Julie in Antarctica: Hiking on Lake Hoare with Amy

12:05am Sunday, 1/22/2012
25°F

After getting back to Lake Hoare field camp after speed sampling the Onyx River on January 17th, Amy and I did some work before setting out for a small adventure on the lake. She went to one of the labs (the instrument lab) to do paperwork involved in tracking radioactive material and I went to the chemistry lab to filter and prep my samples we'd just collected.

Once we got a couple hours of indoors work under our belts, we ventured out onto the lake to retrieve three instruments that Amy and the Limno Team had left in the lake a couple of months ago on behalf of another researcher. These instruments measured temperature and pressure. The researcher who wanted them put in was curious about large scale, temperature driven, lateral movement of water under the lake ice (I think).

The ice on the lake had melted out a lot since we'd been out a couple of weeks ago for Lightening Round. There were lots of little caves with icicles in them and the landscape was very rough.

Little ice cave in a bank of ice about 3 feet high on
Lake Hoare

Icicles in the little ice cave

We found the first instrument without much trouble because there was still some cargo out in the center of the lake near where the Limno Team had drilled their hole in the ice and the ablated ice from under the polar haven was still very visible. The second instrument was along the northern shore of the lake about a third of the way down the lake from Lake Hoare camp. Amy had us wear life vests because this late in the summer season it's possible that the moat ice isn't as thick as it seems and/or melt ponds on the permanent lake ice are thinly covered and rather deep.

Looking east back toward camp and
Canada Glacier

Looking west, up valley, toward
Seuss Glacier

We walked down valley a ways across the lake ice, which was rather rugged terrain! We came across a large melt pond that had refrozen. It was a spectacular shade of light, bright turquoise and had a ridge of ice around it, which was surrounded by a depression or small crevasse that had algal mats frozen into it.

Algal mats, little ridge line, and melt pond

Close-up of algal mats

Amy checking out the re-frozen melt pond

We crossed the refrozen melt pond without incident (and with confidence because we had our life vests on) and continued across the lake in search of the other instrument we were tasked to retrieve. Eventually we decided to trek along the moat and thanks to a well placed flag and good luck we found the instrument we were looking for. Our walk back to camp was mostly along the frozen moat and in the shade of the northern wall of the valley. It was a lovely little hike without any traumatic events, getting wet, or having to search long and hard for the instruments we were retrieving.