Happy Holidays at Lake Hoare

LeeAnn and I finished our second 24 hour sampling event-just in time to join holiday festivities. This included decorating cookies and camp.

We all decorated the gingerbread house that Rae and Sandra had baked a few days prior (equipped with candy-pane windows). (We covered the windows with dark cloth to block out the 24 hour sunlight and illuminated our special dinner with lights and candles).

We exchanged gifts and laughter after our wonderful holiday meal!

Tomorrow I fly back to McMurdo and will post more pics from the field. Happy Holidays!

Two times 24

House Stream (LeeAnn's first Taylor Valley Samples).Salt in the soil, drawn from the lake... patterned ground created by freezing and thawing of the icy soil (much like pot holes in the pavement)
Canada Stream Gauge (Flume with stage height- used to determine the amount of flow per/time, otherwise known as discharge)
Our sampling coolers, we had some help unloading sampling equipment.
Done with our first 24 hours, (waiting to find out if we had helo support or if we had to hike to Lake Fryxell Camp)
(We rolled out of our helo wait position and hiked to Lake Fryxell, our LTER and NASA friends had prepared a nice spaghetti dinner and we had nice conversations until we fell soundly asleep).

LeeAnn and I have been sampling a lot of bottles in a row. Because of a helo delay we got started sampling Canada Stream a few hours late, another helo delay had us staying the night at Lake Fryxell Camp, and so soon after completing our first 24 hour sampling cycle, we are in the midst of another. I have been filtering time-sensitive samples from our first collections in between collecting our next set from Andersen Creek. LeeAnn and I are rotating sleeping, sampling, putting together sampling bottles, and filtering. In the meantime, camp is alive with holiday cheer, I'll post some pics of the cookies that are keeping us going soon! We're exhausted, but wouldn't trade it for this amazing experience!

Whittled Away

We can walk alone in the Taylor Valley, attached to civilization by a radio. Stretching legs, you wonder what you are doing heading out into the striking landscape, so whittled by the elements. The winds or snow set in at you feel changed by the mesmerizing power. You know you will make it back to camp, but shudder. So thankful that your body is fueled by sugar and motion. This is not our permanent camp, especially, in a timescale of millions of years- the age of the oldest exposed terraces. Small resilient creatures thrive here, their bodies joined to rock and sediment, or entombed in ice to revitalize for a few watery blinks every year. Some ancient and some newly birthed, a mystery to solve. Their persistence endures.

What the glacier tells us

We've had a great deal of melt over the last few days. The lower Canada Glacier has swift streams and ponds collect in pools, that pour from their pinched outflows. Sediment melts into the glacier and creating pocked surfaces and odd meltforms. All this water means that a whole lot of science is underway. Liz Bagshaw (Martyn Tranter's dissertation student) is examining nutrients and other chemical info in cryoconite holes, the ice-lidded tombs that form from sediment melting into the glacier surface. Matt Hoffman (Andrew Fountain's dissertation student) is working to understand and model how glacier melt occurs on polar glaciers and what this means for lake levels. I spent much of yesterday collecting trace metal samples from the streams and lakes on the glacier. (I collected the inflows and outflow from the large pond in several of the above pictures along with several more isolated cryoconite holes).

Day of Reflection

Its Sunday, our day of rest and showers. The glaciers flow cleansing their dirty faces, and the once abundant snow patches are now disappearing. Pulled down to the streams and vaporized in the sun. This rare year of snow; erased. Only the highest parts of the accumulation zone retain their snowy mass, keeping these glaciers in rare equilibrium. Today I am going to hike up the mountain behind camp with my water colors, yesterday was warm enough for windpants and a dark Smartwool top- I had my head open to the sun, relieved. This break is well needed as well as the time to appreciate this great valley. I am ever reverent.

Antarctic Freeway: fast ATVs, faster streams

I hopped a ride with the stream team to House Stream (flowing along the eastern margin of the Suess Glacier).
Lee collected some algal mat samples while we assisted.
A crab-eater seal vertebra fell victim to the stream.
Sampling is going well, I have most of my supraglacial (on-glacier) samples complete and will collect the rest of them over the next week. Dr. LeeAnn Munk from the University of Alaska, Anchorage has arrived in town (McMurdo) and we will be conducting a 24 hour sampling scheme on the two streams flowing along Canada Glacier. (We will are working alongside my advisor, Dr. Berry Lyons and Kathy Welch). I am so excited to see LeeAnn, she completed her dissertation with Dr. Gunter Faure when I first started graduate school-and she is wonderful!

Waterfalls for my flat friends

While I was working in the lab, my flat friends ventured over Canada Glacier to gaze down at Lake Fryxell and the gushing Canada Stream. The Frankenburg fish wanted to swim in the lake, but alas there are no fish in these strange ice-covered waters.A little upset that the lake was not fish-friendly, the fish, gator and penguin waddled across the Canada Glacier, enjoying the view of an icefall.
They raced back to camp to tell me that water was flowing from the glacier. A glorious waterfall! The field season has truly begun!
The camp set in shadows, yet melt everywhere, the lakes, ponds and glaciers alive!

Dusty Life

Canada Glacier
Pond behind Andrew's ridge south of Lake Hoare
Canada Glacier ( left) and Mount Erebus (distant right)

Today Sandra (camp assistant) and I sampled the lower western part of the Canada Glacier, the lower the easier to find melt. Sediment blown onto the glacier is heated by the circling sun, melting into the glacier's surface. Channels meander or race down the glacier wherever the sediment is blown and collects. In this way, the sediments make their way back down off the glacier back to the wind-belted bed it came from. The lighter, more mobile dust particles are blown further up the glacier high into the zone where snow accumulates and beyond. Dust from major glaciations (when Columbus, Ohio was covered by ice) blew into the oceans fertilizing them, providing valuable nutrition.

What role do the dust and sediment play for the life existing in these extreme conditions?

Welcome the Water

Lake Ice
Camp at Lake Hoare, below Canada Glacier

Howard Glacier

At last! The streams are melting! My fingers are looking forward to shunting all the blood straight to my sample collecting core as I pull on poly gloves and blissfully dip collection bottles.

Unless it snows or stays gray for a few days in a row, the streams have some thermal inertia. If you put an ice cube (O degrees C) on the stove and heat it until it melts and reaches a temperature of around 10 degrees C, you have used approximately the same amount of energy as it would take to heat 10 degree water to boiling (at 100 C).... what this means is that melting should continue unless we drop more than 5 below C, it clouds up for several days in a row, or it snows...

Anyway, I will be going up on the glacier to collect melt tomorrow, and today I am heading out to sample with the lake (limno) team. In the meantime above are some pictures of icier times.

Mars on Earth

Some of the below pictures are from my hike yesterday, others are from NASA images of Mars. 1) Do you spot the martians? 2) Can you tell which pictures are of Taylor Valley?

a.b.
c.
d.
e.
f.
g.
h.
i.

Lake Fryxell and Glacier Berries

We made it to Lake Fryxell yesterday! (see the snow/ice covered patch in valley basin below) I sampled the moat for pH, DOC, metals, and major ions, all indicators of the geochemical-ecological processes occuring in the Lake. The breeze, an icy breath from the Ross Sea, was persistent, so we ate and drank constantly (drinking water frequently is really important to staying warm, more so than eating as your body requires water to regulate its temperature).
To get there, we hiked up the western margin of Canada Glacier, a feat that required stablizers to handle the refrozen snow. Stabilizers are like strap on sandals that have screws sticking out the bottom to minimize slipping. The don't have front points like crampons and can only handle minimal changes in topography. Without them, you would slide not so gracefully into the side of the glacier like a lost seal trying to find its way back to the sea... Once we were parallel with the base of the icefall, we crossed the glacier across a flagged route (we crossed this way, because the GA, Matt, had not used crampons before and this is the approved route for non-glacier crews using stabilizers).

My flat friends waddled slowly behind us, wading up to their bellies in the high amount of snow that has fallen this spring/summer. (Normally, the Taylor Valley averages around 10 cm/yr of snow- but it looks as though at least that has fallen in the past month).
Here is our view on the east side of the glacier, before we headed down to the lake.
At the end of the day, we had a nice cup of tea from the melt of glacier berries (above in the crate, and below along the margin of the glacier). Until Lake Hoare moats opens up, glacier berries are the preferred source of drinking water. Also, Lake Hoare is the only 'freshwater' lake that we can drink from in the valleys. The rest are quite salty including the magnesium-rich lake mistakenly savored by early valley researchers that was aptly named Lake Chad.

2 Hours to Go

I'll be hiking across Canada Glacier to the east side and plan to sample Lake Fryxell today. I'm waiting until noon to leave because Matt, a GA (General Assistant), has flown in to help out at camp this weekend while Rae returns to McMurdo for a little while. We will be walking higher on the glacier, so it will be much less hummocky and the channels are all below the surface....