No Sunset - More Midnight Sun!! Cold - Cloudy
Dear Friends,
Today was a beautiful day of scenic cruising!!! Yes, it was cold.
But it was bright, not raining.
During the night, we had sailed up along the west coast of Spitsbergen, an island north of Norway, but part of Norway. In the morning for about an hour or so, we cruised into and back out of the Magdalena Fjord where we saw beautiful glaciers and scenery. It was glassy calm and quiet in this fjord. Hope you can kind of get the feeling thru the photos. Please note the two sailboats anchored in a little cove at the bottom of a glacier!!! Well, you can be sure you will not be seeing us sailing up here. What in the world are they doing there we said to ourselves!!!
There are 10 photos in this beautiful fjord.
After coming out of the fjord, we headed north to look for the ICE - outer edge of the Polar Ice Cap. The name of this cruise is "Top of the World" Voyage. We reached the Polar Ice Cap at 12:29pm, ship's position was 80degrees20.8653' North Latitude (579 Nautical Miles from the Geographical North Pole). Our longitude was 10degrees28.6479' East Longitude. The captain slowly nudged the nose of the ship into the ice field. They assembled the crew out onto the bow for a crew photo. Captain did not show up - he felt he should remain on the bridge. It was rather magical to be there!! There was no wind so it was calm and beautiful, very bright. I was right out on the front of deck 10 taking photos. I am attaching 6 photos from the Polar Ice.
Polar ice packs are large areas of packed ice formed from seawter in the Earth's polar regions, known as polar ice caps: the Arctic ice pack (or Arctic ice cap) of the Arctic Ocean and the Antarctic ice pack of the Southern Ocean, fringing the Antarctic ice sheet. Polar packs grow and retreat in size significantly during seasonal changes. However, underlying this seasonal variation, there is a fundamental trend of melting as part of a more general process of Arctic shrinkage. In spring and summer, when melting occurs, the boundaries of the sea ice retreat. The bulk of the world's sea ice formsw in the Arctic ocean and the Southern Ocean, around Antarctica. The Antarctic ice cover is highly seasonal, with very little ice in the austral summer, expanding to an area roughly equal to that of Antarctica in winter. Consequently, most Antarctic sea ice is first year ice, up to three feet thick. The conditions in the Arctic are very different (a polar sea surrounded by land, as opposed to a polar continent surrounded by sea) and the seasonal variation much less, currently 28% of Arctic basin sea ice is multi-year ice and much thicker than seaonsl: ranging from 9-12 feet thick over large areas, with ridges up to 66 feet thick. On August 27, 2008, both the Northwest Passage and the Northeast Passage were ice-free. This was the first time in recorded history that both passages were open at the same time. At that point, tthe North Pole could have been circumnavigated, although the icebreaker Polarstern was the only ship to actually do it.
An icecap is an ice mass that covers less han 19,000 square miles of land area. Masses of ice covering more than 19,000 square miles are termed an "ice sheet". Icecaps are not constrained by topographical features but their dome is usually centered on the highest point of a massif.
After leaving the ice field, we headed south again along the coast of northern Spitsbergen. You will see a few shots of cruising along northern Spitsbergen. There are 4 more photos from this.
Enjoy all the photos of glaciers, ice, and snow! Dick is still looking for the sun and the warm Caribbean. Not up here.
Jan and Dick
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