Daily Report 60 -- Saturday 22 December 2012 -- Sponge Collection on the Dirty Ice at Britina Island
One of the aspects of our project is to determine what the “background” organisms are so we can assess how different the microbial communities are on our traps. Laurie has been looking at the fungal communities associated with marine sponges- part of the group of animals we find near our trap at the Cape Evan’s wall. At the beginning of our field season, Hubert was diving around the giant volcano sponges. You can find a Youtube video of our underwater sponge sampling at http...
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Daily Report 59 -- Friday 21 December 2012 -- Happy Solstice!
When we first arrived in McMurdo we still had sunrise and sunset, although the daylight was long. On 23 October we got our last sunset for the field season and it is now 24 hours a day of daylight.
But today marks a shift in our pattern. For us in the far southern hemisphere, the December solstice is when the sun begins to shift downward toward the horizon as we slowly move into our long winter night. Our next sunset is 20 February, still quite a long time away.
Does all of this daylight...
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Daily Report 55 -- Monday 17 December 2012 -- Lake Fryxell, Taylor Valley, Antarctica
Taylor Valley, known as one of the Dry Valleys, is located on the Antarctica continent and is home to lakes Fryxell, Hoare, and Bonney. Although the receding glaciers that carved the valley are not quite as massive as they once were, glaciers are still present. The largest input of liquid water to the Fryxell, although still comparatively minimal, comes from the Canada and Commonwealth glaciers. The Canada Glacier is located west of Fryxell and the Commonwealth Glacier to the east.
The lakes in...
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Daily Report 31 -- Friday 23 November 2012 -- Ice Caves on Mt Erebus
Active volcanoes not only spew lava, but also hot gases, some of them toxic, some of them just warm air with various amounts of steam and CO2. The vents for such gases are called fumaroles. They commonly form as magma brings groundwater to a boil, forming steam that mixes with volcanic gas and air from the cracks and pores in the volcano, and finally rising to the surface.
So what is special about fumaroles forming on an ice-covered volcano in an extremely cold environment like...
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Daily Report 25 -- Saturday 17 November 2012 -- Ascent to Fang
…and we’re off. After two days of weather delays the helicopters were able to fly; our destination is Fang Glacier, Antarctica. It’s only a pit stop on the way to the final destination, but it’s an important one. Fang is the first leg of high altitude acclimatization; Fang camp is located at 2735 m, and while it appears to be just below the ridge of where LEH is located, the landscape is deceiving. LEH is 2.74 km away from Fang, and another 517 m rise in elevation, leveling for a bit at 3235 m...
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Daily Report 22 -- Wednesday 14 November 2012 -- Polar Mirage
Polar mirage
Here in McMurdo we often see mirages when looking across McMurdo Sound to the Royal Society range or Mount Discovery. These are specifically a form of superior mirage where alternating cold layers and warm layers of air bend the light and can form fantastical images, often appearing like cliffs or upside down mountains. This type of mirage is called a Fata Morgana after Morgan le Fay, who was a fairy enchantress skilled in the art of changing shape in the tales of...
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Daily Report 20 -- Monday 12 November 2012 -- Our Labwork
Antarctica is not all about fun in the snow; our highest priority for the duration of our visit here is research. Charges, defined as multiple packets of rock substrates with different mineral contents and glass slides, have been exposed to the environment for periods of up to four years.
Upon retrieval these charges have to be archived, i.e., processed with various chemical fixatives and low temperature freezing to preserve the microbiological communities and their signatures and to make...
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Daily Report 19 -- Sunday 11 November 2012 -- My Last Dives in McMurdo and Sample Recovery at Cape Evans
It has been a blast. Diving in Antarctica is right up there as one of the coolest things one can do. We finally collected our experiments at about 120 feet depth at Cape Evans Wall.
Very much to our surprise it appeared that the lid has been pried open. Who may have been that interested in our experiments? A day later I did my very last dive at Arrivals Heights near Scott’s hut in McMurdo, clearly a top diving spot.
There were amazing yellow seastars, big volcano...
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Daily Report 14 -- Tuesday 06 November 2012 -- Diving on Cape Evans and at Turtle Rock
After polishing up on my diving experience at dive holes close to town, we moved north to explore two new dive sites, one at Cape Evans and one at Turtle Rock, just south of the Erebus Glacier Tongue. Both dive holes were established for ecological studies, including the macro-fauna as well as microbial communities. Both of them are set on seafloor that is made up of volcanic rocks and of interest to our study. Henry Kaiser was with us on both occasions and shot more...
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Daily Report 12 -- Sunday 04 November 2012 -- Driving to the South Pole
Yes, there actually is a pole at the South Pole, in fact there are two!
There is the “real” geographic South Pole that has to be re-surveyed each year on the the slowly moving Antarctic ice sheet, and there is a ceremonial South Pole- that’s where people go to get their photos taken. Here is a photo of one of our friends at the geographic South Pole a few years ago.
But did you know that there is also a Road to the South Pole? It is the ULTIMATE Ice Road and is a bit over...
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Daily Report 8 -- Thursday 01 November 2012 -- Diving on Dayton’s Wall
After my check-out dives at the McMurdo Jetty, we did two dives at Dayton's Wall just below Ob Hill, a small volcano overlooking the station. It is very close to town and a spectacular dive site. Both dives included Henry Kaiser, a much recorded musician, movie maker, Antarctic diver and the videographer for the B-470 seal science group. For him, the second dive was used to test his new camera and he made a movie for us. It is posted on Jo-Ann Mellish’s YouTube channel.
After seeing...
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Daily Report 7 -- Wednesday 31 October 2012 -- Diving In McMurdo
I am the luckiest guy ever. I get to dive under the sea-ice around McMurdo.
Why do I dive here? I am so giddy about this that I want to say because it is so cool, of course, but this is not the way things work down here. Anything that is done around here has to serve a scientific purpose that has been approved by the National Science Foundation. We gave you the scientific background of our project in the objectives section and in previous blogs on the 2008 and 2010 websites....
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Daily Report 4 -- Sunday 28 October 2012 -- The weather in McMurdo
The weather in McMurdo will go through some major changes as we spend our three months on the ice. We are now still pretty early in the season and temperatures are generally below freezing, whereby temperatures below - 40°C/°F are not uncommon, in particular at "night" (when the sun is low on the horizon or casts a shadow on town). The temperature alone, however is not your enemy, the wind is the one that makes all the difference. When you have to work outside, two issues bother you the most....
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Daily Report 1 -- Thursday 25 October 2012 -- Not the Christchurch we all knew.
Visiting Christchurch made us all sad about the devastation and all the losses the city experienced. At the end of our visit, however, we were quite optimistic about the resilience of its people and their determination to come to a quick recovery. There seems to be an unlimited amount of energy and creativity that they will use to making their city as awesome as it was before. This recognition probably let the editors of the “Lonely Planet” guidebooks to recognize Christchurch...
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