Grounded Icebergs Near the Dellbridge Islands

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Am I the only one who sees a face on the left?

On December 1st, before visiting the Erebus ice cave, Evan and I went to see some icebergs that are stuck in the sea ice near the Dellbridge Islands. The Dellbridge Islands include Tent Island, Big Razorback and Little Razorback. The iceberg I photographed first is nearest to the island in the group with my favorite name, Inaccessible Island, named by the famous British Antarctic explorer Robert F. Scott because it was hard to reach. Of course, he didn’t have a Haagland tractor, which made the trip much easier. Not that a Haagland is a luxury vehicle by any means, but it’s great for traveling on ice and it gets warm inside. Big Red (as everyone calls the heavy parkas we were issued) comes off when you get in a Haagland. You’ll see the islands in the background of some of these photos. Also nearby was Mt. Erebus, but it’s so huge (over 13,000 ft.) that Erebus seems nearby wherever you go around here. The angle of the sun showed up the large crevasses on its lower slopes.

Crevasses on Mt. Erebus
It was so clear that even from a distance you could see the crevasses on Erebus’s lower slopes.

The plan was for me to circle the iceberg nearest Inaccessible Island, to take photos for a 3D file, which I did. I selected 162 to process and since there were so many, I carefully masked them in the software, which took several hours, and I’m processing the file as I type this. I’m optimistic it’ll come out, because the first stage of processing where I aligned the photos showed a generally recognizable shape, and the second stage, under way now, originally showed it would take a total of 12 hours, but it is now almost 60% finished and the estimated total is down to 7 1/2, so the fact that it’s going faster than the original estimate is a good sign. Stay tuned for the next post…

Iceberg, two kinds of ice
Two kinds of ice, matte and glossy, side by side. Click this and the other images to see larger views.

In the meantime, I’ll share with you photos I took after we left that iceberg and stopped at a spot where we could walk around a couple of smaller ones. One in particular had a lot of drifted snow around it, so I’m not sure if I’ll be able to get a 3D file of the whole thing, but it sure had a wide variety of ice formation and profiles that changed as you walked around it. The photos here show some of my favorite views.

Iceberg in sea ice with melt pool
A little pool of water had melted around one end. Our Haagland vehicle is in the distance on the right.
Iceberg frozen in sea ice
Wind-whipped snow and ice.
Iceberg and drifted snow
The drifting snow had curved into smooth, rounded forms.
Iceberg stuck in sea ice
A slight change in perspective shows a different view than the one above, although you can see the same large forms on the left.
Icerberg stuck in sea ice
But the opposite side of the iceberg looks totally different from the side catching the drifting snow.

 

Iceberg stuck in sea ice
This is the only shot I’ve included of the smaller of the two icebergs, because it wasn’t as interesting, although the hook-shaped protrusion popping from the top in this view is certainly quirky.

 

Little Razorback Island
The two smaller icebergs were closer to Little Razorback Island. You can see where pressure ridges have formed near the island.