
Even though the air temperatures are often below freezing, there is plenty of energy from the sun to melt the glaciers. Most of the time the streamflow is little more than a trickle, but during warm summers they can really rip! By tracking the amount of water flowing through the streams we can determine how much the glaciers are melting.
Lost Seal Stream, above, starts at the Commonwealth Glacier and ends at Lake Fryxell.
Many of the streams have a peak stream flow every day, what I refer to as a "flood pulse" or diurnal flow pattern. Here's a video of a diurnal flow event at Von Guerard stream, just outside of camp:
http://picasaweb.google.com/lh/photo/4Dh86LphsLwfmXpm5OEX_A?feat=directlink
Garwood Stream, located in Garwood Valley, has changed a lot recently. A few years ago an unusually warm summer generated really high flows. The stream banks are sandy and very unstable and collapsed from the high flows:
Dry Valley streams are dynamic and unpredictable, which make them interesting places to study ecosystems. I'm constantly amazed by the ability of life to exist in such harsh places (humans excluded, of course).