Dawn in Antarctica

Ian, Dale and I spent yesterday afternoon and most of today together planning our field season, working on equipment, interpreting data from last year, and planning a future project to study Lake Untersee, also in Antarctica.  Ian lives in the Solomon Islands, and Dale lives in New York, so it is very rare for us to work together in person.  Usually, we communicate via e-mail or Skype.  Working together in person is much more fun and productive. One of the highlights was looking at some brand new x-ray computed tomography (CT) images of one of our frozen cores that we collected last year.  X-ray imaging provides a map of density differences, so one can see how the dense minerals are distributed in the low density mat.  Computed tomography is a technique for turning a whole bunch of x-rays into a 3D model of the density variations.  I used a CT scanner in the UCDavis Center for Molecular and Genomic Imaging  to image the core.  This scanner is usually used to image mice, so my project