I spent the last 2 weeks of 2015 on the ship, MS Expedition, touring around the Antarctic peninsula. I spent about a third of the trip on the east side of the peninsula, on the Weddell Sea, and the remainder on the west side of the peninsula, going as far as 63 degrees south. For the most part the weather was not terribly harsh. It was typically in the 30s during the day, and teens-20s overnight. Some days were cloudy or foggy, but we had a number of days with clear skies and brilliant sunshine. There were just two partial days were it snowed a lot (which were quite pretty, especially considering how I live in a part of California that just about never gets snow).
Since this is flyertalk, I'll comment a bit about the logistics of how I got to/from the end of the world. I live in the Bay Area of California (US), so it was quite a long distance of flying. I don't have status with any airline, and sadly that meant I was stuck in economy on US domestic airlines for much of the trip. I flew American SFO to MIA on a 738. Then caught a codeshare on LAN to EZE (Buenos Aires) on a 772. Next I needed to take a taxi clear across the city to AEP to catch an Aerolinas Argentinas flight on a 738 to USH (Ushuaia), at the very southern tip of South America. The American flight was absolutely miserable. The guy in the seat in front of me decided that the space under his seat was for his stuff, rather than my feet, and then paged the FA claiming that I was kicking his seat. Without even listening to my side of the story, the FA took his side, and threatened to have me kicked off the flight. Anyway, the LAN & AeroArg flights were actually not too bad, although the approach to USH was ridiculous. I'm not sure if the pilot was incompetent, or if the weather conditions were unusual, or if its simply a challenging approach, but we kept abruptly dropping several hundred feet at a time, with sharp mountains not far below us. We boarded the ship in Ushuaia the rest of the way to Antarctica. The flight home was USH to EZE on Aerolinas Argentinas (this time it was an A321). Then a painfully long American flight from EZE to DFW on a 772 with a sadistic 2-5-2 seating config, where we were stuck in the middle 3 seats for the 10.5 hour flight. Finally, we flew a 738 from DFW back to SFO.
But enough rambling on, I'll let the photos show off this amazing place.
Neko Harbor
Crabeater Seal
Tabular icebergs offshore, penguin colony on Gourdin Island
Mikkelsen Bay
Lemaire Channel
Adelie penguins
Humpback whales feeding
What's left of the largest chunk of the B15 iceberg. Google "b15 iceberg" for much more info on this record setting iceberg.
Chinstrap penguin
Deception Island
Iceberg with natural caves
Elephant Seal at Turret Point
Adrift
Elephant Point (South Shetland Islands)
Sea Ice for the next thousand miles at the north Weddell Sea
Historic whaling station on Deception Island
Brash ice in Neko Harbour
Passing the locals off the South Shetland Islands
Devil Island
Brown Station, an Argentine research base on Paradise Harbour
The rest of the album is posted here:
https://www.flickr.com/photos/netlla...7700546/page1/