It’s summertime here in Antarctica, and that means 24 hours of daylight. The sun makes a great circle around the sky every 24 hours, and at "night" it dips behind a mountain and we are in shadow, but it never sets.
With the longer daylight, the temperatures warm up, although it could never be considered warm here. However, it was slightly above freezing for a couple of days within the past week, and the top layers of ice on the lake are melting in places. I'm told that as the season progresses, there will be much more melting that leaves puddles on the ice and pockets of water just beneath the top layer of ice. These changes in the lake ice can make it harder to walk across.
Melting lake ice.
Megan, our microbiologist, has taken water samples from seasonal streams that flow into the lake, as well as from water trickling down from Taylor Glacier.
Megan sampling water from Taylor Glacier. Photo by Justin Lawrence.
We have a lot of supplies and equipment that either needs to stay frozen, or else needs to not be frozen. Things that need to stay frozen include some of our foods. We will soon have a hard time keeping them from thawing out before we want them to, so we've been eating them.
Once we start collecting more samples of microbes (while diving), Megan will preserve them but they will also need to stay frozen in order to protect them from degradation between here and U.C. Davis. We actually brought a small freezer with us that's down at the lab tent.
Overall, I'm glad for the slightly warmer temperatures that have taken away some of the bitterness of the chilling winds.