We had a great instrument installation at Minna Bluff yesterday. The Minna Bluff peninsula is about 15 miles long, a half mile wide, and three thousand feet tall. On one side, rocky cliffs fall thousands of feet to the ice shelf. The steep drop is laid in with snow drifts and would be an epic ski descent, were it not for the inevitable crevasses at the ice shelf interface. On the other side of the peninsula, hills of volcanic rubble and snowfields slope more gradually out. Where we worked, a broad bench of pumice and coarse gravel offered easy working conditions. We enjoyed that the sun was out and that temperatures were mild, but because our position was very exposed, we were most grateful for the calm air. Except for some challenge in hammering our anchoring stakes into rocky permafrost, we had an efficient, straight-forward installation. After the power system had been tested and the instrument plugged in, the sound of the instrument pumps starting up was a great sound.
A small cloud of steam could be seen at the summit of Mt. Erebus. I glassed the shoreline below Erebus and could see Observation Hill (a promontory above McMurdo) and Castle Rock (a volcanic pillar along the Hut Point Peninsula). Strong heat refraction rippled the landscape as waves of heat rose from the black surface into the cold air.
With my discovery last week of a small moss colony in the swales of Marble Point, I spent some time looking for signs of life at Minna Bluff. Indeed, I found several varieties of lichen nestled in protected areas under rocks! Lichen was rare at our installation side but was abundant near the ridgeline on one north-facing hillside. In a later spectacle of life, as we looked out the window of the helicopter at the bare ground of Chocolate Point, we saw beautiful 10-20 foot wide melt ponds that contained brilliant orange and green algae! Exposed to constant sunlight, warmed by the proximity to the dark rock surface, with ample fresh meltwater percolating through the ground, the algae had made the most of their environment. Loose folds of disrupted algae mats could be seen floating in the pools. The exotic-colored pools looked like features in Yellowstone.
