Snow Sculptures

The snow here is very interesting - nothing like I've ever seen before.  It comes down powdery soft.  Indescribeably soft.  The only way I can think to describe it is "powdered air".  It is very fine, but coarse at times - very much like the texture of sugar you would crush under a spoon.  When compacted, it has the strength of concrete, but has the look, feel, weight, and... sound... of styrofoam.  Here are some shots I've taken of our snow in some of it's unique forms.

A block of snow I pulled out of a snow bank.  I should have put a marker next to it, but it measured about 3'x2'x2'.  I guess it weighed maybe 3 lbs, or so.  It was less than half the weight you'd expect it to be for it's size.  The upper surface was impenatrable (had been gone over by a bulldozer), but the lower half was powdery and "scruntchy" like styrofoam.  One of my roomates drives a bulldozer in Fleet Ops.  He says that even with their biggest dozers, their blades will sometimes just scrape and chatter along on the surface of the glazed snow.



I liked how the wind sculpted these contours on a hillside.



I see an old man huddled over a campfire with a cloak over his shoulders.  What do you see?



RAISED footprints!  The snow was previously compacted by someone's footsteps, then the wind blew away the lighter snow around them, leaving the footprints standing above.



I took the picture because I liked the sharp, defined edge of the snow at the top of the cliff.  What I hadn't realized was that in the background you can see what has been named the Big John crack (I don't know how it came by that name).  This crack in the sea ice originates at the tip of Hut Point and continues out in the sea ice for probably a mile or so.  At the top left of the photo (not too far from the crack), you can see the road leading to our Ice Runway.



Wierd.



I thought this was an interesting perspective:  Archeologists tell us we can determine the age of an artifact if we know the age of the surrounding strata forms in which it was found.  We're told the volcanic rock that makes up Ross Island is some 13 million years old.  Given that these layers of volcanic grit lie about 20 inches below the surface, I'm going out on a limb and guesstimating that this culvert formed over the course of some 20 million years.      :-D



Really thought this snow pattern on the sea ice was fascinating.

Took this video during one of our recent snow storms.  I liked how the wind was sculpting the drift to a razor's edge.