A Room with a View

This is the view from our lab window. Not too shabby eh? Look at what you can notice about the ice in this picture... Look at how smooth it is until you get to the topography of the mountain. The smoothness of that ice gives it away as sea ice. That is actually one way that early explorers were able to tell the difference between sea ice and land ice - just based on the smoothness. Here at McMurdo we are practically surrounded by sea ice. McMurdo Station actually sits on a skinny tip of Ross Island. Here is a map from the wikipedia entry: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:RossIslandMap.jpg

Since it is still early spring, most of the water around us is still covered in sea ice. However, as the summer warms up, the sea ice will begin to melt, and some of the water around the island will look like regular ocean. However, Ross Island sits on the edge of the Ross Ice Shelf, which is the largest ice shelf in Antarctica. Roughly the size of France, it is a thick (up to 3000 feet thick) chunk of sea ice connected to the continent. While some of the edges down here by McMurdo melt with the seasons, most of the ice shelf remains fairly stable. The Ross Ice Shelf has a cool history because it was used by some of the early Antarctic explorers (most notably, Roald Amundsun and Robert Scott) on their journeys to the south pole. To get started on reading more about the Ross Ice Shelf, check out the wikipedia entry: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ross_Ice_Shelf

You know, it is a good thing that much of the Ross Ice Shelf is stable. Check out the view from my lab window if you look a little to the right...


Yup, we do a lot of work on the ice around here. Remember that I landed in an airplane on a runway out there. Now that is some thick ice!