Audhild Bay is not the only place on northern Ellesmere Island with
enigmatic volcanics. Phillips Inlet and Yelverton Bay both
contain huge exposures of relatively undescribed and unstudied rock.
On an exceptionally clear day, John, Pete, and Matt P., ran a fly camp
to these areas to collect samples.
| With their choked sediment loads and constantly shifting channels,
braided rivers, like this one, are often indicative of tectonically active
or glaciated regions. |
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| The north shore of Phillips Inlet, and its precipitous cliffs of sedimentary
and volcanic strata. Without any real sense of scale in the
Arctic, it is difficult to gauge the size of and distance to objects captured
in photographs. We felt very small when we flew into Phillips
Inlet. |
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| Another view of outcrops at Phillips Inlet. There was plenty
of intriguing rock on the ground in the form of talus, but no readily accessible
outcrops from which to collect meaningful samples. |
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| The mountains just north of Phillips Inlet, marking the western edge
of the Ellesmerian icesheet. |
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| Yelverton Bay, from the southwest. A deep and impressive
fiord. |
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| We found an accessible outcrop at Hansen Point. Here John
and Pete extract a set of cores they drilled. |
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| A suncompass, the device we use to orient each core. If
you look closely, you can see six other cores we drilled from this dike. |
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| This is the view we enjoyed from above Hansen Point: The air was clear
and cool, the sky very blue, and glaciers stretched out into Arctic Ocean
in front of us. Several hundred kilometers across the ocean
was Siberia's north shore. |
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