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<\/a><\/p>\nDon Juan Pond quickly became a provocative location for biologists, hydrologists and geochemists trying to understand how liquid water can exist throughout the entire year in one of the coldest places on Earth.\u00a0 After more than half a century, we still have fundamental questions regarding whether life can actually exist in Don Juan Pond and what is responsible for such a high concentration of salt.\u00a0 The pond also prompts us to speculate about the potential for a similar body of water to exist on Mars, where hyper saline brines may be flowing today, and liquid water was far more plentiful in the ancient past.<\/p>\n
While we are camped just a few hundred meters west of Don Juan Pond, our primary target of interest this season is an unusual rock-covered lobe that abuts the western boundary of the pond. Many similar lobes in the Dry Valleys have clean ice buried just under a thin cover of rock and soil (\u201cdebris-covered glaciers\u201d), but no scientist has ever documented ice in this lobe.\u00a0 Instead, if you dig a pit anywhere on it, you\u2019ll find what we call ice cement: frozen soil cemented together by small amounts of water.\u00a0 Is it possible that this lobe formed in the absence of massive clean ice?\u00a0 Or did it form as a typical Dry Valley glacier then lose almost all of its ice when the climate changed?\u00a0 If so, why didn\u2019t other glaciers elsewhere here lose all of their ice?\u00a0 We\u2019ve been taking samples and running Ground Penetrating Radar (GPR) scans to help image the subsurface to see if there is ice buried at a greater depth.\u00a0 When we compare these data to data we\u2019ve collected at our previous sites, we may be able to answer some of these questions.<\/p>\n
Morale has been quite high of late, as we have received several care packages from home, containing plenty of treats for us all to share.\u00a0 An extra special one was sent to us by Ms. Choe\u2019s 4th grade class in Plano, TX.\u00a0 Each student took the time to send us a card with fantastic drawings of Antarctica and Mars, and several questions about what it is like to live down here and what it\u2019s like to be a scientist.\u00a0 We\u2019ve had fun every night after dinner writing down answers to their questions, which will soon be put onto a helicopter and sent all the way back to Texas.\u00a0 Thanks so much for the package, Ms. Choe\u2019s class!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Author: Jay Dickson We have arrived at our final camp site of the season: the South Fork of Upper Wright Valley. Not entered by Griffith Taylor and his field team during Robert Falcon Scott\u2019s expeditions 100 years ago, Wright Valley … Continue reading