We awoke earlier this month to find camp overrun with yukimarimo. These delicate, wind-blown balls of snow occur in perfect conditions of surface frost, static electricity, and breeze. Scurrying and darting like mice, they're the closest thing to wildlife we've seen this season.
Moving equipment out of the Big House, Grey and I headed by snowmobile to the winter storage berm, a dunescape of drifts and cargo on the outskirts of station. Yukimarimo were scattered over the surface and crushed beneath our tracks. Passing among thousands of these small spheres, each catching the twilight as if dimly glowing, was almost hallucinatory.
There's a certain surface character that appears with the yukimarimo. The final photo in this post shows a possible breeding ground from the same event, with a few crystals beginning to cluster. You can almost picture how the right wind could cause some of the agglomerations of crystals to start to roll.
The yukimarimo stuck around camp for a couple of days. One night, we had stronger winds, and in the morning, the yukimarimo were gone. Were they buried? Was their delicate structure obliterated by the wind? Or did they simply roll away, their journey continuing over the horizon?
