A view of the entrance to the Grotto Berg with T. Griffith Taylor, geologist, stand to the right of entrance leaning on an ice pick. He is looking up at the entrance. The entrance to the cave has long icicles hanging of the sloping walls. Ponting used this ice cave to create the famous photograph taken from inside of the entrance framing the Terra Nova.

The print has a typed caption: 'View of grotto berg. Taylor in foreground. Jan. 5th 1911.'

Ponting describes the berg and the 'grotto' cave in great detail in his book The Great White South (see pages 67-68) and how it influenced his compositions and photographs.

Scott went to see this ice feature and described it in his diary. 'This forenoon I went to the iceberg with him [Ponting] and agree that I had rarely seen anything more beautiful than this cave. It was really a sort of crevasse in a tilted berg parallel to the original surface; the strata on either side had bent outwards' (page 74)