Gentoo penguin at Port Lockroy, on the Antarctic island of Goudier, near the Drake Passage
The Drake Passage is one of the most dangerous places in the world, and oceanographers consider it a “fascinating place.”
And the “most feared piece of ocean on the globe — and rightly so,” he wrote. Alfred Lansing about the journey of explorer Ernest Shackleton, in 1916, who crossed it in a small lifeboat.
The Drake Passage is, objectively, a vast body of water and is located at the bottom of the South American continent, between Chile, Argentina and Antarctica.
It is in this place that the strongest storms in the world occurtells . “The Southern Ocean is generally very stormy, but in the Drake you are squeezing (the water) between the Antarctic and the Southern Hemisphere,” he adds. “This intensifies the storms as they pass through.” He calls this the “funnel effect”, says the oceanographer Alexander Brearley.
“In the middle of the Drake Passage, the winds could have blown thousands of miles to where we are,” he explains. “THE kinetic energy is converted from wind to waves and forms storm waves.” Anyone who passes by then feels the “Drake shake”, or “Drake shakes”, as they are known.
These waves can reach up to 15 meters in heightit says. However, the average wave height on the Drake is much lower — four to five meters. Even so, it is double what is found in the Atlantic, for example.
“It’s not just turbulent on the surface, although that’s obviously what it feels most like, but is turbulent throughout the water column“, says Brearley, who regularly crosses the Drake on a research vessel.
Before the opening of the Panama Canal in 1914, ships passing from Europe to the western coast of the USA had to pass through the area. At the tip of South America there is even a memorial to the more than 10 thousand sailors who died there.
“We had very, very rough seas — waves of more than 20 meters“, recalls the captain Stanislas Devorsineone of three captains of Le Commandant Charcot, a polar ship from adventure cruise company Ponan. He made his debut on the Drake as captain more than 20 years ago, sailing an icebreaker full of scientists to Antarctica for a period of research.
“It was very windy, very busy“. Not that Ponant customers face anything like that. Devorsine is quick to point out that the comfort levels of a research vessel — and the conditions in which it will sail — are very different from those of a cruise ship.
“We are extremely cautious — the ocean is stronger than us”it says. “We cannot sail in bad weather. We go in rough seas, but always with a large margin of safety. We are not kidding.”
The Drake Passage receives some adventurous tourists every year. It’s scary, but for oceanographers like Brearley, it’s a “fascinating place.”
Edwina Lonsdalegeneral director of , an adventure travel agency, even compares the crossing to going to the moon. “If we went to the Moon, we would expect the trip to be uncomfortable, but it would be worth it“, she says. “We just have to think, ‘This is what I need to go from one world to the next’.”
