frosty boy and ice

When I watched the Werner Hertzog movie about Antarctica, he showed lots of weird people and gave some insight (not completely inaccurate) into life at McMurdo. One of the features in the movie, which proves to be an important part of life here, is Frosty Boy. Who would have guessed that soft serve ice cream in the Antarctic would be so awesome? Having been here over a week, we've started experimenting with Frosty Boy. I have stuck to the reasonably normal fruit and fudge on Frosty Boy, Frosty Boy on peanut butter and chocolate bar. Dennis has been making mint Frosty Boy by mixing mint tea leaves in, which actually doesn't taste quite as terrible as you would imagine, although a little fibrous. Warren (next to Dennis) made an apple juice float, although I didn't taste that one.

On a more serious note, our anchor ice project is going really well. We can grow single crystals, which radiate out like feathers and nucleate off of pieces of sponge, have found that sponges nucleate ice if you cool the water down and don't mix it, and I've been playing with mud trying to produce larger amounts of ice in a big tank in the cold room. Here's some ice coming up out of the mud (bottom right is a rock, top left is the edge of the tank, which got really iced up). It grows in flat sheets that come up out of the sediment. The sediment here is really cool... it's mostly sponge spicules, which are little glass needles that form this mat that the ice forms around and binds to pretty tightly. Here's a picture of the spicule mat with ice growing out of it. My next step is to see if I can reproduce this and then stick in some animals and see what happens.

Tomorrow we were supposed to go out to Cape Evans in helicopters but our trip got postponed. Cape Evans is about a 10-15 min helicopter ride and is the site of Scott's second hut and is close to the ice edge. Instead the biomechanics group is going to go out to Pegasus runway on ski-doos to collect pteropods from a hole in the sea ice out there. We can only get one of the two species we want from the holes close to the station, plus going out there will give us a chance to ride ski-doos and see the emperor penguins again. I'm bringing my telephoto lens this time.