Shoveling Snow For Science
Digging snow pits provides an interesting look at the ice sheet. These photos were taken in a backlit snow pit. Two snow pits were dug with a thin wall between them. They were a little over 2 m deep. The deep blue light comes from backlighting the snow pit wall.
You cover the first snow pit, the one you walk down into, with plywood. The second snow pit is left uncovered. This allows the light to travel through the snow pit wall into the dark snow pit that you’re standing in.
What pops out is all the different layers in the snow. You can see the history of snow being deposited on the ice sheet.
In the photo above, I’m pointing to what is most likely last year’s summer surface. There are bigger snow crystals which get formed by the strong temperature gradients at the surface. The thin dark layers are likely wind crusts deposited during the storms of winter.
All of this snow gets compressed into ice. It snows about 70 cm a year here, which compresses down to about 20 cm of ice per year. These “annual layers” are one of the primary ways we date the ice core. From the surface to 1950 meters depth, I’ve counted 11622 years (with an uncertainty of about 1%).
ADVENTURES IN ANTARCTICA 