Dawn in Antarctica

Written November 15, 2009 I love taking walks. Every time I do, I make surprising new discoveries. My first walk was to the Taylor Glacier and up across the moraines (debris left by glaciers) south of Lake Joyce. The landscape has all sorts of strange mounds and hollows that I now know probably form when buried ground ice thaws and the water runs out. The surface collapses making a hollow and leaving mounds behind. This walk was a wander. My second walk was more directed. Dale had spotted a possible ice patch on a Google Earth image before we left the US. He was hoping to be able to find it on the ground once we got here. He showed me where it was, and I walked in that direction. After seeing tons of cool things, including polygonal fractures caused by expansion and contraction of the ground, I walked over a big mound of till (also debris left by glaciers) and found this beautiful blue ice patch. The ice is clear and has bubbles caught in it, which indicates that it was a

Written November 14, 2009 Pearse Valley is a new type of environment for me. It’s colder and dryer than anywhere I’ve stayed. There is more ice. It can be windy, although it hasn’t been too bad yet. There are no plants, although rumor has it that lichens have been spotted high up the valley walls where clouds often form. When I first got here, the cold was intimidating. And it was cold: often about -25°C when I’d get up in the morning. My toothpaste was always too frozen to get out of the tube without putting it in a pocket or my sleeping bag (or keeping it in a heated tent). However, after a few days, I learned what combinations of clothes work keep me warm doing different jobs. Wind protection is really important, and I tend to always have two windproof layers handy. I also found that I can let my hands get quite cold if I need to do delicate work without gloves. They warm up quickly if I keep the rest of my body toasty and put my fingers in a warm place. Also, my wool fingerle

Written November 11, 2009 Our camp is a comfortable place to live for a month and a half. We have four large tents that are mostly heated by propane heaters. When they work, they keep things above knee level from freezing. Two of the heated tents are Endurance tents (striped), and two are Arctic Oven tents (yellow). One of the Arctic Ovens is our cooking and eating tent. The bright yellow tent in the foreground is our cook tent. 100 lb bottles of propane provide fuel. The white boxes on the left are our “freezers”. Note the giant rocks holding the tent down. The pointed tent in the background is our Scott tent with the toilet (see below). We have a propane Coleman stove for cooking and boxes of food on the floor where it stays cold or frozen. We also have water jugs and a cooler for water. We drink the lake water, dipped from the dive hole, and it’s tasty. The rest of the heated tents are work spaces. One of the Endurance tents is for electronics. Wayne is using a ground

[ There is still no Internet connection to Lake Joyce. Dawn sent a CD out on a helo with Cindy to give to Lisa in McMurdo to email to me in Kittitas. Here is her next blog. Bill Sumner ] November, 6, 2009 Yesterday’s blog was about a microbialite sample. This is what it looked like: The microbial growth is the soft looking part sitting above sand. The stuff that looks like old shag carpet is all bacteria, thread-like (or filamentous) bacteria. I dissected it as described before, and ended up with some nice pieces of calcite, which I talked about categorizing. Here is how I’ve grouped my pieces: The large pieces not in a petri dish are special and don’t fit a category. The ones in the dish in the bottom middle have complicated, lace-like structures. The ones toward the right side of the dish are more rod-like but still have lace-like details. The pieces in the dish on the lower right has rods on the left and smoother plates toward the right. The plates toward the bottom have

Written November 5, 2009 [We have web access!  I'll update my classification if it continues.] Three days ago, Dale collected some samples from 19.5 meters (64 feet) in the calcified zone and 10 meters (34 feet) off boulders.  The mats all had the mineral calcite in them.  Calcite forms when the activities (sort-of like concentrations) of calcium (Ca2+) and bicarbonate (HCO3-) in the water are high.  Bacteria change the concentration of bicarbonate in the water when they photosynthesize or respire and organic molecules can absorb or release calcium.  Thus, bacterial communities can influence calcite precipitation (see YouTube videos).  This calcite is what can turn the microbial communities into fossils. I spent parts of the last two days cleaning the mat, rock flour, and sand off the calcite.  I use tweezers to pull off some of the mat and a pipette to squirt water on the sample to remove other bits of mat, rock flour, and sand.  Sometimes I hold the sample with tweezers and

Written October 28, 2009 [We have web access, at least for now!  I'll add photos later if the connectivity remains.] Lake Joyce...  It isn’t what we expected.  In any field science project, you choose a place to go and things to do before you’ve been there and done them.  You use all the data you can find to choose the best place, to make predictions about what you’ll find, and decide what work to promise to do in your grant proposals.  When you get there, you find unexpected things.  Sometimes you can’t even do the science you proposed.  It gets exciting and challenging.  It always happens to at least some degree.  On this trip, we got a big, unexpected surprise. We melted a dive hole through the ice.  The ice was thinner than it was when Dale was here before - only a bit less than 5 meters thick, although it is 6 meters thick in the middle of the lake.  The first dive down found sediment coating all the microbial mats we’ve come here to study.  The mats are barely aliv