CAPE ROYDS, ROSS ISLAND, ANTARCTICA– When you first come to Antarctica you are overwhelmed by the enormity, vastness and seemingly endless large structures of ice which dominate this continent (see my last dispatch). These larger scale visions persists until you begin to look closer. Ice can be delicate, fragile, intricate and blue. Patterns are created showing that water obeys both the natures laws of chaos and order. Playing a part in the dance, gas bubbles squeezed out of the liquid water during the phase change do not escape from the surface in time and remain prisoners in a frozen matrix until the thawing process releases them Wind too contributes to the creation of patterns reminding us it will not be dismissed as a force in this process.

A single Antarctic snowflake. Two things have always given me headaches: the number of stars in the universe and the number of these in Antarctica.

Prisoners in time, these frozen gas bubbles give pattern and beauty to the ice.

A different pond and a different pattern.

Ice crystals obey their own rules of pattern formation.

A different place in the ice, these formations did their own thing.

These frozen ice waves remind us, the wind will be heeded.

The large ice structures of Antarctica remind us of the power of this place; the small ones, how fragile it is.