Further weather woes

The weather’s still playing tricks with us. We were supposed to fly to Taylor Glacier today, high in the McMurdo Dry Valleys, to sample more glacial ice. It looked hazy all morning but flights were still heading out. Our flight was scheduled for noon but deteriorating conditions in the Valleys forced us to wash at the last moment. Trying not to lose another sampling day we hurriedly made alternate plans to revisit the Wilson-Piedemont Glacier to collect snow (an effort that was scheduled for next week). WP is much lower than Taylor Glacier and since we’ve already surveyed a landing site there, much less risky to travel to under marginal conditions. Before we could take off for our alternate target however conditions deteriorated to the point that not even WP was a viable target.

We left our gear at the helicopter hanger in the hope of better conditions tomorrow and trudged back up the hill to the Crary Lab. Shelly and I are both pretty tired today; we worked around the clock to get our WP samples processed prior to collecting at Taylor Glacier. We finished filtering the last WP sample only moments before we were due at the helicopter pad. There’s one good thing about that; with no lab work to do we can enjoy a relaxing afternoon off!

If the weather allows us to fly tomorrow we will try to circumnavigate Ross Island looking for open water where we might find new ice forming. That’s a flight few people get to make and I’m really looking forward to it. If we find promising leads next to solid ice floes we will try to land the helicopter and collect frost flowers. More importantly the flight will serve as a reconnaissance for the culmination of our frost flower collection efforts on Monday, a trip to Beaufort Island (if the weather is good…). Beaufort Island is a distinctive mountain of an Island that juts out from the Ross Sea. It is so remote that it is almost never visited, despite the fact that it contains Adélie and Emperor penguin colonies and an abundance of other wildlife. We can’t set foot on the Island – it’s specially protected – but we can visit a distinctive large lead that forms to the south of it. This lead is present in every springtime satellite image that we can find and will be ideal for collecting frost flowers.

We got lots of frost flowers around Cape Royds earlier in the season (and will hopefully get more around Ross Island tomorrow), so why go through all the effort of collecting frost flowers way out in the Ross Sea? The bacteria that are found in frost flowers originate from seawater, and the microbial communities that inhabit coastal seawater and open ocean seawater are very different. In Barrow, Alaska and from within McMurdo Sound we’ve collected lots of frost flowers enriched with coastal marine bacteria. We’ve yet to look at the microbial community within frost flowers forming over the open ocean and this will be a rare opportunity to do so!