THE HEART OF THE ANTARCTIC 



The following day, December 22, we picked our way 

 with our sledge cautiously amongst the crevasses and 

 over the pressure mounds, the traversing of which 

 gave us some trouble in places, and eventually reached 

 a fairly good track along the ice parallel to the moraine 

 from which we had been collecting the day previous. 

 We found a large pool of thaw water on the surface 

 of the ice. This was fed by a sub-glacial stream coming 

 from an old rock moraine. We could hear this stream 

 rolling the pebbles along in its channel. At another 

 point the moraine showed a remarkable cone, which 

 at first sight we took for a typical esker, but a nearer 

 examination revealed the fact that the whole cone, with 

 the exception of the exterior, was formed of solid ice 

 with only an outer coating of sand, mud and gravel 

 associated with abundant marine organisms similar to 

 those collected by us the previous day. We halted 

 when we arrived opposite the . green mineral observed 

 by Mawson the previous day. We collected a good 

 deal of this. At first sight we thought it was the 

 common mineral epidote, but its hardness and the 

 fact that it had turned yellow, where it was weathered, 

 made this hypothesis untenable. The green crusts 

 formed by it were about one fourteenth to one-sixteenth 

 of an inch in thickness, and it was evidently fairly 

 widely distributed in that locality, as numerous large 

 joint faces of the quartz and felspar porphyry were 

 completely coated with it. A little further on we 

 came upon an enormous silicious sponge, eighteen 

 inches by two feet in diameter, adhering firmly to 

 one of the moraine boulders. We secured specimens 

 of this. 



Altogether the locality was most fascinating, and 

 we longed to have been able to spend more time there. 

 ^Amongst other interesting problems was the question 



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