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The Planetary Society Blog

By Emily Lakdawalla

Borup Fiord Pass Field Report: Not only sulfur, but lots of salt in the springs

Weblog Archive

Update from Stephen Grasby
via satellite phone

"Yesterday we had another day of rain so we stayed in our tents all day. Today it was low clouds and fog so we couldn't get the helicopter in. But the rain had stopped, so we went over to the glacier and got some sore samples of the spring and measured the flow rate, and also got a number of samples for microbiological analysis. The springs are flowing quite well. We haven't calculated the flow rate yet -- we have to calibrate our instruments -- but it's probably two to three gallons a second, quite a high flow.

"It's a very saline water. What we sampled today was 10,000 milligrams per liter, about a third the salinity of seawater. We think this is coming from the buried Otto Fiord formation, buried evaporites. It's many times higher than what we saw in the past. I can't think of anywhere else where you could've seen a salt spring coming out of a glacier before. What we sampled before [in past years] was probably the last gasp of the sulfur water mixed with glacial meltwater, from later in the season. What we're seeing now is probably more pure spring water; so by coming earlier [this year] we get a much better picture of the springs.

"We're getting a strong feeling, too, that they probably flow through much of the winter -- you see a layer of snow and a layer of sulfur and a layer of snow. So you get the impression that the sulfur probably flows through the winter. We can't confirm that though without coming back in the winter.

"Our picture of the geology is also changing. We previously mapped a fold [down the axis of the valley] -- but I think that was just a misinterpretation of the air photos. The previous geologic mapping was done from air photos. When you're actually in this area it's just not consistent with that. We're going to try to work through that over the next couple of days.

"I went up on the glacier too, and started looking around but couldn't find any other spring outlets. So as far as I can tell this time there's just the one outlet. It's high up on the front of the glacier, probably 100 or 150 feet up on the glacier slope. I haven't got to the very top of the glacier yet. But we can't see any yellowing from higher up, so there's probably just one outlet this year.

"We saw an arctic fox today, so that was a bit of excitement. So it's good to have a day of work finally.

"So we're hoping for some continued good weather here, and Damhnait will try to do some spectrometery readings. It's starting to rain again now. This is unusual; it's a polar desert -- the average precipitation is 100 millimeters a year -- I've never seen constant rain before. It's a lot more rain than normal for sure. But we took advantage of it, we took a rain sample -- if you can't beat it, join it."