The kayaks slid into the pack ice and the guide made a single gesture: stop paddling. The boats drifted slowly among the broken floes, and then everyone heard it — that sound.
Fine, ceaseless, a crackling, as though the whole surface of the sea were softly bursting apart. The guide explained in a low voice: the shattered ice holds bubbles sealed away tens of thousands of years ago, and wherever it melts, the ancient air is released with a small ‘pop’. What you are hearing is the weather of ten thousand years ago, being handed back to the present day.
Further on, the face of the glacier stood in the sea, blue to the point of darkness. Its voice was of another kind entirely: a low, muffled, thunder-like groan, rising from somewhere very deep, once every few minutes. That was the pressure moving within the body of the ice. Then, suddenly, one clean tremendous crack — a block calved into the sea not far off, and a white swell came pushing slowly towards us, lifting the kayaks gently and setting them gently down again, as though something vast had touched us, politely.
Back aboard, one guest wrote in her journal: I had always thought ice was silent; only today did I learn that ice is a very slow kind of sound.
This is exactly why we like to arrange the kayaks: a Zodiac’s engine would drown all of it. Only when the power is cut and you make yourself small will Antarctica consent to speak its language to you.