Thinking about the title of this segment lead me to open my Thesaurus.  My first word choice was ‘brutal’, but it didn’t seem the right word. It worked, but seemed too harsh, too negative, maybe. When I looked up synonyms to the word brutal I met with: Ruthless. Cruel. Pitiless. Heartless.

Maybe because of our human self-centeredness we feel that anything not friendly to us is against us.

But Antarctica isn’t any of those. It’s not concerned about emotions, revenge, or even survival. Antarctica isn’t harsh, Antarctica has a harsh environment, for humans. It isn’t concerned about anything human. In itself, Antarctica just…is.

Maybe that is one of the reasons coming here is so strange, unexpected, interesting. There is nothing human about this continent. It is foreign to us. It seems to exclude us and the very thing we prize most, life. Animal life only exists along the edges and is extremely sparse. For example, of all the billions of insects in the world, only one insect species is known to live here.

Everything human has to be packed in and secured by deep stakes… or it simply blows away. I remember reading in one of the books written by an early explorer about a 300 pound steel lid that landed almost on top of him after flew 50 meters. Wind.

But beauty abounds, stark cold blue and white and black beauty. Although if you’re lucky enough to see sunrise or sunset the colors can be so complex and varied, warm, extraordinary, surprising, astounding… pretty.

These pictures are from the Bransfield Straight, Gerlache Straight, Lamaire Channel and Paradise Harbour. You can also see how lucky we were with the mirror calm sea.

The End. (Of the world.)