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Commonwealth Glacier

Okay. Okay! Geez Lousie, I have a lot of catching up to do. Why do most of my entries start with that line?

What’s happened. The week of field work from hell. I mean, from heaven! Busy, but good.

Starting with Friday, November 28.

Bjorn and I were hoping to get out on two field projects together before he left. The first fell through, but the weather and helo schedule were in our favor for the second. We spent a lovely day with Thomas Nylen of Portland State University on the Commonwealth glacier which oozes out into Taylor valley, one of the infamous Dry Valleys.

The goal was to install one GPS receiver as a base station on a ridge alongside the glacier, and to install three more receivers on wood posts pounded into the glacier to measure the rate of glacier flow. Bjorn and Thomas had installed the equipment two weeks previous, but the batteries had died, so very little data was collected. It happens. Luckily, we had the opportunity to try again.

[On the glacier.]

[Thomas and Bjorn.]

The weather was warm, pleasant. I think we even worked with our gloves off. We got to hike around on cool rocks and on a glacier all day. I think the way I was planning on beginning this entry was as follows:

I saw a hollow granite boulder today! No, really! It was a granite boulder, and it was hollow! Hollowed out by the wind! That’s incredible! I’ve certainly never seen anything like that before.

The rocks in the Dry Valleys are crazy. Rocks crazy? There are all kinds of rocks, all shoved into piles together by glaciers past and present. Sedimentary rocks and igneous rocks and metamorphic rocks, all three, and not only are there of all three but there are strange types of all three. And then, the big boulders are in strange forms as well. Large curving sculptures crafted by the wind, elegant and unusual forms stretching upwards and outwards from the hillside.

In the ice, other gems. Holes which form in the ice surface which Thomas explained as patches where sediment has accelerated melting in all directions as the sun does its circles in the sky. The result is a perfect circle where water has melted and refrozen, trapping patterns which resemble an artists’ globes of glass. Or, considering which came before the other, an artist’s globes of glass resemble these holes melted and refrozen into the ice, which distort and move as you move your point of view around them.

[Scale = about 7-10 cm diameter.]

[Scale = same.]

Our work went well, and we had some time to relax before the helicopter picked us up. We dropped Thomas back at camp at Lake Hoare, just upvalley from where we were working, which was a treat in itself. The camp sits at the base of the Canada glacier, with a view up its steep wall. Scotty (helo pilot) flew us up past this wall of ice and over the heads of two researchers out on the ice of the lake, all ice and rock and us up and over exploring it. Scotty flew us along the ice edge on our way back, for my first view of emperor penguins. There were groups of them gathered along the ice edge, them big enough and us low enough that we could see the yellow patches on their chops. No whales, though. Not yet, not this time.

After we’d arrived back in McMurdo and had reorganized ourselves in the lab, Bjorn came in laughing. What’s funny? I asked. Nothing, he said. Oh, he continued, just that you had so much fun today.

Wouldn’t anyone?

Posted by beth at December 15, 2003 07:41 AM | TrackBack