Yesterday I spent an hour in a different world. I've seen sights in Antarctica before that I thought were foreign, but nothing like this. This was the birth of sea ice, and even the veteran captain of the ship had never seen anything like it before.

I call it Phosphorescing Pancake Ice. I think the technical term would be Pancake Ice mixed with Slush, and it coated the surface of the sea as far as one could see.

We've been trained through experiences to expect large bodies of water to behave a certain way. Few of us have been unlucky, odd, or lucky enough to observe large bodies of liquid other than pure water under normal g forces. The few us that have helped clean up an oil spill, worked in an industrial Jello(TM)(R) plant, day-dreamed of oceans on Mars, or sailed the seas of Antarctic might understand what we saw yesterday.

The waves rolled past us. But something was different. They were both too tall and too low and wide, at the same time, for themselves. They appeared to move in slow motion. There were no small ripples on the surface of these giant swells. They were completely smooth. The pancake-pattern coating of ice made the surface look like the body of a giant white leopard flexing its muscles underneath us.

This much is common, when sea ice is born. But our seas had just the right amount of slush so that each wave glowed or flashed as the peak moved slowly by us. I think the water was draining from the peak of each wave so that the slush flashed a pure snow-white as opposed to a wet gray on the face and trough.

We captured HD video of it but I cannot post it from the boat. I think there will be plenty of images or movies of "Pancake Ice" if you search the interweb. Combine one of these images with an image of "Phosphorescence Sea Waves" to get graphic of what I describe above.