Wind, Fire, and Ice: The Perils of a Coast Guard Icebreaker in Antarctica

Excerpt — Chapter 1: In Shackleton’s Wake

Although the ship vibrated from the thrust of its massive diesel engines, it barely moved. I dreaded to think what that might mean.

I stood alone on the cheerless fantail, aimlessly looking at broken chunks of ice pack rocking back and forth in the prop wash. Most of the fractured pieces of ice were about the size of a flattened pickup truck. A small group of penguins stood off to the side, squawking and staring, as if they had never seen a human being or a ship before. Maybe that was true. We were deep in the Weddell Sea, off the coast of Antarctica. It had been over fifty years since another ship had traversed this particular patch of ocean: Sir Ernest Shackleton’s ill-fated ship, the Endurance. Shackleton was the leader of the Imperial Trans-Antarctic Expedition (1914–1916), the most heroic and epic in Antarctica’s history.

I knew too much about what Shackleton and his men had suffered.

A serpentine trail of fractured ice extended off our stern for about 200 yards. It had taken most of the day to travel this short distance. On either side of our wake lay a blinding white expanse of sea ice. Jagged ridges of tented and buckled ice crisscrossed this expanse. Massive icebergs in the distance dwarfed the compressed ridges. Some of the bergs were 100 feet high and 20 miles square. Yet even those huge icebergs looked small compared to the nearby continental ice shelf, which soared 150 feet into the crystalline blue sky. And it stretched from east to west as far as the eye could see.