Taylor Valley

Photos © 2006 Seth White

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Hello from a Qantas 747, about 1/3 of the way through the interminable Auckland-LA leg of the trip home. I spent one day in Christchurch after getting off the ice, and had an excellent time. I seem to be forming habits there: staying at the Windsor B&B, smoking Cuban cigars at the botanic gardens, visiting the Antarctic Display at the Canterbury Musesum (never gets old), and going to Pomeroy's pub for dinner and beers. I'm really anxious to get home this year, but that one day in Christchurch was fantastic - it really put the wind back in my sails. The last half of the season was excellent, but the last two days before I left I had developed a bad attitude about the whole thing. When I posted my last webpage from station, I even wrote that I was not a McMurdoite, and didn't really belong in that atmosphere (this, actually, is true). But the reality is that I had a very rewarding season in many ways. I shared some excellent experiences with good friends, completed some challenging and satisfying work, and visited lots of spectacular places. I wasn't going to post any more stuff from McMurdo this year, but if anything in my life warrants a posting on the internet, and this notion is questionable, some work I did in the Taylor Valley definitely belongs. This is a picture of the Lake Fryxell camp, located on the north side of the easternmost major lake in the Taylor Valley, with the Canada glacier to the right.
This is the GPS base station I set up over the benchmark "FRY1", fifty yards or so from the camp itself. On this trip, I came out to survey two of the little glacier-fed streams which flow into Lake Fryxell: the Huey and the Von Guerard. As with everything in the Dry Valleys, things which are commonplace back in the world assume weird and unique properties. The lakes, which I understand are the only continually frozen lakes in the world, each have their own little special features. Some are frozen solid straight to the ground. Other ones are frozen with meters of ice on top but have water down below is warm, up to +25 C. One is so salty it has never been known to freeze, even at -50 C. The soils on the valley floors are the oldest on earth, up to 10 million years old according to one reference I've read. The rocks themselves are scoured into bizarre shapes by the wind and sand. The glaciers are extremely slow moving and present useful stages on which to research glacial mechanics. And yes there are honest-to-god streams, but they do not flow every year and only have lifetimes of a few weeks when they do. Little organisms (algae, etc.) living in the streams are the subject of study, as well as the hydrology of the streams themselves. So, one such group requested UNAVCO support to survey the reaches of the stream areas under study as well as various instruments placed in the streams.
A tent and zodiac near the F6 camp, with the lovely Commonwealth Glacier in the background. This is the first zodiac I've seen on this side of the continent. After Josh and I did the survey of the Huey Stream (near Fryxell Camp), I gathered up my gear and hiked around the lake to the F6 camp, so named because it's near stream #6 flowing into Lake Fryxell. Stream #6 has since been renamed as the Von Guerard Stream. I had to walk around the lake because it was late enough in the season that a wide "moat" of open water had formed between the shore and the frozen ice in the center of the lake. It's about a 2-hour hike if you're going at a leisurely pace...and I certainly was. One does not travel quickly with bunny boots and a bunch of survey gear (including a lead-acid battery in one's backpack). Why bunny boots? Because slogging around in the middle of an ice-cold stream dictates waterproof boots. But why not bring another pair of boots for the hike? Because I would just have had to carry my bunny boots with me in order to survey the second stream. Believe me, I debated this point in my mind before leaving McMurdo, because hiking on rock in bunnies is NOT my favorite pastime. And of course, me being me, I was second guessing myself as soon as I got there. Even now, I'm writing this in an attempt to convince YOU to say "yeah, makes sense to me". But in the end that's what I decided on...and it was probably the best choice. But that dry pair of socks I brought along were an absolute godsend...unless the ground surface is friggin' 50 below, ones feet sweat profusely when hiking in bunny boots.
While I was at Fryxell camp I had asked Josh and Shannon about mummified seals. They showed me one near the camp but mentioned there was a much better one along the path as you walk from Fryxell to F6, close to the Lost Seal Stream. As I was walking up a slight rise after crossing the stream, this ghostly seal appeared on my immediate horizon. It gave me a bit of a start because from my position the first time you see it is at eye level. And it's staring right at you with its hollow eyes (because the seal hides are so tough, the only things the skuas can usually get to are the eyes). There are hundreds of these ancient seals in the valleys, some found as far as 80 km away from the sea and some dated as old as 800 years. Why? The bio-navigational systems of seals and penguins occasionally go haywire and they stumble or slink along up the valleys only to die of starvation. This one was amazingly well preserved...I mean it really LOOKED like a seal. I got a little bit caught up in the pathetic scene, and spent about 20 minutes taking photos of the poor thing. I figured this must have been the lost seal after which Lost Seal Stream was named, but no, the lost seal in question was an actual live seal that appeared while a science group was working there a few years back. Like all the other dead ones he/she must have passed on the journey inland, this seal was not inclined to go back to the sea. So the team actually put together a helicopter airlift to get the thing back to the water.
The evening of my first day at F6 I helped out a little with the met instruments. This is Karen, from CU Boulder (my old alma mater) working on met station. It was probably 10:00 pm when I took this picture, so I am calling it "late night beaking.jpg". Earlier in the day Karen had walked back to the F6 camp to retrieve some stuff we needed, so I laid down with my head on a rock and took a half-hour nap...falling asleep with this babbling brook nearby. A most un-Antarctic experience, and one of those little things that will stay with me for a long time. Seriously, for moments while we were working I *literally* forgot that I was, in fact, on Terra Australis Incognito. Laptop battery is almost dead...guess I'll finish this page up when I get home.
Finally back in Colorado, at Paola's house, sipping an Anchor Christmas Ale. Nice to be home! The rest of the pics on this page are from a few days working on the Taylor glacier. The terminus of the Taylor glacier has to be one of the best-instrumented pieces of ice in the world. There are seismometers, GPS units, strain grids, instrumented poles driven into the vertical faces, and various sundry dataloggers collecting various sundry data. My task here was to do a GPS survey of four strain grids on the top surface of the glacier. It was a two-day job, so I ended up spending two nights at the Lake Hoare camp...commuting by helicopter to the glacier. Lake Hoare is the primary camp in the Dry Valleys, and this is the main building. The camp sits on the shore of the lake, just west of the Canada glacier.
In the evening at Lake Hoare, the sun will shine down the valley from the west light up the camp and glacier - "the golden hour" as Hassan called it. Nice time of day. This particular evening there was almost no breeze whatsoever, and the glacier reflected in this still pond. I had just stepped out of the main building to take a few photos...and it looked like I'd picked a good time. In the summer season, people tell me that the weather in the Dry Valleys is generally clearer, warmer, and less windy than McMurdo. I believe it - the two days I was at Lake Hoare were absolutely idyllic. It is set in one of the prettiest spots in the Dry Valleys, which to me, are the prettiest places in Antarctica.
The tip of the Canada glacier, extending out into Lake Hoare.
Some icicles off the side of the glacier.
So January 23-25 was the end-of-season measurement push for projects I-139 and B-426 on the Taylor glacier. In total there were 6 people scurrying around the glacier terminus and the ground nearby, surveying the glacier strain grids and working on the instrumentation. This is a photo of Blood Falls, a spot at the end of the glacier where the ice flows over some sort of iron-rich deposit and then burps out the churned mulch. The spot on the ground at the center right of the photo was the site of the Blood Falls camp, which was active during most of the summer season.
Another view of Blood Falls, with Lake Bonney below. The four strain grid sites were all near this part of the glacier.
Two of the strain grid sites were located right on the north edge of the glacier. These stake grids were so close to the edge of the glacier that some of the stakes had actually calved off during the summer. This meant that to measure the positions of most of the remaining stakes, mountaineering support was required. Erik was the guy sent out for this task - a pretty easy job for him. Since it moves so slow, there aren't any crevasses on the end of this glacier, so his job mostly entailed walking around with me for two days and roping up now and then. One such occasion was this - where I walked out to the edge to measure the position of the stakes there. For a few other stakes on the real ragged edge, he went out and took the measurements. On the ground below is a pile of rubble where a piece calved off recently, and you can see the fracture lines where the next bits are getting ready to fall off.
Looking back east, out along the valley over Lake Bonney. Some clouds had set in while we were working, and snow started to fall. As it got worse it seemed as though the helicopter wouldn't be able to land on the glacier to pick us up. But we never got a call on our radios, and sure enough the snow cleared up and the helo came for us right on time. Erik mentioned "anywhere else, I'd have said we're hosed", and I was thinking the same thing...that we'd have to get into our survival bags to set up camp for the night. It was his first season on the ice, but he has guided in Denali and the Cascades...and it was a surprise that we could be on a glacier and have snow set in but just an hour later the helicopter could land. And although I'm no mountaineer, I've spent enough time on the ice that I really thought we'd be stuck there for the night, or even longer. But evidently these little squalls come and go all the time in the valleys. I'm pretty sure the worst weather in Antarctica does NOT occur in the Dry Valleys.
The next day we surveyed another strain grid on the edge of the glacier and then walked across to another site on the foreward tip. Along the way, we walked through a gulley with a stream in it which had carved a gorgeous little canyon. Here's Erik with the miniature Moab in ice.
Down inside the canyon, a beautiful blue scene. I would have loved to stay here for an hour to take pictures and soak it all up - it was one of the top 5 prettiest scenes I've encountered on the ice. But we still had some work to do, and as it was we barely got done in time.
Another one of the blue slot canyon, with a gate of icicles.
A little hole in the ice at another point along the glacier.
On our way back on the second day, I asked if we could stop for a few minutes to swap out a GPS receiver near the Blood Falls site. This receiver is a base station on bedrock, while two other similar systems will measure the motion at other points on the glacier itself. These receivers were installed by Thomas this summer, and ran continuously to collect ice motion data. For the winter, I had three new receivers programmed to just run for one hour per day to save on battery power and swapped them out during my visit to the glacier. Hopefully we'll arrive in October to find these receivers full of data. Here's a photo of the 212 helicopter with everyone milling around waiting for me to finish up. One final thought from this season: the job that I do exists ONLY because of modern technology. Without GPS satellites and receivers, there is no UNAVCO. And without the great logistical machine that is the USAP (and the smaller logistical machine that is the Arctic Program), the costs of doing this kind of work in such places would be prohibitive. For example, if all receivers work through the entire winter, about 30 MB of data will be collected. This is just a wild-ass-guess (WAG) on my part, but if you were to consider every expense that went into the entire production of getting this data, I'd bet it's more than $10,000 per MB.