weather phenomena
from: National Geographic, December 2009. “South Georgia rises sheer and stark from the sea”, by Kenneth Brower
South Georgia sometimes seems like a time-lapse film of weather – one of those frantic abridgments in which clouds boil across the sky while a stroboscobic flickering of light and shadow passes over the land. You sail into a bay in bright sunshine and air scrubbed clean by the ceaseless circumpolar wind. You really can see forever. The steep headlands are in intense, improbable green. Depth of field is infinite, from the kelp beds in the foreground to the snows of the peaks beyond. A glacier, cradled in its high cirque, sends a skein of streams down the rock wall, icy rivulets glittering so bright they hurt the eyes. Then, moments later, like Dorothy whirled back to Kansas, you look out on that same emerald Oz rendered suddenly in gray halftones. A new front has blown in. The sun is just a dimly glowing patch of cloud across which flurries of snowflakes swirl and eddy, dark patterns against the glow. South Georgia suffers from a meteorological version of bipolar disorder.