We would much prefer to use frost flowers that have formed naturally, but they are very difficult to get to. Frost flowers are very abundant when sea ice is forming but getting safely out to an area where this is happening is quite difficult. The ice is thin and newly formed ice floes are prone to drifting out to sea. We have ways of dealing with these issues but we haven’t yet had all of our plans approved by the managers at McMurdo Station. In the meantime we can do some things by inducing frost flowers to form in a place that we can reach. Although our artificial frost flower plot is surrounded by sea ice the bacteria that end up in them will be quite different from the bacteria in the surrounding ice, in part because the environment of the flowers is much different (colder, more salty, more light).