Emperor penguins in Antarctica.
If you’ve seen me lately, you might have noticed a good-looking blonde hanging around. That’s my wife, Dr. Elizabeth Anne Hull, who may soon be famous as the editor of what I think may be close to the best science-fiction anthology ever published, but is already locally well known as a woman who has gone swimming in both Arctic and Antarctic waters. It happened on two trips, several years apart, but I’ll tell you what I learned about the two remotest sections of our world now.
Betty Anne and me.
The Antarctic is said to be very cold, but when we were next to the Palmer Station on the Antarctic peninsula the air temperature was 37 degrees F. When we left Chicago, the temperature at O’Hare had been –4.
Antarctic ice comes in several pretty colors, It is blue or green if it has been at the bottom of some heavy layers of other ice and the air has been squeezed out of it, rarely reddish or yellowish if it has picked up a load of algae or something and — everybody’s favorite — the rest of the time most of it is the whitest white you ever saw.
The principal visible inhabitants of Antarctica are penguins. There are more than a dozen brands of penguins, but which brand any given penguin belongs to is of real concern only to another penguin. I can tell the difference, but only if they’re fairly close and I have the guidebook in my hand.
A pretty sight is to see several Buick- to bungalow-sized ice floes sailing by, each one with a penguin catching a free ride by sitting on its top.
Penguins live on land but have to return to the ocean if they want to catch anything to eat. This makes quite a problem for them because on the other side of one of those holes in the ice that they use to let them get into the water may well be one or more hungry seals, who are swimming around down there, waiting in the hope of catching a penguin for the same purpose. That is why you see the number of penguins parked next to a hole growing until, at last, one of them dives in and the rest follow pretty much all at once. If there is a single famished seal waiting there he’ll catch one of the penguins, all right, but the rest are home free.
Penguins don’t exactly swim. They sort of fly through the water and are very good at it.
Ice floes come in all shapes and sizes, some like castles with towers and minarets, some like craggy mountain ranges, some like huge, flat, square-cut pizza boxes, some like nothing you’ve ever seen before.
Most of a berg or floe is under water with a lot of mass and jagged edges. Consequently every once in a great while one of them holes a ship, and then there’s big trouble. One small cruise ship did go down a few years ago, with I believe two people trapped inside.
While on the other end of the planet —
The Arctic Ocean contains no continent (though it is bounded by several) and very few islands (although one or two new ones are being discovered as the ice melts away).
When we sailed north toward the Pole, we hit lucky on the weather. It was fair and not very windy, thus giving us only gentle waves. As we approached the Arctic ice cap there was at first only a vague blur on the horizon. Then abruptly it transmuted itself to what looked a wide bay that we were entering. The closer we got, the more it began to look like — wow! — a tropical island that we were approaching, with a narrow beach of white sand, lacking only some palm trees and a central mountain to resemble Bora Bora or Moorea.
Actually, that whole scene was composed of nothing but size-sorted bits of floating ice. We were almost on top of it before I could see that the “beach” part was made up of a gazillion tiny ice bits, more or less marble-sized, next to a band composed of larger strawberry-to-baseball sized pieces, then one band after another, each band’s pieces getting bigger and bigger as you headed Poleward. Each separate piece of ice was jigging independently up and down in the gentle waves but they all kept to their spots within the group. (I developed a theory that there was a feeble northward current around there, perhaps a straggling fragment of the dissipating Gulf Stream, pushing on the surface waters to line the ice fragments up so neatly, but never found an oceanographer to tell me how all wet I probably was.)
Then the captain took us right into the ice, all the thousands of tons of our cruise ship, until we were more than a quarter mile from open water and getting a bit close to some biggish ice floes. The captain stopped the ship so we could all take pictures. (And, gee, I wish I had.) And then he carefully backed us out of the ice, staying within the liquid-water lane we had opened on the way in.
There aren’t any penguins in the Arctic. What they do have there is the local knock-off of the same general design, the auk, only they don’t have many of them anymore because 19th-century sailors found them quite tasty. We didn’t see any, anyway. Other Arctic creatures we didn’t see include polar bears, Arctic foxes and various aquatic and semi-aquatic forms.
We did see some whales.
Oh, and listen, those waters in the Arctic and Antarctic that I said Betty Anne had gone swimming in. Did I mention that they were the swimming pools located on the upper decks of our cruise liners?
