Part I: Seals teeth and whales ears - Scott Polar Research Institute ...

thicken. All day as we worked the silence was punctuated at intervals by the rumble
of avalanches on Coronation. The barometer was shooting up rapidly and this lent to
the silence a certain menace, which was borne out later in the day. At 5 o’clock we
decided to take the dory across the bay and stopped work. I put on my 'tropical kit'
(cotton jacket and trousers), which was perhaps the most satisfactory of our clothing.
By then it was raining steadily as we rowed across the bay in a light breeze with
elegant Dominican gulls wheeling and screaming around us. The water north of
Billie Rocks was very shallow and the bottom was large, glacially deposited boulders
with brown seaweed growing between them.
We landed on the west shore of the entrance to Elephant Flats, near a large
'smother' of elephant seals. Derek wanted to look at the light-coloured rock band on
the crags at the top of the dry valley, which ran into the flats. Ralph and I went up to
the old whalers' Pump Hut passing outcrops of the same crystalline limestone. It
stood on the northeast shore of the first of the three freshwater lakes and the engines,
which had driven the pumps for the whalers' freshwater supplies some 30 years
earlier, appeared to be in good order. It might even be possible, we speculated, to
use one as an engine for the derelict launch at the whaling station! The 3 inch
galvanized piping which led down to the beach was all rust-free and in good order. I
might move into this hut during the seal breeding season so as to be nearer my
expected study area. The weather, which had been growing steadily worse, now
threw a blizzard at us. We pressed on to the second lake, where I found more fairy
shrimps. It was getting late so we walked east to the shore and cut across to the bay
where the boat was beached. Derek was there gently ‘tormenting’ elephant seals by
getting them to open their mouths to roar in outrage and then gently lobbing small
stones into the bright pink caverns. We hurried back to base in the dory, to get back
in time for the Met Ob.
Next afternoon after the radio schedule we decided to take advantage of
continuing fine weather to get a better view of the island as a whole by climbing to
the ice cap. We took our ice axes, a 120 ft rope, and our snow-goggles and went up to
the saddle and then southwards along the ridge to Roberts Bluff. This took us well
above the valley leading into Elephant Flats and from this high position we saw a
small glacier lake. We scrambled down a steep slope to the moraine fringing the
nevé - it couldn't be termed a glacier - which extended down from the icecap to the
East side of the valley. A swift glacier stream ran down its margin to feed the lake we
had seen from the top and we pressed on to a small rock peak of garnet-bearing
rocks, which commanded this southwest corner of the icecap.
We made height rapidly and negotiating several crevasses and a bergschrund
reached our first summit, which was unnamed. We sat for a while above a rock face
of some 300 ft which rose up from the ice. While looking at some loose rocks Derek
said he had found a Collembolan: I had a look at it and pronounced it a mite – a red
Acarinid, and on further examination there turned out to be many more. It was an
interesting find because earlier visitors had not recorded any, so I took some back in
a matchbox. (We named this small peak Mite Peak, but later it became known
officially as Garnet Hill.)
A rock and ice ridge ran to the north from this peak (725ft) and abutted onto a
snow and ice slope leading to Snow Hill (866ft) and thence in a horseshoe to Tioga
132