Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
62
Figure 2.14. In the summer
of 1903-1904, Scott and
his party were the first to
see one of the Dry Valleys
to the west of McMurdo
Sound. In this view to the
northwest of central Taylor
Valley, the deteriorating
Taylor Glacier terminates
at Lake Bonney. The groin
of rock extending across
the valley bottom restricts
Lake Bonney to seventeen
feet at the strait. The
upper part of Taylor Val-
ley is marked by dark and
light layers of dolerite and
sandstone. Scott's party
hiked around the eastern
end of the Kukri Hills (left
rear of image), and even-
tually locked into one of
the deep, longitudinal
gullies that carry to the
terminus. From the right,
the descending icefall of
the Rhone Glacier reaches
almost to the tip of Taylor
Glacier. Bound by fifty-foot
walls of ice, the toe of the
Hughes Glacier emerges at
the lower left. In the right
rear of the image, Finger
Mountain is partially
exposed on the left of the
snowy gap to the horizon.
The steplike tiers of icefalls
taken onto the plateau by
the parties of Armitage
and Scott are vaguely visi-
ble in this gap.
a huge boulder where they dipped water directly out of a small meltwater stream whose
soft gurgling gave pleasant harmony to their evening's retreat.
At 7:00 A.M. the next day, Scott, Evans, and Lashly were ready to go. They took a
rope, ice axes, crampons, and some lunch in their pockets. This was a lightweight tra-
verse, alpine-style. They left the sledge and tent and hiked down the glacier. Freed after so
many days in their traces, the men would have been hard to keep up with. Looking down
the glacier, they could not see where it ended, deducing that it dropped oV somewhere
ahead. Out maybe five miles farther a low ridge jutted from the right wall nearly crossing
the valley floor. It gave the appearance of a groin or breakwater at the mouth of a harbor
and certainly looked as if it would dam the glacier if it extended down that far (Fig. 2.14).
Fortunately, as the men hiked along, they found that the glacier did not have any cre-
vasses, just sealed remnants that splotched the ice with whiter blues than the background.
The surface was pitted with ablation cups, those knobby ripples so common on the hard
ice surfaces of glaciers. They form by evaporation of the ice in patterns reflecting the an-
gle of incident light as the circling sun rises and falls overhead in the summer sky. As the
party moved along, the gradient became steeper and the ice began to show signs of wast-
age, similar to what they had seen at the mouth of Ferrar Glacier, though not on such a
grand scale. Melting during the warmest days was surely active here. Patches of boulders
and sand were sparsely strewn across an increasingly hummocky terrain. Partway along
the party roped up.
A small stream channel appeared, starting in a shallow furrow parallel to the direc-
tion of glacier flow. Some discussion ensued about whether to stay high on the glacier
or go down along the furrow. They chose the furrow with the rationale that the glacier
might become too steep were they to follow it to its end, and that the channel might cut
down to the base of the glacier over a gentler incline.
