by white scuds of cloud. Sea and sky—roughly in equal proportion, with a minimum of ice—mirror one another.
With the progradation of the pack, with the deepening of winter, with proximity to the continent, the proportion of ice effects increases. On the seaward fringe of the pack there is not enough ice, while along the shore there is too much. Between these extremes, however, the pack is at its most attractive. There are variations in the objects that populate the scene, in the mixtures of sea, light, cloud, air, and ice, in the choice of perspective. In particular, the appearance of the pack changes dramatically with changes in the character and the distribution of incident light. For much of the year, a veil of snow drizzle, sea smoke, and ice fog envelops the terrane and blocks, distorts, and reflects incoming sunlight. But breaks in the clouds, new orientations of the object to sunlight, and movement of the ice can swiftly recompose and color the same collection of objects.
During the austral summer, sunlight is rarely blocked completely. The cloud deck is low, often consisting of sea smoke or ice fog. Yet there are breaks from time to time, and the dense haze is partially translucent. With or without openings light diffuses through the veil, reduced in intensity and sometimes scattered to bluish hues. Often light is so altered that apparent shadows replace true shadows. It is possible to look to one side of a scene, immersed in diffused sunlight, to discover a virtual whiteout, with heavy pack ice, ghostly icebergs, and finely sprayed fog merged into a single pale luminescence. To the other side, the shadow zone, objects are distinct. Ice floes and bergs gleam iridescently, as if from some inner radiance; the sea glowers in dull black; and the clouds thicken gloomily. In the same way, an iceberg may present a greyish or dull ivory color at one locale, then after passing out of the shadow zone glow a brilliant white.
The surface texture and composition of the ice masses also vary the character of the reflected light. Fresh snow on a floe or berg radiates a dazzling white; meltwater, dull yellow; exposed sea ice, a yellow grey, often lightly stained brown; and exposed glacial ice, blue and white. Just beneath the sea surface, washed free of snow, ice appears green and turquoise. At times, in vigorous sunlight, the ice gleams like whalebone; and in light more strongly filtered and scattered, it is a pale blue. Apertures of blue and turquoise sky may momentarily open in the cloud deck to immerse the surface in brilliant, if localized, lighting effects. Sunlight on ice clouds and ice surfaces induces optical spectacles—haloes, parhelia, arcs—and the surface inversion above the pack promotes mirages. Where clouds reflect open leads, a dark water-sky results. Where the pack is reflected, the yellow-white flush of iceblink brightens the cloying haze.
Seawater, too, exhibits a range of colors as a function of how much incident light is scattered and absorbed. The waters of the Southern Ocean are famously pure, adding little coloration through light scatter from contaminants. When the sun shines directly on open water, the sea appears a dull green-grey. When viewed in thin shadow, the sea seems darkly blue-grey. In deep shadow, with maximum absorption and minimum scatter, the sea is as black as tar. Thus, a composite scene of bergs, floes, and sea may be swallowed up into whitish obscurity when viewed in strong light and low fog; or reveal muted contrasts of shape and design when observed in a shadow zone; or starkly counterpoint black sea and white ice, bluish berg and turquoise streaks of open sky, when seen under a deep or fractured overcast.
The pack may be profusely populated with scenic objects. Small chunks of ice litter the sea like frozen foam. Sea ice floes endlessly change shape, color, and motions, both individually and collectively. Bergs, like prisms, may capture and refract light differently as they raft across the scene. No other ice terrane possesses so many kinds of ices or such a welter of ice masses of different dimensions. Even more, there is life. Penguins and seals adorn floes with color, shape, and movement. Sea ice biotas stain floes. The combinations are endless.
Seen from beneath, the translucent ice suffuses the interacting blue, white, and green light with a subfloe topography punctuated by spires and hummocks. The view is arresting, but too strongly filtered by the ice to hold interest for long. Viewed from above, the pack presents a wonderfully abstract geometry. Its pattern of ruptures and sutures makes an ice embroidery of floes. Their different ages, as they congeal or dissolve, make floes differentially translucent and colored. A melange of dark sea and white ice, of serpentine polynyas and rigid ice polygons, combines the genres of action painting, collage, and abstract expressionism. Where the pack is dense and snow-covered, the white of the ice overpowers the white of the clouds; clouds glide over the icescape like disembodied grey shadows. All these perspectives of the pack, moreover, have in common that they are pictures of surfaces, patterns of colors on a flat canvas of sea and ice. They lack depth, borders. Yet this variety of perspectives is nowhere else approached by the ice terranes of Antarctica.
The pack is most interesting when it exhibits, within a single scene, a good mixture of all its potential effects. Such an ensemble is rare. More typical is the modulation of a given scene by variations in the intensity and the distribution of light. The result is a subtle permutation of color or of apparent composition. There is a darkening or lightening of hues or a reconstitution of ice and sea amid a somber twilight. The scene simplifies into a vast duotone of grey, dull ivory, or pale blue. In dense, overcast pack, sky and sea take on the same color, sheen, and texture. In the absence of motion and color the horizon vanishes into a common smudge of grey. The sparseness of strong light blurs shape as well as color into an immense spectral monotone. Gneisslike bands of slightly lighter or darker greys differentiate the elements of the scene—if anything can. This oppressive uniformity is broken only by the irregular arrangement of ice. White on white, grey on grey, opaque cloud on opaque floe, flat ice on a flat horizon of floe and fog, a collage of white particles on a white surface. Only icebergs, mountainous white shadows, manage to interrupt the scene. Occasionally, a berg of blue ice, still enveloped in mist, captures a shaft of sunlight and gleams like sapphire, an effect both stunning and enchanting—the setting of a blue sun amid a grey twilight.
As autumn deepens and the pack stiffens near the coast, the terrane sheds the variability of light, motion, and objects that makes it attractive. Instead, by a process of subtraction, the scene simplifies and intensifies. More and more is removed. The scene is compressed, like the Antarctic sea and atmosphere, into a shallow surface—a linearity of banded low clouds, floes, and tabular bergs. Perspective lapses into indeterminacy. Composition blurs as borders proceed to infinity and objects lose their mass and structure. Color is erased into whiteout and greyout. Even motion slows. The pack, welding into a continuous sheet, dampens ocean swells. The only movement is the slow freezing of open leads, the grappling of frazil ice to floe, the muted impact of floe upon floe, the stately, imperceptible tread of the bergs—luminous shadows, ice sphinxes, full of grey inscrutability. The pack as a whole may move under the impress of tides and deep ocean swells, but it does so with ponderous undulations, like an earthquake in slow motion. Near the shore, as winter approaches, motion ceases. Ice fragments weld into a rigid mosaic of inertness, a still life painted in white and grey. Then, amidst the polar night, all discriminations are lost in a frozen entropic darkness.
These are the common esthetics of all The Ice. What makes the pack special among the icescapes of Antarctica is its relative abundance and variability, its dramatic mixing of Earth and Ice. Compared to normal landscapes, the pack is esthetically impoverished. What dramatic spectacles it contains appear episodically and mechanically. Compared, however, to the interior icescape—monolithic and seasonally invariant—the pack offers a bewildering ensemble of effects and scenery. Its matrix of fluids—the air and the sea—brings far more mobility and uncertainty to the scenery of the pack than is possible where an ice mass is wholly embedded in solids. There is an element of randomness. Surprise is possible. Accordingly, the pack is most spectacular where it mixes floes, sea, bergs, and broken sky; when the ice grows and moves and storms reshuffle; when the ice is not complete, the fog not total, the sky neither wholly obscured nor utterly open; when there is a certain proportion of light and dark in vivid contrast, not homogenized into a uniform twilight; when some ice surfaces reflect incident light and some ice prisms refract them. White ice abuts black sea, with no gradation between them other than the muted light that diffuses through mixed clouds.
It
