Garwood Interupted

I'm back in McMurdo after a week out in the Garwood Valley. Kelly, Jay, and Lily are still out in camp, finishing up the last of our work there, but I needed to come into station to meet the rest of the Cold Dirt team, who are scheduled to arrive in McMurdo tomorrow.

The field season has been going great, despite some unseasonably cold and wet weather. We battled snow several days last week--trying to keep the tents dry (no easy thing when you've got a cook stove burning in the tent) and trying to keep the snow out of our samples.

Since we've no place to go, let it snow, let it snow, let is snow...

Snow is a problem for ice and water sampling because it has a very particular chemical and isotopic composition. One of our goals this season was to learn whether there is ancient Garwood River ice hidden in the ground ice deposits in the valley. Finding river ice (sometimes called aufeis) hidden with all this glacier ice would be a big find, since the river ice chemical and isotopic composition could tell us something about what temperature and relative humidity were like in the Dry Valleys during the last ice age (finding paleo-climate records in this part of the world can be surprisingly tricky, so this would be a neat discovery!). Of course, if snow gets into our samples, then we'd learn that ancient river ice in the Garwood looks just like modern snow...which would mean we'd have to throw away our contaminated samples. Still, it sure is pretty!

When the weather cooperated, though, we raced about collecting ice and soil samples, and refurbishing the time lapse video stations that Jay Dickson has been operating. The cameras have been working great, and are producing video that I'll post here soon. Of course, the camera systems require electricity to run, so we've been hauling big car batteries around the valley. The batteries are charged by solar panels. Here's a video of Kelly hauling a battery across the Garwood River. I promise, I put down the camera to help her once she got ashore!

Wanted: 1 pack mule. Must like the cold. 

That same snow is keeping the rest of the Cold Dirt team stuck in Christchurch, but I'll introduce them as soon as they're on the ice!

(Almost) Live and (somewhat) life-like from Garwood Valley!

After eight great days in the Garwood, the team and I have moved to Taylor Valley (where I was based last year) for a change of pace, some new soils and rocks to samples, and of course, to get access to the internet, so I can upload images to this blog. We had a tremendous week of fieldwork, and are looking forward to looping back through at the end of the month to finish this year's research.

Here's a few 3D images of what we've been up to. You'll need red-blue 3D glasses to see the view in stereo, but without them, you'll get some idea of the scenery. 

Here's a view of almost every part of the valley we've been working on. Up front close is the buried glacier (called the "ice-cored drift") that fills Garwood Valley. Beyond it is the floodplain of the Garwood River, which cuts through the ice-age deltas we've studied to learn more about when the valley filled with ice. Behind the three deltas is more "ice cored drift," and beyond that, the modern Garwood Glacier. 

Here's home-sweet-home in the Garwood, our camp. We're on the Garwood River plain, in front of the buried ice (that helps keep the wind down). The big tent near the camera is an 8 by 21 foot "Endurance" tent, where we cook, eat, and repair our science gear (it's also our lab, in a pinch). The big antenna next to it is an HF radio for calling back to McMurdo. Behind the Endurance are our bedrooms--each team member gets his own little tent to sleep in. The sand is the valley is pretty soft, making for a cozy night's sleep in a sleeping bag.

This shot shows two team members, Dr. Andrew Fountain (on the right) and James "Jerome" Bethune on the left. James just finished college and is here working with Andrew and I as a field hand, and on some research projects related to how different geological surfaces become better or worse homes for algae. They're standing next to the track of a seal (to the left) that crawled its way inland from the sea (nobody knows for sure why they do this some times). The "ice cored drift" is behind them, and beyond that, the Ross Sea (covered in ice) and the Brown Peninsula.

Here's Berry Lyons and his student Julie sampling a "thermokarst pond" in the buried ice. When the ice melts, it can leave behind a hole that fills up with the meltwater. There's ice exposed behind them, that's feeding the pond. We're trying to learn how these ponds form, and why different kinds of algae chose to live in one pond and not another (some of the algae has wild colors--tye-dye reds, greens, and yellows).

This picture shows Dr. Rickard Pettersson and Jerome working with the ground-penetrating radar. Rickard is carrying a very precise GPS so we know exactly where he's scanned. The radar bounces radio waves off the different layers in the ground (soil on top, buried ice, the bedrock below) so we can measure how much ice is in the valley, and how many different layers are in the deltas. It's a heavy pack to haul all over the Garwood, but Rickard (who's joined the team from Sweden) doesn't mind working hard, or thinking through hard scientific problems. 

The only team members I haven't shown you are Jay Dickson (who is making some amazing time-lapse movies of the "ice cliff" melting) and Thomas Nylen (who is managing the weather station in front of the buried ice). I'll post pictures of them in action, and some of the data they've gathered in the next post.

After working hard all week, the only task remaining was to load up our gear into a big cargo net and to wait for a helicopter to fly us and our camp equipment to Lake Hoare. The Bell 212 is an extremely powerful helicopter that makes a lot of wind as it lifts 1900 pounds of tents, fuel, rock samples, and duffel-bags. It's important to watch the helicopter take off to make sure that the cargo net stays safely packed and away from any obstacles (like the wall of ice next to our camp). The Garwood is a very sandy valley, and, as the winds roared while the helicopter took off, I managed to collect one last sediment sample in my beard. Nothing quite like playing in the dirt. 

Northbound

It's been a busy week in McMurdo trying to get prepared to leave Antarctica tomorrow. My team and I have been busily cleaning and returning gear to the Berg Field Center and the Crary Lab.

The biggest task this week has been preparing samples to be shipped north. I've got all kinds of samples that all have different processing and transportation requirements. It's kind of like trying to figure out how to load a grocery bag. You want your ice cream to stay frozen, your apples not to get bruised, and your eggs not to crack. Only here, I need my ice cores (from Garwood) to stay frozen, my soils (from Taylor) not to grow mold, and my rocks (from everywhere) not to get chipped. Fortunately, the cargo vessel that will be docking in McMurdo next month has freezers, coolers, and giant storage containers aboard that should get my samples home safe and sound.

Since Antarctica is in the southern hemisphere, and Portland is in the northern hemisphere, the ship has to cross the equator to get my samples home. It's pretty impressive to think that the ship can keep ice cores at -20*C (-4*F), even when it's 90*F outside. Since my soils don't need to be in a freezer the whole way back, they need to be dried so that they don't grow mold in the heat (the same way foods like potato chips or raisins are dried to keep them from getting moldy).

I'd say it has been a great season. We've learned a lot about how the "invisible streams" in Taylor Valley (the water tracks) come out of their winter freeze. In Garwood, we've begun to explore a frozen world that existed almost 10,000 years ago. It's been an adventure at times:

Sampling algal mats at the top of the Garwood Valley "ice cliff." It might not seem  like much of an adventure, but to get there I had to cut toe holds in the ice...

...all the way up to the top of the wall here. It's worth it, though, since we can carbon date the algae in the sediments. The sediments are on top of the ice, so the ice has to be at least as old as the sediments that bury it (geologists call this "the law of superposition). Get an age for the algae, and we've got an age for the ice. 

It's also been a great deal of fun. My colleagues--both the scientists, and the support personnel--have been a pleasure to work with. I'm definitely ready to be heading home, but a little piece of me is already excited about continuing to explore in Garwood valley next year!

Stay tuned to this blog during the "off season" for updates on what we've found in the Dry Valleys, news about publications, and more stereo pictures!

Northbound tomorrow.

One last day in the field

I'm sitting in the Lake Hoare hut in the heart of Taylor Valley, waiting for a helicopter that will take me, Thomas Nylen (whose photos are in this post), and Jim O'Connor (a colleague from the US Geological Survey) down to the end of the valley for one last day of fieldwork. It definitely makes me sad to be leaving the field (and sadder to know that I have a solid week of labwork ahead of me--the same kinds of things I did earlier this season). But we couldn't ask for better weather, or a better last project.

We'll launch from Lake Hoare aboard an A-Star helicopter.

An A-Star helicopter dropping off a "sling load" (cargo attached to the helicopter by a cable).

A short flight down the valley, and we'll arrive at the New Harbor camp--a small hut and lab on the shore of the Ross Sea. I'm going to meet Ron Sletten, another permafrost geologist, to talk about a research borehole he's drilled into the soil here. Jim is going to look at more paleo-deltas from when the lakes of Taylor Valley were linked and flowed into the Ross Sea.

Then we'll walk inland to a spot called "Explorer's Cove." The LTER maintains a weather station there, where Thomas needs to do some maintenance work, and I need to collect one last soil sample. 

Then we'll continue our hike inland, past the Lake Fryxell camp, and then up and over the Canada glacier back to Lake Hoare. It should be a pretty excellent walk. Not a bad way to wrap up an Antarctic field season. 

Off to Garwood Valley

Been a busy week back at McMurdo Station, getting camp in order for a weeklong trip to Garwood Valley. We're leaving the comforts of station life behind (dinner is running for over 1,000 scientists and support personnel in the galley, or dining hall, right now), and the structure of a well-organized field camp (like Lake Hoare) for a wild part of the Dry Valleys. We'll be putting in a small tent camp to explore buried ice deposits left over from the last glacial maximum. A toe of ice was left in Garwood Valley about 10,000 years ago. Locked in it is evidence of how Antarctica responded to sudden warming at the end of the ice age.

To give you an idea of what goes in to making a remote research camp work, I've attached the shopping list I took to the food issue room today. McMurdo has a little "supermarket" where you can stock up on supplies for the tent camp. All said, breakfast, lunch, and dinner for 4 people for 7 days came to 199 lbs. of food. It might not be the best chow on the continent, but there's sure a lot of it!


Friday Night--Burrito

2 lbs ground beef
1 bag cheese
1 box rice
salsa
1 bag fajita veg
1 bag tortillas
1 can refried beans

Saturday Night--Stirfry

4 can chicken
1 bag asian veg
soy sauce
chili
10 ramen

(double-up for weather?)

Sunday Night--Steak and Fish

4 x steak
4 x halibut
latkes: frozen hashbrowns bag
egg powder
italian seasoning
salt
pepper

Monday Night--Chili

2 lbs ground beef
2 cans kidney beans
chili powder
2 small green chili cans
1 can tomato garlic and onion
1 can tomato mexican
1 block tastee

Tuesday Night--Spaghetti

2 lbs pasta (not spaghetti!)
2 packages meatballs
1 can tomato sauce
1 can garlic and onion tomato
1 tomato powder packet

Wednesday Night--Thanksgiving

4 cans turkey
mashies mix
gravy mix
1 bag stuffing
10 oz.peas

(double-up for weather delay)

Thursday Night--Chicken Parm

12 breaded patties
1 bag mozzarella
2 packets tomato powder
2 lbs spaghetti

Friday Night--Steak and Fish

beef jerky
tastee cheddar cheese
cookies
cans of soup
olive oil
peanut butter
jelly
cabin bread
gorp
granola
milkman instant milk
bagels x 1 dozen
cocoa
raro (like Tang)
butter (1 box)
olive oil (small)
oatmeal x 1 box

Well Met

Despite strong, gusty winds, we had a good day out at the weather stations (sometimes called "met" stations--short for "meteorology" stations). You might think that Thomas has a tough job, clinging to a 3 m tall mast, replacing sensors in the wind (and he sure does)...

Thomas Nylen at the Lake Vanda Met Station

...but my job's not only taking neat stereo images...

Thomas and Rae working on the Vanda Met Station, with "the Dais" cliffs in the background.

...It also involves making measurements of the Dry Valleys soils. Normally, it's nice to be low to the ground on a windy day. But with strong enough gusts, the sand on the valley floor begins to move and bounce--blown along by the gusts. This is called saltation, and is the process that piles up sand into dunes. On a really windy day, like last Thursday, the wind whips around any obstacle it in its way, making eddies of wind and sand, like eddies in a river. Any time I bent down to pick up one of my sensors, I became just such an obstacle. The wind would whip around me, and blast a column of sand right into my face. Not a fun way to collect a sediment sample!

Hailing frequencies open (from the field!)

Hello from Lake Hoare! This blog post comes to you live from the McMurdo Dry Valleys--Taylor Valley in particular. Camp is a gathering of huts (labs, cooking and eating spaces, generator, storage) and tents (for sleeping), situated at the toe of the Canada Glacier. Upvalley (to the west, away from the shores of the McMurdo Sound and the Ross Sea) is the Suess Glacier. In between these two giant ice conveyor-belts sits Lake Hoare, one of the famous ice-covered lakes of the McMurdo Dry Valleys.

We're celebrating the hundredth anniversary of the exploration of Taylor Valley this year, and explorers and scientists have been visiting the valleys regularly since (with particular interest in the Dry Valleys begining in the late 1950s). In one sense, the McMurdo Dry Valleys are very well understood. The valleys are "dry" because they are not covered by the Antarctic ice-cap (more than 99% of Antarctica is buried by the ice cap)--the glacier-like cap is held back from the Valleys by the tall Transantarctic Mountains that hem this side of the Ross Sea. The Dry Valleys aren't "dry," though.

As you can see in the picture, alpine glaciers (like the Canada) flow down the valley walls and spread across the valley floor. During summer months (December to February), the snouts and surfaces of these glaciers melt, generating streams that flow into low points between the glaciers, forming ponds and lakes. Because the average annual temperature in Talor Valley is -18*C (about 0*F), with summer air temperatures seldom rising above ~10*C (40*F), these ponds and lakes are perpetually covered by thick, floating ice covers. The Dry Valleys are "dry," though, in that they recieve very little precipitation: 3-50 mm of "water equivalent" snow per year ("water equivalent" means that you imagine melting that snow once it fell on the ground to form a height of water--just like when the weather report says that a storm dropped 1/2" of rain. Snow is puffy and low density, so it's difficult to describe how much fell unless you make this conversion.) One or two recorded rainfall events have occured in the whole history of the Dry Valleys (down at the coast), while some higher, inland areas have not seen substantial liquid water in millions of years.

What's missing from this short accounting of the history, geography, and climate of the Dry Valleys is permafrost (and biology--more about that later). Everything that you see in that photo that is not a glacier, lake, snow, or human structure is permafrost. Permafrost is nothing more than a ground surface that has remained below freezing, on average, for more than two years. Perennially frozen soil is my specialty, and is the reason that I've come all the way to Antarctica. Permafrost is the "dirt" in "Cold Dirt," and I'll be talking more

Into the Blizzard (Again)

I'm too far down valley and that snow is closing in fast. At my feet are rocks, boulders, and sand--shattered bowling balls and ball-bearings of brown and red dolerite. I'm digging a soil pit, and when the hole is knee-deep, I hit pay-dirt. Ice, actually. Three million year old glacier ice, some of the oldest ice on Earth, that's been moving as a debris-covered glacier, inching its way down valley (the absolute oldest ice is even further down the valley). I've had my eyes on the ground all afternoon, and now the clouds that were skirting the mouth Beacon Valley have marched their way up towards me. The air is filled with with swirling snow, glinting in the failing sun like harsh confetti. The temperature is dropping fast as the warm rays of the sun are swallowed up by the growing storm. I've got thirty pounds of sand and ice in my pack, and three kilometers to make it back to camp before the weather turns to whiteout. It's going to be an interesting hike...

That was December of 2004. It was my first season in the Antarctic as a scientist studying permafrost (frozen ground) as part of a project to understand frozen landscapes on Mars (the "season" is summer in the Antarctic--winter back home in the US--when field work mostly occurs in Antarctica). Now it's 2010 and I'm about to embark on my fifth field season as a permafrost geologist working with the McMurdo Dry Valleys Long Term Ecological Research Project. As part of the National Science Foundation's Antarctic Organisms and Ecosystems program, I'm trying to figure out how the frozen ground in Taylor Valley feeds water and nutrients to the southernmost functioning ecosystem on Earth, and how this microbial and invertebrate "canary in the coal mine" is going to respond to changing climate conditions.

Keep with this blog to find out more about the science going on in this cold, dry place. I'll be updating from a field camp with limited web access, so feel free to ask questions, think critically, and share in the adventure of polar exploration!