Sea ice and icebergs surround the Nathaniel B. Palmer—which is now trapped. Photograph by Maria Stenzel

64.52 degrees south latitude
57.99 degrees west longitude

Gossip overheard in the food line of the Nathaniel B. Palmer tells you exactly where we are in this cruise. “I hear the lettuce is about to end,” says one diner. “I'm not surprised—it's about that time,” says the other, a salty seafarer and grad student from Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory in New York City. 

We knew this was coming. Our cruise, now lumbering into its fifth week, has exceeded the longevity of our fresh food. Cantaloupe and watermelon petered out a few days ago. Tomatoes soon after that. And several days later our last bananas—geriatric and brown—also disappeared. They were replaced by banana bread, which itself quickly vanished. 

As the cruise enters new gastronomic waters, it enters new geographic ones as well. Several days ago our ship rounded the northern tip of the Antarctic Peninsula and crossed to the east side—our third, desperate attempt to penetrate the unusually heavy sea ice, which has kept us from reaching the goal of this expedition: the remnants of the Larsen B Ice Shelf. 

An armada of icebergs greeted us as we crossed into the east. You might call them the ghosts of Larsen B. Many of them hail from the class of 2002—the warm summer that shattered the Larsen B into thousands of icebergs. At one point as I stood on the bridge, I counted no fewer than 57 large, tabular bergs visible at once, some more than a mile long. I'm told that those bergs have lived for eight years in the cold waters of the Weddell Sea, but they'll dwindle quickly as they drift north into warmer waters. 

Later that night, as half the ship slept, I watched what would prove to be a pivotal battle in our 59-day cruise: steel versus ice. A crust of sea ice six to ten feet thick extended like a sheeny desert plain as far as the eye could see. Shipmates Sebastian Paoni and Brandon Bell backed and rammed the ship through that ice. With each impact the ship tilted, its bow rode over the edge of the ice, and it came to a stop. Then slowly it sank, the ice crumbling under its weight. Hundreds of times the ship did this, sometimes gaining 50 yards, often only five. Our goal, the Larsen B, lay 70 miles south. 

The battle reached its conclusion the following day. The 60,000-ton, 13,200-horsepower Palmer became trapped in the ice like a gnat in honey. The Weddell Sea has a well-earned reputation for vicious sea ice: It has trapped and crushed a number of vessels over the decades, including Ernest Shackleton's ship, the Endurance. Even for modern, metal-hulled ships it's no joke. Back in 2001 the Palmer drifted helpless in the sea ice for 26 days. The ship carries many months of extra food on board, partly for this contingency. I’ll tell the full story in an upcoming issue of National Geographic. —Douglas Fox

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