Antarctica's Deception Island

Perhaps like me you've thought of Antarctica as a freezing continent covered in ice where it snows regularly.

It's surprising to discover that it actually is the world's driest climate and home of "Dry Valleys" where there's been no precipitation for two million years.

Cruising toward Deception Island, we learned about an even more unlikely facet of the world's coldest continent: volcanic activity.

It may not be hard to believe that a shield volcano formed Deception Island ten thousand years ago, or that over time it eroded and eventually allowed water to flood what had been the crater through a gap on one side.



That gap is called Neptune's Bellows, because of the strong winds experienced by whaling ships that tried to enter through it.

On the day we visited, Coral Princess seemed to have no trouble navigating the gap on a relatively calm day.  Captain McBain proudly proclaimed that we were witnessing history as the largest ship ever to cruise inside the Port Foster Caldera.

You may reason that ten thousand years ago, Antarctica could have been a much different place than the frigid continent that pumps cold water around the world's connected oceans as an important element of Earth's overall climate.

From the time Antarctica was discovered 200 years ago, however, the volcano has been intermittently active.

There's evidence for significant volcanic activity in the 18th Century before its discovery as well as the 19th Century when whalers and sealers visited for good hunting in the region.

In the 20th Century, there were two particularly active periods, from 1906 to 1910, and also from 1967 to 1970.

A little over 50 years ago, the eruptions in 1967 and 1969 spewed red hot lava and exploded volcanic rock that devastated scientific stations located on Deception Island.  New Argentine and Spanish research stations, however, currently do research there.

Even today, the floor of the Port Foster Caldera continues to rise from geothermal activity down below.  "It is classified as a restless caldera with a significant volcanic risk."

Like that Royal Caribbean ship that unexpectedly found itself next to an exploding volcano in New Zealand, I doubt any of our fellow passengers believed we might be in imminent danger should we be there at the wrong geologic moment.

Wait.

An active volcano occasionally shooting out 400 degree lava in Antarctica, which we're regularly told must stay frozen or our environment will be in peril?

Yes, while we associate volcanoes more with warm places like Hawaii or Italy's Pompei, red-hot magma can also rise from Earth's core in cold areas.

No, Antarctica is far more complex than a clump of endless ice, which may be easier to comprehend when you consider that Antarctica is roughly 5.4 million square miles, or about the size of the United States and Mexico combined.

Coral Princess is not an expedition ship, but had we gone ashore, it would have been possible to dig holes in the sand to take warm baths.

That's right.

Deception Island has natural hot springs.  Perhaps if the Romans had known about that, Antarctica would have been a Roman outpost centuries ago.

Chinstrap Penguins and giant Antarctic seals rather than sunscreen-slathered, toga-wearing spa-goers are likely to be spotted on the beaches of Deception Island.

Offshore, the whales that once lured hunters for the lucrative whale oil trade now entertain tourists on ships that run on petroleum products rather than whale oil, which in the 18th Century was one of the primary fuels of the Industrial Revolution.



Had petroleum not been substituted for whale oil, whether by government subsidy or simply economic supply and demand making petroleum cost less, whales would have probably been hunted to extinction.

Call it a free-market myth if you must parse the economic forces/government intervention facts, but the petroleum industry saved the whales, and I'm glad we still have those wonderful giants around.

One of the lecturers went into a great deal of detail about the different types of whales and mammals of Antarctica, including how to identify the various species by their different spouts, but long story short, whales are all pretty cool wherever they may be found.

As we cruised from Antarctica that evening, enjoying more great entertainment and fine dining on board our floating resort, we considered ourselves blessed to be among the less than 1/100th percent of the world's population to have ever caught a glimpse of the vast continent surrounding the South Pole.