The End of the Season

It's packing time here at McMurdo. Everyone is in from the field, and all our gear has been cleaned, and  repacked, and put away for the long Antarctic winter. The team has spent hours preparing our water and soil samples to ship north--lots of weighing and drying means hours in the lab.

But the payoff is worth it. We're already getting geochemical data back from our colleagues here from the start of the season in Garwood Valley, and have found some incredibly dense brines in the ponds at the mouth of the valley. What this all means for the evolution of water tracks and buried ice is something we're still mulling over, but the initial results are very exciting.

In the mean time, Jay Dickson sent along this little animation. It shows the Garwood Valley gang in front of the ice cliff. I think it's a good example of the lengths you sometimes have to go to to get the right sample here to answer your questions. The key to success: don't look down.

Going up....