My bags are packed, I'm ready to go....

Because the Dry Valleys are so remote, we fly on helicopters to get there. Today we were supposed to fly to Lake Fryxell and Lake Bonney. But the weather is very bad for flying right now so we can't go anywhere. Helicopters only fly when the sky is clear and the wind is not blowing too hard. The helicopters here at McMurdo have lots of jobs to do, such as taking people to different places, delivering packages to field camps, and moving large pieces of equipment. Even though the helicopters have many jobs to do, safety is more important than everything else. So if the weather is bad enough, they all stay on the ground. Usually from the helicopter pad you can look out at the Ross Sea and also see the mainland on the other side. As this picture shows, you can't see much of anything this morning.

Last night we got a few inches of snow in McMurdo, even though it's the middle of summer!

We come down to Antarctic with plans to do lots and lots of scientific research, the weather is unpredictable. Sometimes we simply can't get out to our field locations and must wait for the weather to clear. So that's what we're doing today... waiting for better weather!

In and Back Out Again

Our final team member, Ross, arrived Saturday night. So, we are now a complete group of 4 from Dartmouth! Together, we've spent the past couple of days in McMurdo in our lab processing our samples.

Katie is working on a procedure called Chloroform Fumigation Extraction. For that, she is measuring the amount of carbon in the soil that is released after adding chloroform. Chloroform is a chemical that breaks open cells of living organisms (including people). So, if the carbon is released by the chloroform, it was released by the microbes living in the soil. Measuring the amount of carbon released by chloroform gives us an estimate of the microbial biomass living in the soil we are studying. Of course, Katie has to be careful not to breathe the chloroform herself. (Don't worry: when this picture was taken, she was already finished with the chloroform step!)
Elizabeth is busy picking all of the rocks out of her soil samples. The soils she is studying are very rocky, and the pebbles have to be removed before she can measure their chemistry. Doesn't that look like fun?!

We will be heading out to the field again tomorrow. We will be splitting up into two groups so that we can get more work done. Katie and Elizabeth will be going back to Lake Fryxell where we went the first week of our field work. Ross and I will be moving around all over the valley for the rest of the week. We'll be busy!

~~~~~~~~~~~~On another note~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Check out the awesome card I got in the mail yesterday, drawn by my friend Bob! Cedar waxwings like these live in the trees outside my office back at Dartmouth, so I put the card over my desk here in McMurdo to remind me of home.

Now where was that?

The plants and animals that live in the Dry Valleys are very small. Because they are so small, they are often difficult to locate, and even more difficult to find a second time.

This picture shows how closely you have to look to find the mosses that we study.

There are also no road signs pointing us in the direction of our research sites. We study certain spots in the field during one research season and try to get back to those same locations the next year. This is challenging because there are very few land features that we can use to remember a certain location and some things change from year to year. The streams are fed by melted snow, so they change depending upon how much snow falls during the winter and melts in the summer. This stream might have looked completely different last year, so finding a particular bend in the stream is nearly impossible.

Because of these navigational challenges, we use a GPS to help us find places in the Dry Valleys.
GPS stands for Global Positioning System. It uses satellites orbiting the earth that transmit signals, which enable GPS receivers to determine their current location. A GPS tells you your location in latitude and longitude coordinates. When we want to be able to find a certain spot again, we record the latitude and longitude coordinates so that we can later return to that exact location using the GPS.

Here's a picture of Elizabeth using a GPS to record the coordinates of a study site. If she wants to come back later, all she has to do is tell the GPS to find those coordinates and it will point an arrow in the direction we need to walk to get there. It also tells you distance.

A GPS isn't perfect. Sometimes we have a really hard time finding a spot using the coordinates a GPS gives us. It is often about 10 meters off, which is a lot when your study subject is only 1 centimeter tall. But the GPS is a very useful tool and we are very happy that it's in our scientific toolbox!

Stoichiometry

This morning, Katie and I flew to the Lake Bonney basin for another two days of field work.
While we are here, we will be working on a project that will tell us how the soil and soil organisms respond to nutrients added to the soil.

There are three main elements that are very important for life everywhere: carbon, nitrogen, and phosphorus. These nutrients are important for all organisms to grow and live. If one of these elements is in short supply, organisms cannot continue to grow. So, the amount of nutrients in the soil can be limiting to life. We want to know which of these elements are limiting to life in the dry valleys.

We have set up areas where we add carbon, nitrogen, and phosphorus to the soil. Each year, we add more of the nutrients and measure how the microbes and invertebrates living in the soil respond to the additions. We add the nutrients by dissolving sugar and salt in water, then pouring the water over the plots. Some plots get sugar water (for carbon), some get water with nitrogen or phosphorus salt added, and some get both sugar and salt. In this photo, Breana is adding some nutrient water to one of the plots.

We use the plastic cone to prevent the wind from blowing the water away before it reaches the ground. Or, you can be like Uffe and wear the cones as a hula skirt:
After we add the nutrients, we measure respiration to see how active the microbes are. We also measure the amount of nematodes in the soil and how the soil chemistry changes after the nutrients are added.

We've been working on this project for many years. So far, we have learned that carbon is most limiting to life in the dry valleys. Carbon in the soil mostly comes from photosynthesis by plants. Plants are able to take carbon from the air (as carbon dioxide) and turn it into forms usable by soil organisms. Because Antarctica is so cold and dry, there are not a lot of plants. We only have some mosses and algae that can photosynthesize, and they are only found near sources of water. Because there's not a lot of photosynthesis, there is not a lot of carbon added naturally to the soil. So, carbon is often the limiting nutrient in the dry valley soils, which is why we notice the biggest response in the activity of the organisms when we add carbon.

Nitrogen and phosphorus may also become limiting in the soil, if there is enough carbon for organisms to use. That is why we look at all three of the nutrients. We want to know how increases in all three nutrients might influence soil organisms. Which nutrient is most limiting might not be the same everywhere in the dry valleys, since the different areas have different geology. Hopefully this project will be able to tell us which nutrients are limiting in the different areas.

Katie and I are only at Bonney through tomorrow, then it's back to McMurdo to process our soil samples that we collect here. Hopefully, the final member of our team will arrive tomorrow. Ross's flight should be arriving tomorrow afternoon as we're returning from the field. Let's all hope that the good weather continues!

Happy New Year!

It is 2009 down here at McMurdo!

We returned from the field on New Year's Eve. We quickly unpacked and took care of all of our samples for the evening. Then, we were ready to celebrate the holiday!

The new year starts for us 18 hours earlier than the east coast of the U.S., so we celebrated New Years Day before most of the U.S. woke up to New Years Eve. Here's Breana (one of the postdocs working with us down here from Colorado State) demonstrating how to celebrate New Years, McMurdo style:

A New Year's tradition at McMurdo is a concert called Icestock. Different groups of people working here (that also happen to be musicians) form bands (to varying levels of success) . Most have only been playing together for a few weeks or months. A big stage is set up outside where each of the bands plays short sets for the crowd of dancing Antarcticans on New Years Eve. So that you can fully experience Icestock, here's a short clip of my favorite Icestock band called Sunday Britches:

To help us ring in the New Year, some people made really cool, big puppets out of random things you can find around McMurdo. They were built on backpack frames and paraded through the crowd of people listening to the live music. They were really creative!

That's how we celebrated the coming of 2009 down here in McMurdo. Today, we are back in the lab processing our soil samples from the field and getting ready to head back out tomorrow morning!

Food, Food, We Love Food!

A very important part of doing research out in the field is staying well fed. All of the food we bring out with us to the Dry Valleys comes in a box, bag, or can. Because we don't always have a refrigerator, we don't really eat fresh foods. We make milk and juice from powder and even use dehydrated eggs. Here's the kitchen cupboards at one of the field camps in the Dry Valleys.
Every science group that comes out to the field camps brings their own food, but it often doesn't all get used. Lots of food gets left in the camp kitchen for other people to use. Some of it never really gets used and sits on the shelves for years and years. I really enjoy browsing the shelves in the kitchen looking for the oldest expiration date on food packages. Granola bars and beef jerky are generally the oldest. Today I found a Cliff bar at F6 camp that expired in 2003. I performed my own scientific experiment to see if Cliff bars change in quality over time. I banged it on the counter and the bar is a little hard. I couldn't bite through it and it tasted like cardboard. I've heard that the oldest beef jerky found and consumed expired in 1996 and that was found only last year.

Elizabeth, Becky, and I take turns making dinner in field camp. Here's a picture of Becky trying to decide between a box of Thai or a box of Mexican.

There is no running water in the field camps, so we try to use very few dishes when we eat. We often don't wash our bowls between breakfast and dinner, and only wipe them out to save water. So sometimes your dinner tastes a little bit like your breakfast. Yum, yum!
We spend large parts of the day out in the field, so we usually eat lunch away from camps. Remember those Cliff bars and beef jerky I was talking about? Those are our lunch! Here's a picture of Becky snacking on some of the food we bring out with us for long hikes.


Even though we don't have the best ingredients to create fancy meals, we eat pretty well out here and thinking of tasty dishes with what you can find on the camp shelves is always lots of fun. Happy Eating!

Process, Process, Process!

We flew back to McMurdo Station from Lake Fryxell two days ago. That ended our first week of field work.

During the past two days in town, we've been busy working in the lab. We have to process the samples that we brought back from the field. We have spent most of our time sieving soils to remove the rocks, then weighing out portions of the soil to measure the amount of salts and nutrients in them. We weigh the soils in this special bench that blows air, which prevents anything floating in the air (like dust) from falling into the bags of soil. We wear gloves so that the oils on our skin don't change the chemistry of the soil. We have only 2 days in town at McMurdo to get as much done as possible before we leave again for the field, so it has been very busy!

We are also getting ourselves ready to go back into the field on Monday. We will be going back to Lake Fryxell, but this time we will be staying on the other side of the lake at the camp called "F6". So my next post will probably be from the field!