reflections

Melchior Islands

Jaws of hell

Poseidon... or is it Neptune... looking down on the madmen entering his realm....
Imagine he grinds his teeth right now...

The mouth of the sirene....

Everybody knows what is inside, but still it is tempting to go and try to have a look....

signs of danger

The front of a glacier collapses in the very moment when this yacht passes....

Different types of penguins

A giant amongst us.... kings penguin, chinstrap and gentoo...

Adelie penguin
There are 38 colonies of Adelie penguins and over 5 million Adelies in the Ross Sea Region. With a reduction in sea ice and scarcity of food, their numbers have dropped by 65% over the past 25 years

Gentoo penguin
The total breeding population is estimated to be over 300,000 pairs on the subantarctic islands

Chinstrap penguin
There are approximately 7,500,000 breeding pairs in the South Sandwich Islands, Antarctica, the South Orkneys, South Shetland, South Georgia, Bouvet Island, Balleny and Peter Island.

living in a world of luxury: Magellanic penguin in a colony in the Beagle Channel close to Ushuaia:
Breeding in coastal Argentina, Chile and the Falkland Islands, with some migrating to Brazil, this is the most numerous of penguins.

The penguin highway

Penguins tend to have problems walking in deep snow....
therefore they walk in each others path, thereby creating a veritable penguin highway

if nothing helps nay more, sliding on your tummy is the last option

trails of shit

Gentoo penguin's nests are frequently surrounded by a corona of white trails - they depose of their shit with an remarkable force equalling the pressure in a car tyre. This was actually subject of the research of a Victor Benno Meyer-Rochow of the University of Bremen in Germany, who was nominated for the ignoble (alternative) Nobel prize. He found out, that the force is needed, because the contents of the intestines is so acid that their skin and feathers would be damaged if it would stay on there.