#Iceberg jeans full

I thought I'd be stepping onto pristine snow and hearing it crunch underfoot. This wasn't the experience I had built up in my head. Stepping onto the continent for the first time at Casey wharf, my boot immediately found… a huge puddle of mud. Is this what you think about when you picture Antarctica? It's the 'take it new or take it clean' rule, and its critical to ensure you're not bringing anything onto the continent that shouldn't be there - seeds, for instance, could disrupt the local flora, or maybe you're hiding bugs in your clothes. If your gear isn't completely new, you have to give it a thorough cleaning, vacuuming off all the muck from your shoes and bags. To get to shore requires a ton of preparation. The word comes down that we have to be ready to go by 8 a.m. Located southeast of Casey, the dome has been invaluable for glaciologists and ice core scientists to understand the relationship between carbon dioxide and temperature rise since preindustrial times.Īs expeditioners prepare to help out with the refueling of Casey, the media team begins working out how and when we might get off the Nuyina and put our boots on the ground in Antarctica.

It might not look like much, but beyond the coastline lies Law Dome, which rises about 4,000 feet into the sky. And the immense size of the icebergs pales in comparison to the immensity of the Southern Ocean. Standing at the back of the ship and watching the iceberg drift by, I feel tiny. Even as the iceberg approached the Nuyina, that remoteness only ossified in my mind. When the only thing you can see on the horizon is an iceberg as thin as a fingernail clipping, things just seem small. I really began to understand the remoteness of the Southern Ocean. That's about two-thirds the length of the Titanic, or 32 African elephants trunk to tail. It's hard to get a good feel for just how big the 'berg is in the image above, but this one rivaled the size of the Nuyina. Look at it! It looks so much like a halfpipe I expected Tony Hawk to be in the middle pulling off 900s. But as it pulled up next to the ship, it was a lie. When it appeared on the horizon, it looked to be a huge, solid block of ice.

Nevertheless, this photo essay is an attempt to do so.Ī close-up of the 'berg reveals it's a bit of a trickster. Particularly when that voyage comes at a time when scientists are warning the world we are at risk of losing what makes the frozen wilderness so special as a result of human-caused climate change an pollution.

#Iceberg jeans full

You'll come to find that pictures don't do Antarctica justice - it's difficult to capture the full experience of living and working on a ship but it's even harder to convey just how it feels to be in the Antarctic. The journey would see the ship's scientific instruments tested in the ice and allow it to perform its first ever resupply of two of Australia's research stations, Davis and Casey, on the eastern coast of Antarctica. I was on board the ship for 39 days, experiencing the tos-and-fros of the Southern Ocean and documenting the challenges and successes of taking the vessel to the Antarctic for the first time. In December, the ship embarked on its maiden voyage to the frozen continent at the bottom of the world. The RSV Nuyina (pronounced 'noy-yee-nah') is Australia's new, AU$529 million (US$380 million) orange-and-white icebreaking behemoth, a vessel designed to provide Australia's Antarctic Program with constant access to Antarctica over the next three decades.