The Erebus Ice Tongue that you can see in the photo is where the ice caves are located that I was exploring yesterday.
The Erebus glacier in Antarctica comes down from Mt. Erebus and protrudes off the coast of Ross Island, forming an 11-12 km long ice tongue—a long and narrow sheet of ice projecting out from the coastline. The Erebus Ice Tongue is the serrated, blue-rimmed “knife” extending toward image center from the upper right out into snow- and ice-covered McMurdo Sound. Beneath the smooth white expanse is the Southern Ocean.
An ice tongue forms when a valley glacier moves very rapidly out into the sea or a lake. When the sea ice in McMurdo sound thaws in the summer, the ice tongue floats on the water without thawing. It also calves off in places forming icebergs. The Erebus Ice Tongue is only about 10 meters high, so its icebergs are small. When the ice around the tongue melts in the summer, waves of sea water constantly batter the edges of the tongue, carving very elaborate structures in the ice, sometimes producing deep caves at the margins. In the winter, the sea freezes once more around these new shapes.
This false-color composite image was acquired by the Advanced Spaceborne Thermal Emission and Reflection Radiometer (ASTER) on the Terra satellite. The image was created by combining near-infrared, red, and green wavelengths (ASTER bands 3, 2, & 1 respectively). The image was acquired on November 30, 2001, in the thin light of permanent “dawn” that the continent experiences during the Southern Hemisphere spring.
NASA image created by Jesse Allen, using data provided courtesy of NASA/GSFC/METI/ERSDAC/JAROS, and the U.S./Japan ASTER Science Team.
The Frozen Chosen has disbanded and we are but a shadow on the Frozen Continent!
We really needed to get to the ice...we were running out of things to occupy our time! Only in New Zealand can you find a physician and a pastor willing to wear a penguin and a kiwi on their heads.
The elevated Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station structure was dedicated last season. It now finally includes the dining area, lounges, a gym, medical, lab and computer spaces, offices and meeting rooms, and an emergency power plant, as well as berthing rooms for 154 people.
The structure has a total floor area of about 65,000 SF; the PRIVATE rooms for winter over's are 9'-8"x 8' and the rooms for summer folks are 9'-8"x 6'--like mine shown here. Some of the rooms have (less-than 100% soundproof) demountable partitions so that couples can share a 2-person room. Many of these rooms include WINDOWS which were tested in CRREL's cold chambers for suitability at Pole's harsh temperatures. Another important feature of the station is that the emergency section of the station is isolated by thick insulation so that other portions of the facility can be winterized during emergencies when energy supplies are limited. Unlike the older housing sections of the domed station, this structure has been designed and built to provide lighting, heating/ventilation, and fire protection, all in full compliance with current US building and safety codes. The original plan was that this berthing capacity would eliminate the need for the labor-intensive summer camp which must be frequently excavated, dug out, and moved...but given the planned construction schedule for ICECUBE, the 10m telescope, as well as completion of the elevated station, summer camp may be with us for a few years yet. Of course when the original South Pole Station Dome was built, it was to house the HUGE crowd of 33 people (expanded to 40 when the Annex was added), everyone thought there would be no need for summer camp...yeah, right.
Here I am standing at the Geographic South Pole marker. Which is in a different location each year. Of course, the Geographical South Pole hadn’t moved. It was the ice sheet above it that had moved. The ice-sheet, which is about 3 kilometers thick at the South Pole, moves by about 9 meters each year, as it continues its relentless slide down to the coast. Each year, the folks at the South Pole Station on New Years Day place a specially machined marker at 90° south. Of course, the marker moves with the ice, so in a year's time, it's meters away from the South Pole. This was the 51st move of the South Pole marker since it was first set up in 1956. Along with the marker, on New Year's Day, the station staff also move a large board announcing both Amundsen's triumph and Robert Scott’s belated arrival a month later. Amundsen's quote reads: "So we arrived and were able to plant our flag at the geographical South Pole." Scott's words are full of regret: "The Pole. Yes, but under very different circumstances from those expected."
