Day 22 Royal Bay

The JCR arrives in Royal Bay, South Georgia

Glacier-watch on the monkey island

Royal Bay glacier

Royal Bay glacier

King penguin colony

Tuesday, 17th April 2012. The Southern Ocean isn't one to give up its secrets easily; its wonders are mostly hidden under a cloak of a mile-deep ocean or veiled behind a curtain of fog. But when the weather turns at the right moment, it certainly lets you in on a few wonders. And one of those was waiting for us today...

Our ship, the James Clark Ross, drew closer to the north-eastern corner of South Georgia this morning. Under the gaze of scientists and crew who had gathered on the monkey island (the 'roof' of the bridge) we pulled into Royal Bay. We could not have arrived at a better time, as the shrouds of mist slowly drifted off and gave way to glorious sunshine. Royal Bay is dominated at one end by a glacier pouring rivers of ice into the ocean. The sunshine danced around the glacier tongue and illuminated the frozen river colouring it gleaming white and incandescent shades of blue.

Vast snow fields rose up from the glacier and flanked the base of steep, jagged mountains. The terrain rose dramatically to a series of snow-capped peaks. The snow accentuated the three-dimensional structure of the local geology by highlighting the stratification. The clouds shrouding the summits parted for a few moments at a time only. It was easy to get carried away taking more and more photographs as the light changed every minute.

The keen bird watchers in our group had brought telescopes and spotting scopes. The ship was now stable in the calm waters of the bay so tripods could be mounted on deck. The added optics were excellent to scan the coastline for wildlife. I was called over to a spotting scope that was pre-focussed on the eastern beach. First I saw just a couple of white specks on the beach. "Pan to the right", Hugh called, when I didn't quite realise what I was looking at. And then it dawned on me - there wasn't just a couple of specks, there was hundreds. "Where does it end?" I asked. "Just keep panning right" was the answer. There was thousands, possibly tens of thousands. The entire beach was literally carpeted in KING PENGUINS!!! However, we weren't close enough to get a really good look and even the high magnification of the spotting scope couldn't bring out any details. My camera was even less able to capture the scene - but what I was able to take in was the sheer vastness of the penguin colony.

We had come to Royal Bay to sediment cores. The coring for the day was very successful and the wet lab soon filled up with lots of tubes full of mud. The sediments in Royal Bay are darker as they are of glacial origin. The scraping and scouring of the flowing ice sends plumes of finely ground minerals into the bay. The layering of the deposits gives clues to the life of the glacier over the past thousands of years. The paleo team hopes to canalyse the cores and find how the glacier changed in the past in order to find clues as to how it might change in the future. With temperatures and sea levels rising around the globe there isn't a corner of the planet that isn't affected by the changing climate. Glaciers, whose volume delicately depends on the prevailing conditions, are very useful in the study of climate change. Especially when the sediment cores can take us thousands of years into the past.

We are now planning a CTD survey for more studies of the glaciers on South Georgia, so we should stay around this magical island for a little longer....