate north, in the Crystal Sound, with the Antartica Peninsula on starboard side.
A "sound" is in fact a body of water, it helps mapping different parts of the sea. There are many very specific maritime terms, especially to describe the ship orientation. One of them is how to say left and right. The Port Side is the left side of the boat, and the Starboard Side is the right side. The weather is still bad but as we finish lunch, we are told by the captain that it will get worse this afternoon. On top of this, we going tru narrow passages between islands, with many ice blocks and there are very few to no maritime maps at all of those areas yet. The speed of the ship has been greatly reduced.
Crystal sound was so named by the UK Antarctic Place-Names Committee in 1960 because many features in the sound are named for men who have undertaken research on the structure of ice crystals.
Antarctica geography
Since I have bit of time, it's interesting to understand that Antartica is a continent (the 7th), as all the ice cap lies on a land mass (which is different from Arctic, where the ice is formed on the sea with no land beneath). Actually roughly 90 million years ago, the fossils suggest, Antarctica was as warm as Italy and covered by a rainforest. The average ice thickness is 2.2km and covers the entire continent, therefore the exact nature of the land under the ice is still pretty much unknown. Antarctica represents 90% of the world total ice and 70% of the world reserve of fresh water.
Stopping for the night at Port Charcot
Port Charcot is a 2.4 km wide bay at the north of Booth Island. We are now back to the Northern part of the Peninsula. Yet, if you look at our itinerary so far, we were the only ship to get that far South and we are still quite below the other cruise ships that only reaches the tip of the peninsula as we would not take the rist to get caught in ice. The weather should get clearer tomorrow and we should be able to do 2 landings. The island was first mapped in 1904 when the French Antarctic first expedition led by Jean-Baptise Charcot over-wintered here.
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