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ANTarctica
Fourmilab South Pole Expedition
January, 2013 |
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Charles Peak Windscoop
2013-01-05 18:36 UTC |
Click images for reduced size. |
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Charles Peak is on the edge of Union Glacier. This was our first
excursion from the camp, and our first experience of the weird
Antarctic interface between blue ice glaciers, snow pack, melt
ponds, moraines, and mountain slopes.
Fog can appear and disappear in just moments. About a minute after
this picture was taken the fog was completely gone.
The Drake Icefall flows between the Edson Hills and Soholt Peaks,
joining the flow of Union Glacier.
This is the blue ice portion of Union Glacier, looking toward the
Sun.
The blue ice glacier has a complex texture. Frost crystals form on
edges of the ice.
When there's no fog or clouds, the sky in the Antarctic interior is
breathtakingly clear: there is no source of dust or other particulate
matter and it is one the driest places on Earth. So clear is it that
if you occult the Sun with your finger, the sky remains absolutely
blue right up to the limb of the Sun. Try this in your back yard,
and you'll see a blazing white patch of diffuse light around your
hand. I had previously seen a stunningly clear sky in central
Australia in 1986, but it wasn't remotely like this.
The patterns of ice and frost on the glacier are endlessly fascinating.
Some of the structures of ice crystals are almost organic in their
complexity.
There had been a warm spell before our visit, and in some areas
sheltered from cold winds, melt ponds. Melting of snow on dark
rocks of moraines heated by the Sun resulted in this fairy-castle
structure of snow towers.
Note the climber on the snow pack of Charles Peak. Everything in
Antarctica is on such a Brobdingnagian scale that without a
reference, it's difficult to know its size or distance.
This document is in the public domain.