Sunlight at 3 a.m. on iceberg at 73º South, Ross Sea, Antarctica

24-hour summer sunlight is just one of the many wonders of polar regions. It is a photographer’s dream, but also challenging when the need to sleep takes over in the small hours of the morning, despite glorious sunlit scenes all around.

So it was for me in the Ross Sea region of Antarctica: I was desperately tired after having missed sleep the preceding few nights, yet I was powerless to tear myself away from scenes such as this and allow myself to sleep even for just a short while. Knowing that I may never return to the Ross Sea again, I stayed awake as long as possible every ‘night’ to make the most of it.

Aboard the polar vessel Akademik Shokalskiy we had been negotiating open pack ice for several days, and, as we progressed northward, the sun got progressively lower at midnight each night giving deeper and deeper sunset/sunrise colours. For a couple of hours either side of midnight the sun would be low enough to the south to cast beautiful tones of yellow and orange over the pack ice before slowly rising again.

On this particular night the temperature had fallen to about -5 ºC, sufficiently cold for a thin skin of new ice to form in patches on the sea surface and giving the water a glazed appearance. At about 3 a.m. we passed close to this small, old tabular iceberg, its faces glowing a beautiful golden yellow in the low sunlight. Thickening pack had slowed our progress to only a couple of knots, which gave me plenty of time to retrieve my camera and take my time over a handful of now-precious photographs before we finally left the iceberg behind.