View Point

Having spent the morning looking at the ice that was both beautiful and blocking our passage to the emperors, we were looking forward to making a landing this afternoon.

Delphine had selected a place called View Point, which is a continental landing.  There is no wild life in this area, but being high up you get a great view of the surrounding area.

We were the last group out on the helicopters, but it made no real difference to the landing.


The flight was only about ten minutes, during which we crossed miles of sea ice.

From up here the seals are like commas and penguins like tiny specks, but the ice still looks huge.

It is fabulous to be able to see the circular pancake ice, with their pressure ridges where they knock against each other.

Even just from the ship those ridges look small, but in reality they are often a couple of metres high, which would make it really difficult to walk across.

We landed on View Point and had a few hours to explore the area, with the white snow contrasting against the dark rock, and the odd lichens adding an occasional hint of colour.

With no penguins to distract us, we focused more on the landscape and the way that the snow had drifted into different formations. Those of you who have travelled on trains in the UK in the winter may recall a wonderful excuse for cancellations that there was the wrong type of snow.

Well here you really do see different types. You do get the soft and fluffy type, but what you often find is a rather more granular, icy type. We figured that if we added a bit of flavouring then you would have an instant granita.

At the bottom of the hill, in Duse Bay, we could see an old science station, and close to that were a load of seals hauled out on the ice, but otherwise it was just rock, ice and snow for miles around us.