A Year on Ice-Humbling and Character building experience!

Abstract

Antarctica! The most hostile yet the breathtakingly beautiful landmass on the earth. It gives true feeling of vast dynamic forces of nature. Its haunting beauty is inspirational. It’s a place in the world where you experience absolute silence. Antarctica is the harshest, driest, coldest, windiest continent at the bottom of the earth. Treacherous weather yet a land of stunning panoramas, wide sweeping glaciers, turbulent ice-falls and vast majestic snow-covered landscapes. In summer, these are seen under a permanent sun that whirls relentlessly along the horizon and in winter continuous darkness obscures everything. Each sunrise and sunset are unique, and colours directly flow from heaven. The colours get reflected from pure white snow and there is a shower of many divine colours all around. Antarctica is a spiritual experience! Here the sun, moon do not always rise in the east and set in the west. The midnight sun sets for 10 minutes in the south at the beginning of winter here and the Polar night ends when sun rises for the first time in the North. Clouds with ice crystals give multiple images of sun, and cold weather plays tricks giving rise to astonishing mirages- don’t be surprised if you happen to see a ship or a piston bulley upside down! It is that part of the planet earth, where humans did not get a chance to interfere with nature. Southern Ocean encircling this continent freeze in winter resulting in doubling the size of the land mass-A pulsatile continent! Antarctica is cut off from the rest of the world during harsh winter months from March to October. Highest of all the continents, Lowest recorded temperatures (-89 degree) and violent snow storms (winds over 250 kmph); it’s indeed a unique place on earth! Its beauty is ethereal…On clear winter nights, there arise southern lights, or Aurora Australis from behind the ice shelf -often rolling waves of green, blue, red like a giant wheel of fairy dust. They are seen undulating over our head and spreading to fill the sky, moving like waves after waves; just like huge curtains spreading down from heaven. It was an emotional, life changing experience that one can only sit on the knees, hands folded, with tears in the eyes!