Well it’s been a few days of intensive sight-seeing and I finally have a moment to catch up on the Blog.
From Puerto Montt we travelled to Puerto Chacabuco and then the Northern Patagonian ice-fields incorporating Laguna San Rafael, Aiken del Sur Park, Riesco Lake and numerous glaciers.
The park was full of very unusual plants including the endemic fuchsia and a giant annual plant related to the rhubarb.
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| Native fuchsia - very pretty and delicate |
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| GIANT Rhubarb - 3 metres high |
They treated us to an excellent lunch of lamb cooked over the coals
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| Roast lamb anyone??? |
We then caught a catamaran to Laguna San Rafael and got very up close and personal with the enormous glacier. The scale is hard to depict with holiday snaps but the tidal glacial wall is about 100 metres high and the face of the glacier more than a kilometre across.
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| 100 metre high tidal glacial wall |
It was absolutely freezing, but we were dressed for the occasion!
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| Douglas and Mrs Mawson???? |
We saw dozens of ice bergs (those bits of floating ice more than 3 metres high) and even more ‘growlers’ - the smaller glacial chips. There are a myriad of technical terms relating to glaciers, but I've forgotten most of what I've been told already. Probably due to the postprandial Brandy Alexanders I've been consuming.
We've seen two types of glaciers:
· Tidal i.e. where the mouth of the glacier meets to sea and
· Hanging i.e. where the glacier stops before reaching the water.
Due to the changing climate, the number of tidal glaciers in this region is disappearing at an alarming rate. The edge of this glacier has retreated about 2 kms in the last 13 years – the small white line to the left shows the edge of the glacier in 2000 compared the 2013. Scary, huh?
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| The changing face of a glacier |
One of the on board experts was from Chile via Italy. He commented that one of the problems with this remote area is that many international naturalists etc. do research in the area but then return to their home countries and sometimes don't remember to share the information that could be useful in protecting this fragile environment - he is trying turn that around.
We also saw smaller but no less specie Amalia (aka Skua) glacier as well as the El Brujo (witch’s) glacier where there is a very remote ranger station.
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| White building - remote ranger station |
The ship radioed in to the rangers to make sure everything was OK – they requested a supply of AA batteries and were also supplied with some fresh fruit – in return we were given a chunk of glacial ice – see the official display. The rangers were as part of their duties studying the very endangered Huemul deer. This is the the national animal of Chile - the condor is the national bird - and they have found around 40 living in the vicinity which is good news.
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| Glacier chunk on display with ice carvings and 'volcano' |
Later in the evening we passed the wreck of the Santa Leonor from 1968; this wreck apparently caused the standardisation of naval terminology as the comment 'Alright', was taken to mean full right (starboard) rudder and the ship ran aground in the nearby shallows at speed. From that date forward, only port or starboard could be used as navigational instruction. Our thanks go to our friend Peggy for this image as we missed it.
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| Santa Leonor wreck |
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