| Letter from Reckless #5 |
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Its Reckless here,
How are you all? I’m doing great; I’ve just had an amazing stop in Ushuaia which is the most southern city in the world. It sits at the bottom of South America in a region called Tierra del Fuego, which is Spanish for ‘The land of Fire’. Ushuaia itself is very nice. It has huge mountains rising up behind it and it’s where people from Argentina go to go skiing and snowboarding. We couldn’t do that this time, as its summer here and there isn’t much snow. Our visit to Ushuaia was a very special one because it was the first time a Royal Navy Ship had visited since 1982, so we had a fantastic reception and Anchor and I made lots of new friends. Gracias por una visita maravilloso en Ushuaia!
Our time in Antarctica was very, very busy as we created some new charts of areas, which had not been surveyed before. We also got to do some ice breaking which was very exciting because we had to smash our way through the ice, to get to the places we needed to look at. If you haven’t seen the films we made of HMS Endurance in Antarctica, have a look at them later on the website – they will amaze you.
While HMS Endurance was in Antarctica, her helicopters were used a lot as the pilots had to fly lots of hours each day taking stores and scientists to where they needed to go ashore. This meant that I got to do lots of flying as well and seeing the Antarctic ice from the air, was amazing. I also had the chance to go ashore and have a look at what some of the scientists from BAS (British Antarctic Survey) were doing in a place called Beak Island.
Antarctica is such an amazing place but did you know that geographers class the South Pole as a desert? I’m not joking; this is absolutely true - Bear’s honour! However, Antarctica isn’t a desert with camels, sand and palm trees everywhere. Because Antarctica gets less than 5mm of rain or snow each year, geographers describe it as a desert. Have you heard of the Sahara desert in Africa? In some parts of Antarctica like the dry valleys near McMurdo Sound, it is drier there than the Sahara Desert because hasn’t rained in the dry valleys for over 2 million years. As I write this to you we are on our way to the Antarctic for our third and final work period, and we will be there for 5 weeks this time. I hope to see many more amazing things down there so I can share my stories with you all. I hope you are all working hard at school and I look forward to hearing from you all soon. Yours aye, Reckless |
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