Mark Kurz and Andrea Burke sitting and working on lava.

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iBase ID

131726

Creator

Linder, Christopher L.

Title

Mark Kurz and Andrea Burke sitting and working on lava.

Type

Still Image

Date

12/13/2007

File name

graphics/pd3-1/cl_20071213_antarctica07_lavascience_196.jpg

Notes

"I never thought we would find such clean ice under that lava," Kurz said. He and Burke used a whisk broom to dust off the sides of their trench so they could measure the layers and take samples for dating. When Kurz was last here, in 1994, "we judged this whole flow by what we saw at the edge-a surface of rubble with thick chunks of basalt underneath." Both Kurz and Soule expected that the lava underneath our pentagon would look something like the wall of basalt in Photo 8 from yesterday. But instead of smooth black rock, there's a thick layer of seemingly pure ice. It's underneath about a foot of sand-which was probably blown here by the wind-yet the ice isn't gritty and shows no signs of having percolated through. "This doesn't really conform to any of the standard patterned-ground models I've read about," Soule said. He suspects that the ice gradually accumulated in an underground layer between the surface rocks and deeper lava, but he doesn't yet understand how the ice got there.
Image of The Day caption:
"I never thought we would find such clean ice under that lava," said WHOI geochemist Mark Kurz during a December 2007 expedition in Antarctica. Kurz, graduate student Andrea Burke, and colleagues dug a trench in the Dry Valleys so they could measure the layers of rock and ice beneath the surface and take samples for dating. When Kurz last visited in 1994, "we judged this whole flow by what we saw at the edge--a surface of rubble with thick chunks of basalt underneath." Instead of smooth black rock, they found a thick layer of seemingly pure ice. "This doesn't really conform to any of the standard patterned-ground models I've read about," said WHOI geologist Adam Soule. Soule suspects that the ice gradually accumulated in an underground layer between the surface rocks and deeper lava, but he doesn't understand how the ice got there.

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