13 December--Field Camps

A Jamesway field building.  They are apparently no longer manufactured and some have labels dating from before the Korean War.  They can be lengthened indefinitely.  They're most usually used for kitchen and dining areas, but can also house science labs.

Today--that is to say, last night and this morning (how disorienting!)--I took several runs in a Delta out to the new Pegasus City.  At this point, it's a half hour run, but after the short-cut closes and we have to go through Scott Base transition, it'll be a full hour.  The ice road during the first run at 0330 was smooth, but it deteriorated a lot by the 0530 run.  Instead of 20 mph, I was down in places to 15 mph.  Soooo.... anyway, not many photos today and I'll pull these from the Common drive and focus a bit on the remote field camps. 

The Interior of an LC-130

Field camps aare supplied by air, either by LC-130 flights if they have a large enough landing area, or by Baslers if they have a small landing area or difficult topography.

The old trustworthy Scott tent, extremely stable in the wind and warm.  Most tents here are modern mountaineering tents, like North Face or Kelty.

A lake out in the Dry Valleys.  It's a myth that no rain has fallen here in the last 2 million years, but in some areas the last precip was in the 1970s.  That's still plenty dry.

The Indian-American scientist I introduced to the Ob Tube studies the bacteria and algae growing under the ice of the lakes and sea.  The lakes will sometimes thaw around the margins by the middle of summer.



At first glance you'd think that the area is sterile of life, but there is a wealth of nematodes living in the upper area of the "soil."  Because of the extreme aridity, they go into a sort of suspended animation, only to come roaring back to life at the first intimation of moisture.  In at least one study, a nematode resumed life after being dry for 60 years!  A nematode might be as long as one millimeter.





A ventifact, a rock carved by wind blown sand, snow, or ice crystals.