The Southern Ocean

At the Southern tip of South America, the closest point to the Antarctic continent, we boarded our ship the National Geographic Explorer. Only an inch or so away on the map, the Antarctic Peninsula looks so near, but the shortest distance of our entire journey promises to be the longest—and the hardest.

All the oceans of the world mix in the Southern Ocean. Some say that all five oceans are really one, merging as they do down here at the bottom of the world. The Southern Ocean rings the Antarctic Continent, and you must cross it to reach the Southern Continent. Unlike the Arctic, which is a sea surrounded by land, the Antarctic is a continent ringed by an ocean. Uninterrupted by land masses, the winds blow strong and westerly.

It is the end of our second day at sea, and we are still crossing the Drake Passage. Petrels and Albatrosses follow the ship, hundreds of miles from land. They swoop and dive, seemingly immune to the great winds. It’s hard to type, the swells are about twenty feet high right now, and the wind is 26 Knots. Leif (Captain Skog) says this is normal, and it will get much rougher tonight, with waves thirty feet high and winds to 40 Knots.

We have already crossed the Antarctic Convergence, the physical boundary into Antarctica. This is the place where the warm waters of the Atlantic, Pacific, Indian, and Arctic Oceans meet the cold waters of the Antarctic. The convergence is marked by a sudden drop in the temperature of the water and of course, the air. The water drops from six degrees Celsius to three, a seemingly small difference, but really quite significant. The cold water of the Antarctic is “poised between solid and liquid.”