Dawn in Antarctica

December 10, 2013 Today was sunny all day with 25 knot katabatic winds in the afternoon.  It was warmer. I spent all day on microscopy, photography, and sorting photos.  It was a very productive day. The quad bike quit starting, and Devin, Anne, and Tyler pushed it back to camp.  None of them new what to do to figure out what was wrong.  I got ready to help when Ian came back to camp.  He has a lot of experience with engines, and once we found the tool kit and pulled the spark plug, we solved the problem:  the plug was fouled.  A new one fixed the problem.  We can add "engine repair" to the list of field skills needed! Our only means of transport besides walking is a quad bike (ATV).  We have a sled to help carry gear between the huts/sleeping tents and the science tent and dive hole.  It is also good for carrying the drill and other gear around the lake.

December 9, 2013 Today was mostly sunny and calm, with beautiful snow on the mountains. Mt. Oden with Lake Vanda in the foreground. Tyler and Ian dove today, and I handled the rope as usual.  The rope pulls for Ian's dive went badly, as in the signals weren't clear.  That put me off for most of the day.  I don't like doing a poor job on something like handling a diver's line.  There was too much slack, and the rope might have gotten caught on something.  I need to really concentrate when handling the line.  At least it only caused stress and didn't actually put Ian in any danger. I did a lot of microscopy work and wandered back to camp along the south shoreline.  I was very tired.

December 8, 2013 Happy Birthday, Dad! There is more snow on the peaks and the Onyx River is really flowing. I spent the morning programming in Python to look for trends in our preliminary thermister data.  I don't do enough programming to remember all the data reading and processing tips.  And without the internet to look them up in an instant, it took me much longer to actually get to the data.  I worked on sorting out how to do a Fast Fourier Transform to look for cycles.  This was really fitting for today, my dad's birthday, as a key part of his Ph.D. thesis was implementing a FFT technique to understanding nuclear data for cobalt. Helping Tyler prepare for a dive.  I'm holding the rope, Ian is checking his air, and Devin is preparing to attach his inflator.  Anne is the photographer. Tyler dove and collected samples for me to photograph and for Anne to subsample for genomics.  Anne and I spent all afternoon on the samples, and Anne worked late into the evening

December 7, 2013 Snow!  We had flurries all afternoon.  It was amazingly beautiful. We also had an amazing thing happen: The Onyx River started flowing.  The Onyx is the largest river on the continent of Antarctica, and it ends in Lake Vanda, right next to our camp.  It "usually" remains frozen until late December, but it started flowing on a cold snowy day, early this year.  It is true that the sun was shining up valley, so snow and ice were probably melting there. The Onyx River - the largest river in Antarctica.  It's really only a babbling brook... The Onyx River flowing into Lake Vanda past our camp and the Vanda huts.  The stick in the water is part of a system to measure the river flow. In the morning, we cleared out some of our holes in the ice to take video of the lake floor.  Ian did his third dive, retrieving the thermisters so we could see if they were working.  Anne and I talked about sampling protocols for genomics, lipids, and photographs.  

December 6, 2013 Today was cold and windy. We drilled more holes and took more video in the morning.  In the afternoon, I worked on a dive tracker.  The dive tracker was made by a group of students at Hobart College, Tasmania.  They are working on using Arduino electronics, accelerometers, a magnetometer, and GPS to track under water autonomous vehicles.  They build us one to try on Tyler to see if we can track his dives.  The tracker saves the data to an SD card.  We tried it out, but didn't understand the data and broke the magnetic switch.  I bypassed the switch.  I also did some test to see if it was actually working.  I didn't come to a conclusion. Me, working on electronics in the dive tracker... For dinner, I fixed soup (using leftover pasta water from the night before) and hash browns.  They go amazingly well together after only a week in the field.

December 5, 2013 We had an almost wind-free night, which made for quiet sleeping.  Our tents were flapping. Today was Tyler's first dive and Ian's second.  Tyler mostly looked around and got used to the new dive gear.  Ian deployed an instrument called PAM (Pulse Amplitude Modulated spectrometer) that measures chlorophyll abundance and photosynthetic potential.  We left PAM in the lake measuring two spots for most of the month we were at Lake Vanda. Ian and I drilling the first flight of a hole in the ice with Tyler watching.  Once we go down a flight. we stop drilling, disconnect the Jiffy drill at the top, add a flight, and do it all again, and again, and again.  We get to the lake water in the 4th flight. After lunch, we drilled more holes in the ice and took more video.  Tyler's new video system is working very well.  When we've tried it before, we've had trouble getting the camera to spin properly.  However, this time, we have a SeaView camera that

A birthday message from Vandy, the monster in the lake... December 4, 2013 My 47th birthday!  I spend all day appreciating the fact that I was actually in Antarctica.  After all the shutdown woes, Ian and Antarctica New Zealand had given me the best birthday present possible - four weeks at Lake Vanda. I spent the morning on the microscope and cameras working with my first sample, and then helped drill more holes and drop cameras down them in the afternoon with Ian, Tyler and Anne.  Devin collected more lake profile data The drilling/drop camera party We decided that the Christmas cookies really needed to be birthday cookies, so we ate them for my birthday.  We did save the candy canes and marshmallow Santas until Christmas (and after).

My first sample... December 3, 2013 In the morning, Ian, Anne, Tyler and I drilled holes in the ice to measure water chemistry and to lower a camera to look at the microbial mat growing at the bottom of the lake.  We had a lot of fun.  Ian also did the first dive, with me handling his rope.  The divers are tethered by a rope so they can find the hold again.  We also used the rope for signaling.  One pull meant the diver was fine.  Two meant they wanted more line.  Three meant pull the line in.  Five or more meant there was an emergency and pull in quickly. (We never used this one.) Ian deployed two thermisters at 26 m water depth to measure the temperature at the lake bottom and 10 cm off the bottom. This was a test to see what data we might expect for them. Ian also brought up the first samples, and they were very interesting.  Things are similar to what we saw in 2010, but after three years of thinking about the growth of the pinnacles, I saw much more than before. We had

The microscope setup in the spacious science tent.  I'm using the binocular scope and the phase contrast scope is on the other side of the table. December 2, 2013 I set up the microscopes in the science tent in the morning, and it looks like our photography system will work well this year.  Karl (from snow school), Deidre (reporter), and some others came out for a few hours.  Karl and Deidre photographed and interviewed Ian and various other things around camp.  They filmed Tyler for a profile for Antarctica New Zealand.  I send a blog post out with them. We also collected water samples for Anne to filter to look at planktonic organisms and Tyler to analyze the sulfur isotopes of sulfate and sulfide. Today was the first colder, windier day.

Anne, Devin and I flew out to Lake Vanda in a US Antarctic Program 212 helicopter.   We flew in a US helo because AntNZ only has one helo this year, and it was busy flying a giant radar over the sea ice to measure its thickness.   The US pilot was happy to fly us to Vanda; it’s his first season, and he hadn’t been out there before.   Thus, we did a bit of sight seeing over the Asgard Range.   We flew into Wright Valley, which hosts Lake Vanda, from the south and swung back east to camp.  That gave me a great view of our science and diving tents on the lake ice.  They are the tiny spots just above the grouping of three islands, in the shade from a cloud. We landed near the NZ huts at the east end of the lake, and that is where our main living camp is.  One hut is a kitchen and the other two are for storage and science.  We sleep in the individual mountain tents (Tango tents from Mountain Hardware). The camp on the ice has two tents, one on either side of

Devin in front of a working DTS instrument! December 1, 2013 I felt a bit ill in the morning, but it wore off.  Ian and I deployed the drop camera and tested a sediment sampler in the dive hole.  We decided the sampler wasn't too useful and didn't use it again.  In the afternoon, I helped Devin deploy the DTS.  I don't know what the TLA stands for, but it consists of a long, industrial bundle of fiber optic lines that gets suspended in the water (to the bottom of the lake).  A laser sends pulses down the line, and the reflections are timed.  The strength and timing of the reflections measure the temperature of the cable in different places.  The idea was to look for small temperature changes related to convection in the lake. Deploying the cable was very stressful.  It is a stiff cable and was wound backward, so we had to manipulate it a lot.  It made many popping sounds, so both Devin and I were terrified we were breaking it.  However, by the end of the day, Devin