Midnight at the Bottom of the World:
Antarctica Illuminated by Light Reflected off of the Moon

The coldest, driest desert on our planet, Antarctica, is also the darkest when it slips into polar night. During winter at 77° south, the McMurdo Dry Valleys of Antarctica receive no direct sunlight. Instead, all of the light in these photos comes from sunlight reflected off of the gibbous Moon.

Commonwealth Creek
June 3, 2015
Commonwealth Creek
June 5, 2015

Pearse Valley
May 12, 2015
Pearse Valley
May 30, 2015

Don Juan Pond, Upper Wright Valley
June 7, 2015

South Fork, Upper Wright Valley
August 1, 2015
South Fork, Upper Wright Valley
May 30, 2015

Pearse Valley
June 3, 2015
Kukri Hills
June 5, 2015

Commonwealth Creek
April 8, 2015


Full-Year Montages of the McMurdo Dry Valleys

Below are two zoomable montages of thousands of images of the McMurdo Dry Valleys in Antarctica acquired during 2015, one image every hour. In each rendering, every row represents one hour and every column represents one day, starting sequentially from the top left. Images are rendered using the OpenSeadragon image viewer, and the images were tiled using deepzoom.py. Please click the Full Screen button in the upper-left to view the montage.

Each source image is rendered at 800px wide.
Full resolution individual frames are available upon request (jdickson@caltech.edu).

Commonwealth Creek, Taylor Valley

Commonwealth Creek is a seasonal stream that drains from the Commonwealth Glacier to the Ross Sea at the mouth of Taylor Valley. Our camera looks upstream and documents activity on the channel floor and on the steep, pole-facing northern wall. This wall contains buried ice within well-defined layers that melt during peak austral summer conditions.

Don Juan Pond, South Fork of Upper Wright Valley

Don Juan Pond is the most saline natural body of water on Earth. Our camera documents activity within the pond looking up-valley within the South Fork of Upper Wright Valley. South Fork is extremely narrow, thus illumination from moonlight in the winter is low, though specular reflection off of the pond's surface is observed. Despite temperatures near -50°C in the winter, the pond is too saline to fully freeze over. Moonlight observations can be used to measure shorelines during austral winter conditions.

This work was primarily conducted at Brown University in the Department of Earth, Environmental and Planetary Sciences. Funding was provided through the
National Science Foundation's Office of Polar Programs.

The help of Jim Head, Joe Levy, Kate Swanger,
and many others in the field is much appreciated.




jdickson@caltech.edu