12th March 2017, Day 8

Glacial ice if you recall is transparent because the sheer weight of centuries of icefall squeezes every air bubble out.

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The tail of an ice dragon. OR an iceberg carved uncannily like one by time and tide. You pick.

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One of Nature's tricks to hypnotize unwitting sentients: twinkling sunlight on water. Fortunately there is no known cure.

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All is maya, unreal like a dream. It is familiarity that makes us believe otherwise. But hop on a plane and drop into a random spot on the other side of the world and you're literally amazed by the sheer illusion you once entertained about knowing what the world is all about.

And in this sense, Antarctica is a big blind spot, and by that logic, one of the best mirrors to wake us up from the reverie of maya.

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A panorama in 6 frames. Another incredibly sunny day with no cloud cover at all - we were actually sweating in 3 layers, but shivering a bit in 2 layers when the winds picked up. Never got used to that.

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Enjoying the company of my feathered friends. I'm sorry I wore an adventure jacket to your black tie event.

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Perhaps I haven't mentioned that this day would be our last day on Antarctica and we would begin our long voyage back to civilization that night. Everyone was in an obvious daze - bittersweet spirits I'm sure you can imagine - as if we knew a glimpse of the sublime we had been given would soon be taken away.

Who knew 10 days would yield a lifetime of memories? Who would've thought the sights and sounds would be so overwhelming that some would just stop dead in their tracks and have to practice meditation to process the myriad thoughts and emotions welling to the surface, threatening to make poets of everyone in attendance?

This is the fate of man when confronted again with Nature: awe sheer awe. As one of the expedition mates took care to iterate once and again, Earth is the only planet we know of that harbours this incredible dance of life. Why here? Why these atoms? Why these colors? Why these incredible forms? To what do I owe this honour to share this moment with billions of fellow sentients?

It may be millennia still until we understand the origins of life, or better still the purpose of existence, but let's never forget the incredible planet that was our nursery and our university, that gave and gives as we took and take. Let's whisper a silent thank you and do whatever we can to preserve this incredible place we have been born into. There's no place like home. I love you mama Earth <3

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And then @chiwa_24 lost it and went full penguin. Hilarity ensued.

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Wonder what we would see that afternoon!

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Penguins' point of view.

These little fellows are so well-adapted to Antarctic conditions, that they are among the few to enjoy such views. It's not easy living in Antarctica - everyone knows the winter ordeal of the Emperor penguins as they brave the six-month cold night just to give their chicks a headstart in spring.

As for the other species, they spend more time on the coasts, and as winter approaches, they may retreat to sub--Antarctic islands that ring the continent. They return in spring and start laying eggs, hatching their offspring, keeping them safe from opportunistic skuas, getting them ready for hunting and swimming, all before the chill and dark of winter sets in again.

I remember watching David Attenborough's excellent Planet Earth in a back-to-back marathon once. What really struck me was that almost every exotic biome he describes - like deep sea vents, deserts, polar tundras, mountain ranges - he mentioned that the conditions were nigh inhospitable and *yet* there was life. Not just a couple of stubborn stragglers, but an entire ecosystem of specialized critters. "Give life half a chance, and it will bounce back," he softly says to the camera. I believe it. I hope there will be enough diversity left to repopulate the planet when we're done with our unwitting raids on our own home planet.

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The curves and crevasses of a glacier. The front atop the water surface was easily 3-5 storeys tall, and actively calving. In fact, we were told to get to higher ground as soon as we landed because a sudden release of big chunks might create mini-tsunamis. So that was pretty cool. We did see and hear a few calving episodes - from afar, the chunks looked small relative to the glacier but judging by the waves they caused, they were easily big enough to crush a man underneath. The sound echoed through the entire icemass, like echoes of rocks tumbling in massive caves.

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All sense of scale whitewashed away. The brain simply incapable of appreciating the true size/distance of things. Like an effortless optical illusion.

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I just sat there for a long time, what felt like forever, or at least I wished it could be. Observing. The cold mists rolling down the surrounding peaks.

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Always loved being around mountains, the sense of being dwarfed by impossible massive elements that are bigger and older than you, roles reversing feeling like a tick crawling on a giant's skin.

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Chilling on natural hammocks, these crabeaters napped and awoke to the best views of the bay.

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Not often do we come across such unspoilt land and water. Nature is such a dynamic process with so many moving parts, but very unlikely to ever describe any natural scene as "polluted". Think about that. This is a industrial ecology that has had 3.8 billion years of R&D to get to this level of interconnected efficiency. Let's learn from it as much as we can. It is simply essential to move forward into a sustainable, maybe even regenerative, mode of civilization.

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Sights like this render you speechless, and perhaps that's a good thing. Not everything that can be perceived can be put to words you know?

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Nature squared.

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How to instantly beautify your landscape photos? Just add whale!

Seriously though, these giants are so unexpectedly graceful, they literally glide in the water.

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We never got tired of whale watching.

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Or seal-chasing.

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Or bird-watching.

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Simply unreal lighting conditions, that framed a couple of logging whales in a kind of glow I can't explain. Can you make out the sprays from the blowholes?

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But if I've learnt something, it's that the entirety of Earth can be this way - wherever we live. There is nothing instrinsic to human civilization that has to necessarily destroy the environment, and our cynical illusion that this is the case is preventing us from envisioning a mode of civilization that is inspired by the planet. Remember though this is not a matter of being cleaner, this is about a need to deeply and fundamentally redesign our living systems to be synergetic with our planetary life support systems. This is not just a favour we're doing to the planet, it's a favour we do for ourselves as well. Who in their right mind wouldn't want to live in a heavenly place - where humans, plants and animals live in harmonious interdependent cycles? What is so wrong with that vision?

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The fact that a place like Antarctica exists is mind-blowing. Thanks to its remote location, and its crazy weather conditions, and more recently the successful ratification of the Antarctic Treaty, an entire continent of wilderness, relatively untouched, still exists on Earth. Much as we'd like to imagine ourselves as being of outsized importance, the biblically appointed caretakers of Earth and its denizens, our track record hasn't been that great. Luckily, Antarctica has been spared from most of these excesses so far. But even from afar, the human touch is affecting Antarctica - human-induced climate change is slowly but surely shifting the conditions on this continent, affecting the ecosystem and the seasonal landscape itself. In a nutshell, think of our polar caps as working double-duty to cool down a hotter Earth, at their expense.

And ironically, the warmer and ice-free these areas become, the more corporate interest grows in exploiting resources in Antarctica - be it fishing, mining, oil & gas drilling... the list goes on.

The 2041 Foundation, headed by Robert Swan who himself was given this charge by legendary explorer Jacques Cousteau, is dedicated to not let that happen. To preserve Antarctica as a wilderness continent for posterity. And I'm confident that the 85 others who joined me on this expedition are now passionate Antarctic ambassadors too - dedicated to that very same cause.

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Antarctica has its own way of putting you in your place, making you keenly aware of bigger perspectives in terms of both time and scale.

Even on the first day, the expedition leader said "This is a land that grabs hold of you, a part of it stays with you forever." I thought that was dramatic then but now I get it.

Goodbye Antarctica, I'll remember you forever.

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And then it was time to return to reality…