Boondoggle to Odell Glacier

Map of my boondoggle flight to (red) and from (blue) Odell Glacier. Numbers mark locations of the photos below and the side of the plane from which they were taken. The dark blue-grey is the ice shelf; it never melts and provides the "overland" route by sledges and motor vehicles to the mainland. The lighter-dotted blue-grey is the fast-ice, dense ice attached to land that may melt but right now is quite stable. Sea ice currently extends from McMurdo to the turquoise line drawn on the map.

Current conditions: Con3. Temp 21ºF. Mostly cloudy with snow flurries. Population: 860

The NSF tightly controls the activities of all McMurdians. As I've mentioned before, there is NO venturing off base unless the NSF approves it. White Island beckons us from 12 miles across the Ross Ice Shelf but we can only longingly wave.

Once in a while, though, the NSF throws us bones, familiarly known as boondoggles. Today, I got to be one of the "boondoggl-ees and fly out to the Odell Glacier near the Allan Hills to dig out a fuel cache.

My loyal readers (all one of them) may recall that, on September 27th, I posted a map of fuel caches scattered around the continent. Just as the Great Explorers of the early 20th century left depots of food and fuel so they could traverse distances exceeding their sledge-carrying capacity, modern researchers leave fuel caches so they can travel beyond the distance of the average helicopter or fixed-wing small aircraft. As field teams are starting to scatter across the continent, the NSF sends fuelies to dig out the extant caches. The fuelies' job is to make sure the fuel is accessible and hasn't been corrupted over the long winter. Needing to complete this task before they freeze, random McMurdians are chosen to help the fuelies dig. I was one of the lucky six chosen to go to Odell Glacier.

The Odell Glacier is at 76º44'S, 159º55'E, about 150 miles (and a one hour flight) from McMurdo in South Victoria Land. It is named for Noel Odell, an English geologist and mountaineer who was the oxygen officer on the trip up Everest in which George Mallory died. Odell was, himself, a famed mountaineer who, for a while, held the record for highest ascent.

The glacier is adjacent to the Allan Hills. These inconspicuous, brown jags rising from the glaciers made the news last week because a Princeton professor, John Higgins, drilled a deep ice core there and found 2 million year old ice (Nature 2019;574: 663 DOI:10.1038/s41586-019-1692-3). The CO2 levels at different depths of the core reflect atmospheric conditions during hundred-thousand-year cycles of global warming. To do this work, Higgins's team camps for weeks at a time in the Allan Hills, an excruciatingly cold and violently windy site. Just imagine working in this austere, forbidding Martian-esque landscape as the raging Katabatic winds rip at your tent. I'm reading Mawson's Will, a book about the Sir Douglas Mawson's expedition in the area in 1909 (the next glacier to the west is named for him), and it is simply staggering the weather people endured.

On our end, it was an absolutely stunning day for a boondoggle with almost no wind. The picture captions will say a bit about sites along the way.

1. Leaving McMurdo in the Delta Dawn. If you don't wear a seatbelt, you bounce
a foot in the air as the truck goes over the ridges in the Ice Shelf. Not surprisingly, I was the only one in the
vehicle inclined to buckle up.

2. The Twin Otter. These are amazing planes, able to take off and land in a remarkably short
distance. The plane is also capable of flying slowly and, for at least half our trip, we flew within a few hundred
feet of the ground. You'll see how close we are in the pics below; most are not taken with a zoom.

3. Erebus just after takeoff

4. McMurdo from the air. The black circle denotes the clinic and the red, our dorm. The arrow points to Hut Point with Scott's Discovery Hut. The New Zealand Base, Scott Base, is on the peninsula in the foreground. That peninsula
marks the border of the Sea Ice (upper portion of the picture) and the Ice Shelf (lower ridged portion of ice).
The "road" to the airport is on the bottom right.

5. The other side of Erebus with the Erebus Ice Tongue, a glacial tongue, coming towards us.

6. Mt. Bird at the far end of Ross Island with Beaufort Island in the background. Thousands of
penguins roost at these two locations but we couldn't see the colonies from the air. We have reached
the end of the sea ice and are about to cross into open water.

7. The boundary between the sea ice and the ocean. This current border is marked on the map above by the turquoise line . As you'll see on the map, at the end of summer, the water comes all the way to McMurdo.

8. Ice floes

9. The Ferrar Glacier--named for Hartley Ferrar, Scott's geologist on his 1902 expedition--pouring into the sea ice.

10. Icebergs (the rectangular elevated lumps) that calved off of glaciers trapped in the sea ice.

11. The mountains edging the coast with a glacier pouring down to the sea in the middle of the picture

12. The Mackay Glacier, named for a member of Shackleton's Nimrod expedition during their discovery of the magnetic south pole. We flew so close to the ice here, I kept thinking we were about to land.

13. Our landing site on the Odell Glacier (2000 meters elevation). We had to circle three times, seemingly almost touching the ice, so the pilot could find a good place to land. Minimal snow covered the glacier and large ridges of ice made landing treacherous. A ski could easily have caught and broken.. The pilot, a Canadian from Alberta who flies in the Arctic in northern summers, touched down like a feather. The vast expanse of ice glittered endlessly to the north and rocky hills
surrounded us on the east (the Coombs Hills) and west (the Allan Hills). You can glimpse the beginning of the Allan Hills to the left of the plane. Our plane entered and exited the glacier through a gap in the southwest.

14. Our job was to dig out the cache, a collection of bright red fuel drums lying like a pinprick of blood on an enormous expanse of stark whiteness, but they were totally uncovered when we arrived. I imagine the wind, which can wail at speeds of over 100 MPH in this area, never allowed the snow to settle (note the blueness of the ice and see below). We spent about an hour collecting fuel from a selection of barrels to take back to McMurdo for testing. It was a beautiful day but cold.

15. Done with the boondoggle.

16. A beautiful area of blue ice with waves of mountains behind. Blue ice is formed when strong winds blows off the snow, the surface ice sublimates and is replaced by ice bubbling up from the glacier below.
The brown valleys beyond the ice are some of the Dry Valleys, among the most forbidding sites on the planet: brutally windy, cold and with almost no water.

17. A pretty ice formation.

18. My favorite picture from the trip (too bad I have to post low-resolution). Marble Point is the peninsula in front. We have a field camp there. Behind that is Cape Bernacchi. Beyond Cape Bernacchi is New Harbor followed by the Ferrar Glacier. The distant mountain is Mt. Lister (4000 meters).