Lemaire Channel

The Lemaire Channel is a strait eleven kilometres long and in places only a few hundred metres wide between the peninsula and Booth Island, lined on both sides by sheer peaks and glaciers dropping straight into the water. It is the most photographed passage in Antarctica, and almost every voyage that reaches this far south sails it when the ice allows. Brash ice and bergs can block it completely. At its southern end Petermann Island holds Adélie and gentoo penguins together, and Pleneau Island next to it is known for a graveyard of grounded icebergs. Humpbacks and minke whales feed in the channel.