Ice abstraction

Ice has been a recurrent theme in the recent week's walks... and posts. This abstraction, however, was pretty much unexpected, since the weather forecasts had been calling for a warm spell that was supposed to turn the frozen wetlands into a more fluid waterscape. It didn't happen, so when I headed off to Babcock Ridge this afternoon, a sunny but cold and windy time, I wasn't able to search the vernal pools for marbled salamander larvae and young fairy shrimp. The window into their world was covered by solid and rather opaque ice. But if I couldn't look below the surface, I was delighted by what I'd spotted on top of it: a weird moonscape of temporarily solid bubbles and craters. If I were a scientist visiting from another planet, I'd have to say that this deftly sculpted ice was a sign that Earth showed sign of having had water at one time. Maybe it could sustain life.