Research: Dry Valleys, Antarctica

Day One: Set Up. The focal point of this research is to determine the composition of the lake water present of the four lakes in the Taylor Valley of Antarctica. To do this we take samples of lake water at various pre-determined depths below the ice. These lakes are all permanently ice covered, so initially a hole was created using a Hotsi (this is hot coil of wire that is run on a generator and it melts the ice in a circular area), this was done initially several years ago, so all we had to do was reopen the hole. To do this we used a chipper bar and broke away the ice. Then we measured the ice thickness in three different holes.

Day Two: Sampling. The sampling takes place in one day. Most of the material we are analyzing is organic and inorganic matter, bacteria, carbon, phosphate, nitrogen and other elements. However, we are also sampling for chlorophyll a (used in photosynthesis to turn light energy into usable energy or sugars for plants) and as a precaution the chlorophyll a cannot be exposed to light so much of the research must be done in semidarkness.
4:00 AM. Out of bed, into the snow gear, and down to the hut for a quick snack.
4:45 AM Head out to the lake and get ready to start the sampling.
5:00 AM Start sampling. This is a three person job, one person is in charge of pulling the samples up from the hole, another is in charge of filling the bottles with lake water, and the third puts chemicals into particular samples.
7:00 AM Some of the samples are tagged with isotopes (an isotope is a chemical that can bind in place of other compounds, but it has been radioactively modified so that it can be picked up during analysis).
8:00 AM Back at camp for breakfast (the other two people here cook for the three that are up early), then before we even sit down to eat we start filtering on 6 deepest depths.

Filtering is done using a special filter about the size of a nickel. Three different types of filtering are done, one picks up only Carbon-Nitrogen compounds or CNs, another picks up Phosphorus, and the last picks up chlorophyll, so this means all filtering is done in the dark, so as not to ruin the chlorophyll samples.
Particles that are in the water are often off white, but some have color like this sample (photo left) which was taken at 25 meters below the top of liquid water (this sample took over 4 hours to filter completely).
Break for lunch, Break for dinner, samples are finished by 6-7 PM and then the day winds down. Clean up the labs, and hop in bed, grateful that everything went according to schedule.

Day Three:
Finish up the tests.

We also run other tests that I will go into in more detail later. But for now here is a picture of my tent (below) and the huge glacier right behind it!

MOVIE

Here is the time lapse video that a buddy of mine Scott the balloonatic (ie. working with the giant balloons that are sent into the upper atmosphere to measure the hole in the ozone layer) anyway it is the movie he put together of our happy camper group building our snow wall. I really hope this clip works (if it doesn't you can go to YouTube.com and type in "happy campers from McMurdo build snow wall").

I am wearing black sunglasses, a wine red shirt, black overalls, and no hat. I start out on the very right hand corner of the snow wall (as you are looking at it, I am facing the camera though so it is my left, your right) then I move to the oppisite side to secure the other corner of the wall. The movie is only 2.5 minutes but in real time this took 12 of use around 40 minutes to make. The people who are really sawing the blocks out of the quarry aren't even shown in this video, but they were doing hard work too, then the blocks had to be brought over to the carpenters at the wall (that was me!) we were using saws like you see in wood work shops.

Question and Answer:

The Life of Science: The life of science is very different from ordinary life. Upon entering into this life one realizes the interdependence of the experiments and the experimenter. One cannot survive without the other, and therefore the good scientist makes sacrifices for their science.

1) What is your daily schedule like? Our schedules are based on the schedule of our experiments. While out in the field for example we will wake up at 4am. Then by 5am we will be sampling on the lakes, this will take around 2 hours and then the samples will be processed for the following 24 hours (this starts at 7:30 and ends the next morning at 7:30). So when you put your new samples in you retrieve yesterday’s samples and analyze them in the lab. Remember we are studying: salt (NaCl), bubble air (CO2 and O2), chlorophyll a (photosynthesis), bacteria (extremophiles) and the overall composition of the water sample. So that should take us into the night. Our group will have it worked out so that the three people who get up early go to bed a little earlier. Then the other two people will stay up until midnight running the samples until they are done.

2) What are you doing right now? Right now I am stationed at McMurdo still. This is the main lab station for all of the research done in this part of Antarctica (the other three stations are: South Pole, Palmer-in the peninsula, and Scott Base-which is a Kiwi only group). My job right now is to prepare for all of the bacteria runs that we will be doing out in the field. I am washing and labeling bottles, preparing gels for the bacteria to be grown on, and organizing for our flight to the dry valleys. Some members of my group have left for the dry valleys already, so right now I am in charge of all the preparations, which includes getting all of the needed food ready for flight. I should be headed toward Lake Bonney in one weeks time (weather dependent of course).












When I am lucky I get to go on hikes, the picture shown is from a recent hike to Castle Rock and after getting there I climbed up it (around 1,000 feet).

I am also working with another researcher here at McMurdo. We are looking at stream water (which flows into the lakes I will be studying). We are sampling the water and testing the amount of sediment that is suspended in it. The ecosystem here in the Dry Valleys is very co-dependent on all the variables. The glaciers melt into the streams which then flow into the lakes. This glacial flow represents the only nutrients that the lakes will be receiving all year, so it is all very important!

3) Is it colder then you expected? Right now it is still summer here in Antarctica, and the summer is much warmer then I expected. On a daily bases I am wearing jeans and a long sleeve shirt. When you go on hikes up Ob Hill for instance, then it gets a little colder and you want to have a parka and long underwear on, but for the most part it is warm here. By warm I mean around 20-25 degrees F. It will get much colder soon however, when winter comes in mid February the sun will go down and the temperature will drop significantly.

4) The animals that we see around McMurdo are Skuas (shown right, it feeds on krill and fish), seals (we are currently right on the sound so we can see the sea ice where the seals constantly break through and lay around on the ice) and, if you are lucky, Penguins! Penguins move around a lot so it is really hard to catch them around the sound. The last sighting of Penguins was around a week ago at 3am... I missed that one.

5) Will you see Penguins in the Dry Valleys? Hopefully not. The Dry Valleys are, remember, a desert. There is no liquid water there and no mammals besides humans can survive there. In short, like any desert, the poor animals (including humans) who are unlucky enough to get lost in the Dry Valleys, end up dying there. So the only penguins and seals I will find will be mummified specimens. (Which I will not touch or disturb because it is not a part of my research project and it is therefore prohibited.)

6) Do you like it in Antarctica? YES! I love it here, the people are amazing, the research is really interesting and life is really exciting. It is a hard life to get used to and it is important to make time to relax. Research is a full time job so we all have to work hard to make sure that we are stopping for the day eventually. We also have to make sure that we are going to sleep. No matter how awake you feel at midnight when the sun is still high in the sky and the air is cold on your face, you need to remind yourself that tomorrow will be just as beautiful, and you need your sleep. Also because we are in such a tight community lots of people are currently coming down with the flu. So we have to be really careful that we don't get sick. Sickness out in the field is horrible, and sickness here in McMurdo is not much better.

7) What do you eat? Unlike past explorers who had to resort to eating seal meat and their dogs to stave off scurvy, we are lucky here at McMurdo and there is never a shortage of food! Much of our food is flown in from New Zealand (or even brought in by ships like the Oden shown right), so our food is really good and fresh (mostly, out in the field it will be frozen and/or dried). However, when the flights are delayed it affects the food too. Also we have our own green house here, something I wasn't expecting. All of our fresh veggies are grown right here in Antarctica; of course we are very careful that no seeds or pollen escapes the green house area because that would contaminate this pristine environment.

8) When I head out to the Dry Valleys (in one week) I will stay there for around 5 days, then return to McMurdo to prepare for the next trip and investigate what we found on this current trip. Starting in February my group will begin to stay in the valleys for a month at a time and then return to McMurdo for a week. McMurdo itself shuts down in mid February because most people leave. My group of 14 scientists is the first one ever to stay in the dry valleys during the extended season until April 17.

Question and Answer:

1) How thick is the ice underneath you? Actually right now I am still at McMurdo; here we are strictly land based. There is a snow pack that is very heavy in some areas, but we are not out on the ice at all right now because it is the end of the austral summer and the sea ice is far to thin to move about on safely. The sea ice however gets very thick in the winter months (Feb-Sept) and other then a thin moat that forms on the shore of the Ross Ice Shelf it is fairly thick even now. The ice breaker for instance has been making it's slow way into the sound for the last week already and is just now close enough to get good pictures of.

2) 6a All Saints: How is the penguin? The penguin that I mentioned earlier that had made its way unknowingly out onto the landing strip is perfectly fine. The plane of more than 70 people waited in the air until it safely moved away from the area. Some fire fighters scared it away but did not get close enough, even then, to touch or really scare it. The problem is penguins do not have any land predators here in Antarctica so humans and even huge planes do not scare them as they would scare a deer for instance back home.

3) We did not build an igloo exactly. We did erect three walls around our camp and that was done by using carpenter saws and sawing the compacted snow into blocks. The cave that we made for shelter is slightly different and is known as a Quincy. In order to build this first we arranged all of our big baggage and sleeping pads into a mound on the ground. Then we covered the mound with 2 feet of snow and packed it down as much as possible. After that we went back to building walls and erecting tents for the next hour. At this point you dig a small hole in the back of the Quincy and pull out all of the luggage. Then you continue to dig out a little more of the inside and make your main entrance. Next you plug your backdoor or safety exit and poke air holes through the top of the cave (this lets in new air so don't forget to do that!) Then you are done with your ice cave.

Happy Camper:

Day 5: 9 Jan, 2008 (NZ time)
As I got down on my stomach and wormed my way through the narrow opening of our Scott tent it was impossible not to reminisce about the first Antarctic explorers, or rather scientists, and what they went through to get where we are today. While Amundsen and his group reached the Pole first, and returned home to tell the tale, Scott is the name on everyone’s lips in Antarctica, and as we finished the first day of Happy Camper and crawled into our own bags, I was beginning to realize why.
The winds picked up right after we finished erecting two Scott tents and the center wall, but the Quincy or ice hut (fitting two), two camping tents, two more ice walls, and the kitchen still had to be built, and the twelve of us had been working for 3 hours. After his ponies died (one month in) Scott and his men were forced to walk pulling over 1500 pounds on what were already heavy wooden sledges, moreover they were on makeshift skis. As we finished the tents and the East wall the winds shifted uncharacteristically quickly and came billowing from the South. Looking southward, my head bowed against the intense winds, I attempted to distinguish the distinctive southerly Antarctic features of White and Black Islands. What I saw was distressing, the winds were indeed issuing from the South and already Black Island was barely discernable behind the thick cloud cover. To make the situation even more ominous our leader’s pager kept going off to inform her that an accident had occurred involving the caravan of ATV’s we had just seen pass by us.
Hurriedly we finished the final wall and packed our backs and tools away so they would not be subject to the heavy winds, then we ate. Our group was made up of four young desert scientists, three cooks/dishwashers, two astrophysicists’, two teachers and one balloonatic (you may have heard about the ozone testing with balloons), and our dinner conversation rivaled any that you could imagine. But even with subjects like supernovas, the expanding universe, and black holes to hold my attention I kept peeking over the shelter to keep my eye on the approaching storm. Already by 7pm the summer sky was darkening, and though it was nice to have the illusion of dusk around us, I knew it was not from the sinking sun.
Everything stayed up that night and only the sound of the vigorously flapping flags could be heard through the canvas tents. Not until the next day did conditions enter condition 2 (low visibility, heavy winds, or very cold), so now we are waiting at McMurdo for planes and helicopters to be able to fly again (everything has been grounded the last three days). Our group is getting excited to head out toward the dry valleys, but we are going to have to wait until next Thursday at the earliest (Jan 17).
Even given the cold weather my coldest experience on Antarctica yet occurred yesterday when I was in the freezer pulling food for an hour. All my love and thank you all for your responses…

Something to Think About: We also went through several scenarios to test our abilities to survive the harsh conditions we could be facing out in the field. One such scenario was meant to give us the idea of what a whiteout during condition 1 weather would be like. During this scenario 'lost' one of our teammates and only had one climbing rope to go find her (we all had white buckets over our heads to signify the whiteout). The first time we went the wrong direction and eventually we managed to pull the front end of the line back to where we were meant to be. But it had been 20 minutes and the person would have died. The second time we did better but again our planning took too long and the person would have had horrible hypothermia had it been a real case scenario.

On the ICE

Day One: Jan 4, 2008 (NZ time)
A loud crack sounded over the intercom and heads all around me snapped up from books and papers as 70 sets of eyes found their ways to the window of the cockpit. “Uhh,” my heart raced, I wondered if the plane was about to boomerang, “Uhh, we’re going to circle until the fire station clears the runway…there’s a penguin out there.”

Smiles cracked all around me, even the old timers who have been to the ice 15 or more seasons laughed, this is what happens here, in this strange new place. That is not to say that getting to McMurdo was a synch, the base is 9,500 miles from Portland and planes are often forced to return or boomerang back to New Zealand due to harsh weather (one group had 7 such boomerangs before eventually landing on the ice), so I was relieved and ecstatic.
I am not sure what to say about my first step off the plane. For the thirty minute bus ride to the base I didn’t say anything at all, the snow pack and -5C temperature along with Mt Erebus literally took my breath away. As we boarded the bus people shouted about penguins and the cold, but I had eyes only for Erebus. Standing at 12,500 feet Erebus is the most active volcano in Antarctica and we were directly in its shadow. Its sharp icy ridges and continual plume of thick milky smoke make it look even more formidable and it is therefore no wonder that early explorers named it after their valiant ship that was the first to conquer the journey to the Antarctic.

LAB 1:Currently I am located at the main Crary lab in McMurdo (photo shown left is from the top of Observation Hill). This lab is very large and has all of the common conveniences. However, within the next week my team and I will be leaving the comforts of McMurdo and heading out into the felid where the real science begins.
Doing research can mean anything from stepping outside into the yard and collecting rain water to taking a helicopter plane two hours away and camping for up to a month at a time. Here in Antarctica we are doing the latter of the two… This gives an entirely new meaning to preparing for the field.
Usually in science you will prepare to be out in the filed for a day or two of sampling but you will be able to return to the lab to analyze your data. Here it is a completely different story. We will be without things like: containers, sinks, WATER, chemicals, cleaning solutions, zip lock bags, and everything else unless we bring it. Therefore, for the next week before we leave we are all planning, cleaning bottles, washing equipment, and packaging everything in bubble wrap so that it is safe for the 2 hour helicopter ride. Apart from all of that we are planning all of our meals (to feed 5) for the next two weeks and bringing that food with us to the field camps too. So there is a lot of work to do and when we are not in classes or lectures we are in the lab preparing. While doing so however we are all repeating the mantra that soon the grunt work will be over and we will be heading out to sample.
One thing at a time though. Each bottle must be washed then rinsed three times, labeled with tape, packaged, boxed, and sent out to the hanger before we go.