Blogs from Antarctica - page 61

Amy Shields, a graduate student with Dr. Kam Tang of William and Mary College, showed me around her lab and told me about her research with a particular type of phytoplankton called Phaeocystis antarctica. This tiny one-celled plant is at the bottom of the marine Antarctic food chain, but not much is known about this particular species. This organism has a period where it wanders around as a single cell, but later it seems to clump together with others of its species into a colony and secrete mucous to hold the colony together. The colonies are yellowish. They take up carbon and produce volatile organic sulfur into the water. The group is looking at whether the solitary forms differ from the group forms in growth, composition or photosynthetic rates. They also are looking at how the ... read more

Friday the 13th, a day often associated with bad luck, turned out to be very lucky for our team. We left WAIS early (about 12 hours earlier). Due to bad weather at South Pole, WAIS received an additional flight. The flight did not take too long. Upon arrival at Williams Field, I was disappointed at the lack of support. We were not allowed on the shuttle so that Air Guard personal can change shifts. Since it was toward the end of dinner time, we had to eat at the Williams Field Galley. The food was good, but I would have expected an additional shuttle to pick up our flight. I was stunned with how many mountains were around McMurdo. I know I was only here about two week ago, but compared to WAIS’s bleak landscape, this ... read more

A look at Robert Falcon Scott's Discovery Hut erected at Hut Point just outside of McMurdo. It was primarily used for storage and entertainment for the Scott party, but served as a residence for some months for Shackelton's group. If you would like to know more about this hut, I recommend the NZ Heritage Trust site at http://www.heritage-antarctica.org/index.cfm/Human/Scott1/... read more

Our team excavated and dug snow pits near the big drill site to provide data about the upper layers and density to be used with our radar, by glaciologists interested in WAIS and by the ice core team coming to WAIS next year. Here are some photos of the tools and our team doing the measurements in the snow pit. There are no photos of them actually DIGGING the pits though. ... read more

Tuesday morning, we woke up early so that we could make sure that we had time for breakfast. We were warned that we would need as much fuel as possible to keep ourselves going during Happy Camper School. At about 9am, we met the Field and Safety Training Classroom on the second floor of the science support center. We were introduced to our two instructors Trevor and Cecilia (CC), and then went around the room and introduced ourselves and our previous camping activities. We went through some discussion on staying warm and handling cold injuries. At about 10:15, we packed up a hagueland (amphibious tracked vehicle) and a Piston Bully (tracked vehicle). We took these vehicles out to the instructors hut (i-hut), which is located out on the McMurdo Ice Shelf near Williams (Willie) Field. Once ... read more