About this Blog

This blog is dedicated to a research expedition to the McMurdo Dry Valleys in Antarctica. Through field mapping of geomorphic evidence, sample collection, and cosmogenic nuclide concentration measurements in the Noble Gas Lab at Harvard, we hope to better understand the behavior of the East Antarctic Ice Sheet during Miocene (~23 to 5 million years ago) and Pliocene (~5-1.8 mya) times. The Early Pliocene is the most recent period in which global temperatures were significantly warmer than the present, therefore providing us with a potential analog for a warming climate. This research is generously funded by the NSF Polar Science Program.

Friday, December 12, 2008

On Beyond Sessrumnir: Nibelungen Valley

12/9/08

We’ve started to develop a nice routine down here: Wake up at 7:00 am (or as close to that as we can), eat a hot breakfast of instant oatmeal, check in with Mac Ops over the radio, pack for the day, and then head out into the field. When it’s time for lunch we try to find a spot out of the wind and whip out our hot thermoses and such cold friendly foods as beef jerky, frozen Swiss cheese, Froodles (a noodley fruit snack we’d never heard of until we got here), cabin bread, peanut butter, and chocolate bars. At the end of the day (defined as 5:00 pm as we cannot go by the setting sun) we head back to camp, unload the samples from our packs, and start heating water for dinner. By 9:00 pm we’re mostly done washing up and unwinding and then it’s off to bed.
Oh, and the views in the meantime are INCREDIBLE…

12/10/08
Back to our old haunts today – the pools and canyon features of Sessrumir Valley. The fieldwork routine has set in and Jenny and I are getting faster at collecting samples and marking locations with our GPS equipment. In the meantime, Rob set up another anchor for Robert to rappel off of to get samples down another cliff face. So far, the weather has really been cooperating. We’ve had sun and blue skies for at least part of every day we’ve been in the field, and usually it’s sunny all day. Some days are high winds and some days it’s quiet, but the nice weather has helped the work along.

Another view of Sessrumir Valley.


We took a helicopter for our day trip to Nibelungen Valley.

Nibelungen Valley is a pretty cool place- after taking a
bunch of samples, we headed down valley and explored for a while.

Both Sessrumir and Nibelungen valleys (oriented N-S)
overlook Wright Valley (oriented E-W) - behind me (Jenny) you can see Lake Vanda.
Allen thinks that with a little imagination this rock in Nibelungen
looks like a hippo. You decide. Either way – the erosional features
here are pretty cool.
Blown snow highlights a feature called patterned ground –
where freezing and thawing of the ground causes cracks to
develop in otherwise undisturbed areas.
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