Pack ice and tabular icebergs

10, 11 or 12 nights

South Shetlands: visit King George Island, Deception Island and Half Moon Island. Explore the Antarctic Peninsula up close in Zodiacs and see whales breaching and seals sunbathing on translucent blue icebergs. Visits typically include Port Lockroy, Cuverville Island, Gerlache Strait, Neumeyer Channel and Paradise Bay. Explore the east, as well as the west of the Antarctic Peninsula. Sail around icebergs drifting in the Antarctic Sound, to the penguin rookeries of Brown Bluff or Paulet Island and the islands of Dundee, Snow Hill and Seymour. Our Emperor Penguin Safari aims to land on Snow Hill Island to visit a resident emperor penguin colony.

The South Shetland Islands

This rugged island chain hugs the Antarctic Peninsula, providing a narrow but exceptionally sheltered sea passage: on either side, towers of black rock filigreed with grey webs; the valleys between them smothered in a stratified white mantle hundreds of metres thick. One of these islands is the active volcano of Deception Island, whose flooded caldera formed a perfect harbour for the whaling station which flourished here in the 1930’s. There may be time for a dip in the geothermally heated waters: not warm - ice-cold but with hot spots.

The Antarctic Peninsula

The Antarctic Peninsula is the most readily accessible area of the continent and hosts some of the most awe-inspiring scenery and wildlife. It has the mildest climate of the continent (in the summer, the temperature usually hovers around freezing point) and is home to many of the scientific bases in Antarctica, including Port Lockroy, the first permanent British station. Gentoo, chinstrap and adelie penguins abound, and there’s always a good chance of sightings of humpback and minke whales, and orcas. Ships edge their way south through the slush and abstract patterns formed by the fractured sea ice; place names recall the early explorers: Neumeyer Channel, Lemaire Channel, Petermann Island.

The Weddell Sea

Relatively few sailings aim to reach the Weddell Sea. The route is through the Antarctic Sound - known as ‘iceberg alley’, since a feature of both it, and the Weddell, is massive tabular icebergs, calved from the Larsen and Ronne ice shelves. There’s a chance that, on one of the many low ice floes, you may see a leopard seal or that most elegant of all penguins, the emperor. Paulet Island, at the mouth of the eastern end of the sound is home to thousands of adelie penguins. Nordenskjold’s hut is preserved at Snow Hill Island; here he and his group survived two Antarctic winters in what amounts to a potting shed.