Antarctic cruise unveils an Ice Age world

ANTARCTIC CIRCLE — It was a sparkling summer day in the White Continent. An albatross stalked our ship for miles over calm blue seas polka-dotted with ice floes, past glacier-robed peaks, under an insomniac sun.

The 61,000-ton M.S. Amsterdam shared the lonely Antarctic with convoys of icebergs in fantastic shapes — domes and steeples and sheer cliffs of white or greenish blue, some 60 feet high and a mile long, weighing millions of tons. All relentlessly moved with the circumpolar current.

Chinstrap penguins strutted and preened on a pancake of ice soiled with guano. Some wobbled and slid. Others dove deep for krill, the thumb-size crustaceans found beneath the ice that in this starkest environment comprise an abundant food supply.

"Thar she blows!" someone shouted. Passengers scurried to train cameras and binoculars on spouting humpbacks just back from wintering in Ecuador.

For me, visiting Antarctica fulfilled a nearly lifelong ambition. In 1958, I was the only reporter aboard a Navy blimp out of East Weymouth, Mass., that tracked the nuclear sub Nautilus on its voyage underneath the North Pole. We hovered overhead when the historic message was flashed: "Nautilus 90 North." In 1967, I toured bases from Greenland to Alaska along the distant early warning radar network line.

The bottom of the world is far different from the top. No polar bears, not a tree or bush, and no native humans — except when Argentina and Chile fly expectant mothers into their bases to bolster territorial claims.

Antarctica is surrounded by turbulent seas and rimmed with ice shelves — one larger than France. It contains 72 percent of the world's fresh surface water and 90 percent of the world's ice. Mountains soar to 15,000 feet above an average mile-deep ice cap. Yet this coldest, most remote continent has dry valleys that haven't seen snow in a million years.

An unforgettable morning was spent cruising the canyons of Lemaire Channel, which is sometimes too ice-jammed for even battering-ram Russian icebreakers. A snowy sheathbill, fluffy as a toy, perched on a deck railing but flew off at the approach of early rising mile-walkers circling the ship three and a half times.

Near Petermann Island, an enormous elephant seal sunbathed on a berg-bit shaped like a frozen deck chair. A distant growl escalated to a thunderous roar as a calving Gibraltar of glacial ice gave birth to another iceberg.