Sunday November 10, 2002

Today was an easy day for me as Stacy elected to take advantage of the clear, windless day to do all the diving at the distant site at Cape Bernacchi. Since I had found that the ski-doo ride there the other night proved to have aggravated my injured lumbar vertebra, I elected to stay back at the ranch. The arrangement has been for the two dive tenders to drive the ski-doos and the divers to be fully suited and to ride on one of the Nansen sleds, with the dive gear on the other. Bumping along on a wooden sled for three quarters of an hour would be hard on anyone's back.

It was luxurious being at the base camp all by myself. I cleaned house, chipped several pailfuls of seaice to melt for washing water, washed my hair (wonderful feeling), then made mini pizzas for lunch à la Pine Cove, much appreciated by the gang when they returned. In the afternoon, after they had set out on their second dive foray, I took a long hike through the sand hills behind us looking for more interesting rocks, and then came back and made bisquick buns, slathering them with caramel sauce and rehydrated banana slices for a dessert concoction for the hungry gang. This was a success, especially the caramel gooed spoon, which Dan sucked on like a lollipop. Last night I was also chef, and cooked up garlic-tarragon jumbo shrimps, couscous (don't laugh, Janelle and Mike!), honey-orange carrots, and garlic buttered beans. Yum. It's very nice taking a break from institutional cooking.

While I was hiking in the hills this afternoon, I discovered that the odd brilliant white stones that I found had a green stain on their undersides. It made me recall a science lecture given by Imre Friedman about five years ago, about endolithic lichens, that is, lichens that actually live within rocks. They are particularly abundant, he said, in the Dry Valleys. So what I had in my hand, turning the undersides of the rocks green, were these cryptic lichens hardy enough to survive -50C temperatures and utter dryness, bursting forth in the warmth of the short Antarctic summer. Small, hardy round worms, called nematodes, also survive freezing in the soils of the Dry Valleys, and in the bottoms of the perennially frozen Dry Valleys lakes are a diverse mix of bacteria, blue green algae, and protozoans. Even kilometers deep in glaciers scientists are finding bacteria and viruses captured from the air as the snow settled and turned to ice thousands of years ago. The exciting find now are the lakes embedded 3 km inside the Antarctic ice sheet, the largest being Lake Vostok, which may still harbor bacteria from when it was formed.

The atmosphere is tremendously peaceful here. We look out over the sea ice to Ross Island, with a different view of Mount Erebus than what we can see from McMurdo Station. Here, we see the north flank where Fang Ridge is, and to the far north Mount Bird, a smaller volcano, which is inactive. There are two other volcanos on Ross Island, Mount Terra Nova and Mount Terror, both inactive also. Erebus and Terror were the names of James Clark Ross's ships, subsequently given to Franklin, and now wrecked somewhere on the sea floor of the Arctic Ocean near Canada's King William Island. Terra Nova was Scott's ship on his second expedition to Antarctica. Only Mount Erebus is active, but I have not heard of there having been any large eruptions. But its upper sides have beautiful fumaroles and its caldera steams constantly.

Behind us, to the west, is the Taylor Valley, rimmed by peaks and interspersed by glaciers. Along the valley are several ice covered lakes, the closest being Lake Fryxell where there is a long term ecological research study going on. In 1991 I gave the dive officer my video camera to take through the ice on Lake Fryxell as he descended through a dive hole to set up some equipment for a science team. The ice was about 7 m thick and full of bubbles, giving it a look of Boda crystal. It was beautiful. My friend Gregg, who is a helo pilot, gets to see more of the Antarctic than 99% of us here and also learns about it from the scientists he transports. He told me that the rocky-sandy soil that I walked over on my way to the Commonwealth Glacier is a glacial moraine from the Ross Ice Shelf which pushed up the Dry Valleys 17,000 years ago. Where McMurdo Station is now was covered by 300 m of ice.

-Kathy