Field Trips, Field Trips and More Field Trips...

Sorry to have been away from my computer for so long. I've been busy seeing more of Antarctica, specifically the ANDRILL drill site, Robert Scott's hut at Cape Evans, and the Wright Valley. In this blog I'll start with the most recent trip and work backwards because I really want to share this photograph with you.

On Wednesday (11/28) a group of us from ANDRILL went on a field excursion to one of the valleys. We flew in aboard a helicopter that dropped us on the flat area near where I'm standing. Here is a quote from the introduction section of the Wright Valley Field Excursion guide given out to us:
"The Dry Valleys have long been a feature of great interest on the Antarctic continent. Not only because of their unique absence of ice and snow but as a result of this, their accessibility to geologic features that are ice covered in a majority of the continent. Little was known of the region until 1955 when the New Zealand party of the Commonwealth Trans-Antarctic Expedition, 1955-1958, resulted in the first thorough geologic assessment of Victoria Land." (Peter Webb, whom I photographed at our Open House, was one of the students on that expedition.) "...On this trip a variety of erosional and depositional features will be observed that reflect the complex Cenozoic history of the region."

In the photograph above, the distant peaks behind where I'm standing you can see the deposited layers that are lighter in color. Those layers are part of the Beacon Supergroup composed of sedimentary rocks like siltstones, limestones and sandstones and also have fossils of fresh water fish and plants from the Mesozioc Triassic time. The valley that is directly behind me clearly shows erosion from giant glaciers during the Cenozoic era. The other thing you should note is the glacier way off in the distance. That is the Wright Upper Glacier. Beyond that is the East Antarctic ice sheet that covers the largest portion of the continent.

One of the other cool things about this are is that the ground responds to the temperature fluctuations, freezing and thawing causing cracks that form the land into pattern ground- connected polygons. If you look closely at this photograph you will see some rocks laying flat and some sitting on edge. If you look at the lines created by the rocks sitting on their edges you will see lines that meet where the snow is. This is where three polygons of the pattern ground join together. As the helicopter took us to the bottom of the valley I took this next photograph of the valley floor where you can see some of these polygons, pattern ground.

The helicopter dropped us off at a New Zealand hut next to Vanda Lake. We left our gear and hiked around until lunch, came back to the hut and feasted. (I'm glad there was a port-o-potty next to the hut!) We picked up our gear and hiked a few more miles through what will be a very broad, shallow stream bed later in the season. For now, it was dry sand and pebbles.








We dropped our stuff off again at a US hut where some guys were working on the upkeep of a seismic array. They had a very cozy hut and had coffee waiting for us! That's one thing I really, really like about being here- everyone is a friendly neighbor. Too bad we can't all live that way off ice. After coffee and more hiking, the helicopter picked us up right on time and delivered us back to McMurdo just in time for dinner.

This photo shows the lower portion of the Wright Valley. Imagine where I was standing in the first photo as the top of the valley, this would be near the middle and the Ross Sea is still beyond.

Taylor Valley by Helo

Last week at this time, I was sitting at the window seat of a Bell 212 helicopter with my jaw on the floor as we flew through some of the most magnificent scenery I've ever seen. The sun was out, there were fluffy white clouds to give a bit of definition and the wind wasn't bad enough to bounce us around very much. A perfect ride!

Taylor valley, unlike its neighbor, Ferrar, has no single glacier filling the entire valley. There are side glaciers coming into the valley, like the Commonwealth glacier where we stopped to hike, but most of the main valley floor is a series of small lakes or dry ground. The upper valley is where the Taylor glacier is located, and we flew over the vast area where the Taylor and Ferrar glaciers go side by side. At some point in the past, the mouth of the Taylor valley was blocked and the whole thing filled up with water. You can see the remnant shelves left around the edges of the valley showing at least two different water levels.

What landform features do you see in the photos that were created by glaciers? By wind? By flowing water?

Beacon Valley...or Gilligan's Island?

Beautiful view of a huge glacier in the Dry Valleys.

Two tiny climbers in red are on this mountain--can you find them? This is to give an idea of scale!

Remember the old TV show, Gilligan’s Island? Well, we also started out on a fateful trip…

Just sit right back and you’ll hear a tale…a tale of a fateful trip.
It started from this icy shore aboard a flying ship.

The mate was a mighty helo tech, the pilot brave and sure…
Eight passengers took flight that day for an eight-hour tour…

The weather started getting rough, the tiny craft was tossed
Helo Ops stopped all the flights, so the crew would not be lost.

The explorers hiked across the hills, to the shore of New Harbor Isle…
They had to make the best of things, they’re here for a long, long time.


We took a helo field trip out to Beacon Valley--it's a valley farther than the Taylor Glacier which was as close to the polar plateau as I had been before. The mountains at the end of Beacon actually hold back the polar ice sheet. Beacon is one of the Dry Valleys; an incredible landscape that reminds one of Mars—red sand and rocks, and dry as a bone. According to written records, it has not precipitated there in over fifteen million years, and what does fall is all snow or ice, which often ablates before hitting the ground.
Louise showing scale of a rock split during freeze-thaw cycles. Looks like Our helo taking off after dropping us in Beacon Valley.
a huge 3-D jigsaw puzzle!

It was windy and very cold, but as long as we kept moving, we were quite comfortable. We hiked around the bouldery valley floor and up the mountain slopes to take a look at the outcrops of rock, which are partially responsible for feeding sediments into Victoria Basin where we are drilling right now. After about four and a half hours the helo picked us up and took us to Commonwealth Glacier where, in 2002, I had studied the streams that melt and run-off in the summer. It was exciting to “come home” to the place I had spent eight weeks my first time in Antarctica.


We were dropped with our survival bags about a mile and a half from the glacier, so we hiked over to take a closer look, then hiked back to the drop point. We still had an hour before the helo was to come back, so some (I opted out--I had already hiked about five hours--a lot of it uphill) climbed down a steep embankment (about fifty yards down) and then up the other side to an outcrop there. I took a nap on a huge, tabular rock--great view of the glacier and mountains, and it felt great!


The rest of the group finally came back, and we waited about half an hour for the helo which didn't come-our radios weren't working in the valley, so a group hiked to the top of the closest hill and tried again. Mac Ops told us that they were weathered in and no flights could get to us. We had two choices: make camp with the survival bags--ugh! Nasty freeze-dried food, tents, pads and sleeping bags that aren't all that great, and stoves that we were trained to use in Happy Camper School, OR, walk three and a half miles over a small mountainous or hilly terrain to New Harbor camp. We chose that option. Our weather was fine--so off we went. I felt it was tough going—others thought it was a walk in the park! I’m sure it was all a function of age and fitness level—guess which end of the spectrum I ended up on! You decide where on the spectrum you would have fallen. Some of the way was through snow that would break under your feet and end halfway up your calf--you'd have to pull your leg free. Then you'd be on large rocks that turned and twisted under your boots; then over small, pebbly surfaces that moved like sand and were hard to walk through. I preferred the larger boulders and hated the snow! I was carrying a heavy backpack and sweating as we crossed the last of the three hills (not quite "mountains" but enough elevation for me!).

But the walk was well worth it. We arrived at New Harbor about 10 PM. The camp was a double "jamesway", a curved canvas shelter with electricity, wooden flooring, tables, chairs, a gas stove and cots with blankets and pillows. It also had two large propane heaters, so we were toasty for most of the stay. There wasn't a lot of food, but we had hot chocolate, granola bars, and Ramen noodles--so not a bad deal at all. In the morning we found that some frozen food had been stored in a cold cellar, so we baked raspberry turn-overs and if we had had to stay longer, we also found bagels we could toast up.

The only difficulty was during the night. There were only five cots and eight people, so three slept on the floor or on tables. The cots weren’t exactly cushy, but I fell asleep fairly quickly just wishing for a toothbrush! In the middle of the night, my shivering woke me up, and I knew from survival training that your body is heading toward hypothermia if you don’t take steps to warm up. The propane heater had gone out, and I was closest to the outside wall. The cold air was sucking the heat out of my body from under the cot. I got up and folded a blanket to give me four layers under me, put my Big Red on, and found another blanket for my feet. I can’t say I was warm, but at least I wasn’t shivering anymore.

The next morning the weather was still bad in McMurdo and we had a low ceiling in the Dry Valleys, so we explored the sea ice and a small fishing hut that was located in the harbor. The sea ice is amazing. I think this is multi-year ice, so it is very thick, but it also had huge pressure ridges, cracks, and lots of sediment that has built up on the surface. While on the ice, we found a large seal that had pushed her nose through a dive hole, lifted off the cover that the divers had attached, and flopped down to take a nap in the sun. She was funny to watch. She’d lift her head and check us out, but it was obvious that she knew the redcoats were no threat because she plopped back down and went right back to sleep. Have you ever watched a dreaming dog with its paws running? Well, she, too, seemed to be dreaming as she flipped her tail and made little grunting noises. I’m not sure if it was a happy dream or a nightmare, but she was certainly busy!

Finally around noon, the ceiling lifted enough that a helo was able to go pick up our survival bags, about 100 pounds of rock samples we had collected, and then it came to get us.

Our eight-hour tour had ended up being a twenty-four hour “boondoggle.” When we arrived back in McMurdo, we were met with concerned looks over our “survival trial”—that is until they found out what a cushy setting we really had! So they wanted to know how ‘Gilligan’s Island’ really was, and although I thought we should have agreed upon a good story about facing the harsh Antarctic winds as we fought our way on foot across the mountains…we couldn’t help but just grin over our grand adventure!

Thanks Kate Pound and Joanna Hubbard for sharing your pictures! My camera was dropped about a week ago, and I am so grateful that you are taking so many great shots!













Kate Pound in front of the jamesways at the New Harbor field camp.
Joanna Hubbard

Beautiful Beacon Valley

On Monday, we were lucky enough to take a field trip to the Dry Valley Specially Managed Area. We went in a helo up the Ferrar Valley, and were dropped at the head of Beacon Valley for a four hour wander, and were taken out again along the length of Taylor Valley, stopping for another chunk of time at the mouth of the valley by the Commonwealth glacier and stream. We had fairly mild to good conditions but before our helo could come pick us up and bring us home, McMurdo weathered in and we had to stay out overnight. Rather than break out our survival packs and make camp where we were, we hiked three miles to New Harbor field camp at the shore of McMurdo Sound where we had propane heaters, cots and blankets and an outhouse. We were picked up the next afternoon from our very cushy "survival" spot, no problem.

Beacon Valley is special for many reasons. One is the sheer distance to get to it, further than most of the commonly or easily visited Dry Valleys like Taylor or Wright. It is a wonderful place to see a large amount of Beacon supergroup sedimentary rock (around 400-230 million years old) and get up close to it. The Beacon supergroup is a very deep/thick series of sand and silt stone sediments deposited by water and later uplifted. I scrambled up a scree slope of eroded material to get to the steep cliffs of rocky outcropping and to a vertical section of dark Ferrar Dolorite (an igneous intrusion from around 180mya).

After getting a closer look at the large chunks that had fallen off the crumbly looking rock, I decided against going right up to the wall and touching the rocks. I got as high as I could on the unstable slope and sat to look out at the valley for awhile. I could hear the wind whistling past the irregular surface of the huge rock face, and nothing else. Really lovely after the hustle and bustle of McMurdo's 24/7 transportation hub noise. I couldn't sit too long, keeping moving there was important as it was chilly and windy even though the sun was partially out.

Another Dry Valley feature that is a little different in Beacon was more easily seen from the helo, the huge frost polygons on the valley floor, hard to recognize them on the ground, even when we were standing on them. Other areas we saw polygons had smaller ones. The ice underneath the polygons here in Beacon Valley is thought to be some of the oldest ice in the world somewhere between 7-14 million years old, scientists are sampling it to get ancient atmosphere.

Everyones attention was definitely attracted by the extreme wind weathering in action visible on every rock in the area to some degree. Many of the finely grained rocks have a satiny smooth texture and rounded edges that comes from being sandblasted by airborne sediment in the wind. There were pockets of this blasting material in the lee of most large rocks. Other rocks have been sculpted into strange, sinuous shapes by the same action, their softer areas being more vulnerable to abrasion.


What do you notice about the rocks from the Beacon Valley floor in this picture?