The landscape in and around McMurdo is everchanging. Cold winds sweep dirt across the frozen desert. The sun melts away snow, only for it to refreeze in slick sheets when a cloud comes by. Everything is dynamic.
Perhaps the most subtle, but most interesting, is the ice shelf itself. The facility we work at is built on the ice shelf. This means that below my feet are many feet of ice, followed by sea water. This sheet of ice moves about a foot a day. As this sheet of ice moves constantly towards the shore. And when they meet, the ice gets pushed up into fantastic structures called the pressure ridges.
