Champ Island, Franz Josef Land
Today we anchored off Cape Fiume on Champ Island and made our first helicopter landing ashore. The place we visited is the site of a large outcropping of the Vasiliev Formation, a sandstone unit which was laid down in a shallow, nearshore marine environment in the Early Jurassic, about 210 million years ago. The sandstone contains numerous coal layers which indicate that is was deposited in a warm bay with a clean sandy bottom bordered by swamps similar to what we find in the Gulf of Mexico today. Russian geologists have found skeletons of plesiosaurs (aquatic dinosaurs) in Franz Josef Land, indicating that the climate was once very different from the harsh arctic environment of today.
One of the most interesting features of the sandstone is a considerable number of very large sandstone spheres which were clearly formed when the sandstone was in place and are not the product of later erosional processes, except to free them from the surrounding sandstone matrix. On the ground there are numerous grape-sized nodules of iron pyrite which appear to be the nuclei of these large spheres. Apparently sulphur-rich groundwater, acting through capillary action in the pore spaces of this very porous sandstone, has spread the pyrite solution concentrically out from the nuclear nodules and cemented the sandstone together to form these spheres, which then weather out intact. Visiting the site is like walking through some giant’s bocce ball alley.
We later re-boarded the Kapitan Dranitsyn and again sought the pack ice. We were rewarded by sightings of several polar bears, one of which provided the most exciting drama that any of the veteran arctic travelers aboard had ever seen. A large bear, using his extraordinary olfactory ability, detected a bearded seal on another ice floe. As we watched at very close range, the bear began to approach the seal, staying hidden behind the ice. He then went into the water and swam submerged to the ice floe on which the seal lay. Suddenly he shot out of the water and seized the seal which then desperately started to spin away trying to reach the water on the ice edge. The two went into the water together and the fight continued amid a tremendous splashing and thrashing about. Finally, the seal apparently escaped, undoubtedly injured, because the bear regained the ice and walked off disappointed. Certainly it had happened before, because polar bears have a quite low success rate in their attacks on seals and the bearded seal is very large, perhaps 750 lbs., so difficult to hold onto in the water. Still a missed meal is critical to these animals living on the edge here in the high arctic. None of us had ever observed this hunting drama so fully played out before. It was indeed the sighting of a lifetime.
Today we anchored off Cape Fiume on Champ Island and made our first helicopter landing ashore. The place we visited is the site of a large outcropping of the Vasiliev Formation, a sandstone unit which was laid down in a shallow, nearshore marine environment in the Early Jurassic, about 210 million years ago. The sandstone contains numerous coal layers which indicate that is was deposited in a warm bay with a clean sandy bottom bordered by swamps similar to what we find in the Gulf of Mexico today. Russian geologists have found skeletons of plesiosaurs (aquatic dinosaurs) in Franz Josef Land, indicating that the climate was once very different from the harsh arctic environment of today.
One of the most interesting features of the sandstone is a considerable number of very large sandstone spheres which were clearly formed when the sandstone was in place and are not the product of later erosional processes, except to free them from the surrounding sandstone matrix. On the ground there are numerous grape-sized nodules of iron pyrite which appear to be the nuclei of these large spheres. Apparently sulphur-rich groundwater, acting through capillary action in the pore spaces of this very porous sandstone, has spread the pyrite solution concentrically out from the nuclear nodules and cemented the sandstone together to form these spheres, which then weather out intact. Visiting the site is like walking through some giant’s bocce ball alley.
We later re-boarded the Kapitan Dranitsyn and again sought the pack ice. We were rewarded by sightings of several polar bears, one of which provided the most exciting drama that any of the veteran arctic travelers aboard had ever seen. A large bear, using his extraordinary olfactory ability, detected a bearded seal on another ice floe. As we watched at very close range, the bear began to approach the seal, staying hidden behind the ice. He then went into the water and swam submerged to the ice floe on which the seal lay. Suddenly he shot out of the water and seized the seal which then desperately started to spin away trying to reach the water on the ice edge. The two went into the water together and the fight continued amid a tremendous splashing and thrashing about. Finally, the seal apparently escaped, undoubtedly injured, because the bear regained the ice and walked off disappointed. Certainly it had happened before, because polar bears have a quite low success rate in their attacks on seals and the bearded seal is very large, perhaps 750 lbs., so difficult to hold onto in the water. Still a missed meal is critical to these animals living on the edge here in the high arctic. None of us had ever observed this hunting drama so fully played out before. It was indeed the sighting of a lifetime.
