McMurdo Dry Valleys: Three Months at an Antarctic Field Camp in Photos

A single yellow tent on bare brown rock, with glaciers all around: for three months this was home for a researcher in Antarctica’s McMurdo Dry Valleys. Her photo album, shared on Reddit and Imgur as “Season 3 – Life in the Dry Valleys”, shows what everyday fieldwork looks like in one of the strangest landscapes on Earth.

What are the McMurdo Dry Valleys?

The McMurdo Dry Valleys lie on the coast of Victoria Land, between the East Antarctic Ice Sheet and McMurdo Sound, within the Transantarctic Mountains. Covering about 4,500 km², they form the largest ice-free region in Antarctica, although that is only about 0.03 per cent of the continent.

The valleys stay bare because of katabatic winds, cold, dense air that pours downhill off the ice sheet and quickly evaporates any snow. The mountains also block most incoming weather, so precipitation averages only about 100 mm a year. The main valleys, from north to south, are Victoria, Wright and Taylor, with the Asgard Range between Wright and Taylor. Because they are so cold and dry, scientists use them as a stand-in for Mars.

Life at camp F6

The camp, called F6, sat in the Asgard mountains. Only three people lived there for the full three-month season. The photos show the basics of their small base: sleeping tents, waste storage and a solar panel for power.

Days were spent hiking through the valleys and along the glaciers. The team even planted a Colorado flag on one of the ridges.

Measuring Antarctica’s meltwater streams

The team’s job was hydrology. When the short summer melt season began, they measured the streamflow and water chemistry of the seasonal rivers and streams that run off the glaciers into the valley lakes. The Dry Valleys hold Antarctica’s longest river, the Onyx, and several lakes that are among the saltiest on Earth.

Taylor Valley, home to Lake Fryxell, Lake Hoare and Lake Bonney, has been a Long Term Ecological Research site of the US National Science Foundation since 1992, and the whole area is managed as the McMurdo Dry Valleys Antarctic Specially Managed Area.

Lake Fryxell and the Canada Glacier

Lake Fryxell appears again and again in the album: crossed on foot, seen beneath the Canada Glacier and the Asgard Range, and close up, where air bubbles are trapped in its ice cover.

The maps below show where the Dry Valleys lie, across McMurdo Sound from Ross Island and the main research stations.

McMurdo Station and the pressure ridges

McMurdo Station on Ross Island is the main base for American research in Antarctica. Near it and New Zealand’s Scott Base, the sea ice spreading out from Ross Island buckles into pressure ridges: jagged walls and slabs where floes are pushed together. People standing beside them give a sense of their size, and close-ups show the dense layers of ice inside.

For more polar and ice stories, see our feature on Antarctic research-station designs, meltwater channels in Greenland and the frozen bubbles of Abraham Lake’s Ice Bubbles: Layers beneath the Surface.

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