How We Get Water

Here is a new video about how we get water at Lake Fryxell Camp, where I’ll be this week with a small team of scientists. A wild helicopter ride over the Canada Glacier lasting all of six minutes brought Tony and I here from Lake Hoare Camp, where we joined up with Amy, Karen, and Tristy, who are here to drill a hole in the lake ice and collect samples of organisms living in the liquid water below. Sampling will occur here, at Lake Hoare, and at Lake Bonney, also in Taylor Valley. These researchers and others will go from camp to camp (and lake to lake) for what is known as “the limno run.” (limno for limnology). I’ll follow them around, getting a feel for each camp.

Lake Fryxell Camp sits in a wide, panoramic part of Taylor Valley–a far different feel than Lake Hoare Camp which is pinned against the glacier and steep valley walls. Here at Fryxell the sun reaches the valley floor more often and the landscape is suggestive of northern Alaska or Canada. It is windier here than at Hoare but we are experiencing high temperatures at the moment so even the wind doesn’t feel too bad. For most of the day it was in the 20s. Right now the thermometer reads 22 degrees Fahrenheit.

Crossing the lake ice is an adventure–throughout the year the wind blows large swathes of dirt onto the lake, warming the ice below and causing it to melt down about three feet. Areas of ice where dirt did not blow onto the lake appear to have risen up. You’re left with a labyrinth of waist-high crackly white ice, and hard, smooth and often still dirt-covered ice at your feet. It crackles and crashes, tinkles and pings as you walk across it. “The moat,” the collar of the ice of varying width along the shore, is mostly flat, smooth, and clear–the video has a good example of what you can see below your feet.

Last night we trudged across the lake about a mile to the “Polar Haven,” a mini-Jamesway (a half-cylinder shaped structure popular in the military and in Antarctica) which covers the drill hole location. Drilling the hole is a simple process but definitely takes some work–you hook up a four-foot long drill bit that measure two, five, ten, or twelve inches wide, depending on what you need. Last night we used a five inch with two flights, meaning it was two bits in total length, so eight feet long. Two people hold onto a small motor that spins the bit, and you push down until it drills the hole. Next they insert a long metal pipe with hot glycol running through it, which melts further down the column. The lake ice is currently three and half meters thick. Today the hole was fully drilled and melted through, but they will wait twenty-four hours before sampling so as not to sample from the temporarily disrupted water column from all the activity.