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Old Jan 31, 2005, 9:15 am
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Kiwi Flyer
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ICE AS FAR AS THE EYE CAN SEE, part two

Rather than bore the reader with an endless list of glaciers, peaks and ranges and other sights; I will attempt to provide a selection of just the highlights of our flight. As mentioned previously, the exact flight path is dictated by weather conditions so there is no guarantee of what will or wont be seen on these flights.

The first ice tongue we pass is at the mouth of the Matusevich Glacier. Seems not that large, but then we are told it is 30km long. One berg has been trapped by ice for a year and is 50m high by 30km long and 10km wide! Wow it is hard to get a sense of scale.

We head inland up the Rennick Glacier (beside Bower Range) which is very wide. Many glaciers and icefalls in the side valleys. For the next couple of hours we have several figure eights, loops and up and down valleys so that both sides get good views. Needless to say most passengers are up trying to see out of the best side all the time. Sometimes tough decisions to make as highlights are described on both sides of the aircraft at the same time!

We head back to the coast down the Tucker Glacier near Mount Minto – the tallest peak in these parts. From here we generally head SW along the shore of Ross Sea and up and down the main valleys. Mount Erebus and the enormous Ross Ice Shelf is visible in the distance. Ross Sea itself is reasonably free of ice in this area. But it is too far away to see NZ’s Scott Base or US’s McMurdo Station.

A couple of large peaks interrupt the flow of a powerful glacier and the flow lines clearly show the divergence and reconvergence downstream, complete with pressure mounds and crevassing.

We circle the Italian base at Terra Nova Bay and the 100km long Drygalski Ice Tongue. Part of the major iceberg B15 (?) is visible trapped behind it. When it calved several years ago it was the largest iceberg ever recorded and bigger than some countries. It has since broken up into several smaller pieces but these are still huge. (Its hard to judge scale but it looked big beside the very long ice tongue!)

Around 1:00pm we are 2900 miles from Adelaide (great circle as opposed to our flight path!) at about 76 degrees south, and unfortunately its time to head back. In the relatively ice free Ross Sea it is easy to see how much further icebergs extend underwater relative to above water, due to the changed sea colour above the underwater ice. We again pass the volcanic cone of Mount Melbourne – this time from the other side and see the snow filled crater. As we head towards Cape Adare very suddenly at 1:30pm the skies cloud over above Ross Sea and the coastal margin. This means we don’t get to see Cape Adare (the north-western point of the Ross Sea).

We were so very lucky to have cloud-free viewing the entire time over Antarctica (apart from the last 10 minutes). The crew and staff remark how they’ve never seen it so clear the whole way before.
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