Aug 24

We’re anchored in a nice cove of an island after a comfortable overnight passage of 180 miles. The geology is very different from northern Labrador, which is all ancient gneiss (2.8 billion years), tall and dramatic, towering headlands and sharp-sided fjords. Now it’s dozens of rounded rock islands (only one billion years old), light in color but utterly gray because of the lichen, and not so high. And in the protected niches — trees! Our first in two weeks. Still, however, soil is rare; the fundamental landscape is bedrock. The Labrador coast is all about rock, really old rock. We should have brought geology, not botany, books. It’s like the American West, but two billion years older. More about that later.

Today we observed a neat optical effect peculiar to the arctic. On a desert a hotter air layer forms just above the land, bending the sky down and creating mirages. Here the opposite is true. The air layer above the water is colder and denser than the air above, so the result is like an optical fiber: you can see over the horizon. We could see icebergs that were forty miles away, well below our line of sight. Furthermore, the object is inverted. A conical island becomes an hourglass, with its summit meeting an upside-down copy. Jim took pictures of this: an hourglass island, an iceberg twice its real height, even one with a copy of itself displaced sideways. Apparently early explorers were fooled into mapping non-existent mountain ranges.