Flying over over a seamount named Jun Jaeguy, a submarine volcano that appears to be inactive at the moment. Photograph by Maria Stenzel

64.43 degrees south latitude
57.61 degrees west longitude

Our ship has once again been repelled by sea ice—this time more ominously than before. We now know for certain that we will not reach Larsen B. It's hard to imagine how disappointed these scientists must feel. They've been planning this expedition for three years. Their careers depend on it.

The Nathaniel B. Palmer has gone as far south as it can without becoming trapped in ice and now sits in a sheltered apron of sea ice between James Ross Island and Lockyer Island. Most of our scientific targets on the former Larsen B Ice Shelf lie 70 to 100 miles south—beyond helicopter range. Scientists and crew are making plans to use our helos, together with strategically placed fuel caches, to extend our range and leapfrog scientific instruments to the most important of our targets. If it works, it will have been a heroic effort.

In the meantime, we're collecting data from yet another dead ice shelf—a lobe of the former Larsen A Ice Shelf, which once flowed out of Swift Glacier on James Ross Island and covered the area where our ship now is. This little ice shelf was last seen alive and well in 1843; by 1945 it had shrunk by half, and by 1957 it had vanished entirely.

Some scientists question how substantial this ice shelf really was. A core of mud that our crew extracted from the seafloor sheds light on this. Three feet of sand sit at the top of the core—just the kind of stuff that's vomited forth when ice shelves disintegrate and the glaciers they once supported run out of control like 18-wheelers without brakes. Below the sand sits gray clay—profoundly empty of diatoms or any other sign of life. It suggests that before the ice shelf went, this area spent thousands of years beneath a thick ice shelf that blotted out sunlight and prevented all but the hardiest things from eking out a living.

As we sit here in the ice, the seasons are changing, as evidenced by the eroding daylight. During a late summer's Antarctic night we received our first snowstorm. Wind wafted the falling flakes into waves. Several inches of snow gathered on the ship's decks. At 2 a.m. I wandered out onto the bow and recognized true darkness for the first time in weeks. Only the lights of the ship and three flood lamps throwing circles of light onto the wind-sculpted ice. A dozen white-winged snow petrels cruised in clockwise orbits around the ship, skimming inches above the snow, just at the edge of our little snow globe of light.

The birds zoomed by our port side with the wind at their backs, then levitated as they turned into the wind, beating their wings hard to regain momentum. I'm told that snow petrels will sometimes follow ice breakers as they crash through sea ice, snatching up hapless little krill that are thrown onto the ice in front of the ship. But with the ship at a standstill, their cavorting seemed a waste of energy in this cold and harsh (if also kind of pretty) environment—it's not as though they were catching fireflies.

Two birds of another kind also inhabited our summer nightscape: two emperor penguins sleeping on the ice, just off starboard. To find respite from predators such as leopard seals, these birds routinely haul out of the water and flop face-first into the snow—where they sleep. Our two emperors looked still and dead, like minor characters in some old western who'd taken gunshots in the back and fallen forward into the dust. The snow formed drifts around their little black bodies. One has to wonder whether this place was throwing us one last taunt as it chased us out of town. Or perhaps offering a quiet moment of consolation. —Douglas Fox

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