Drake Passage

After about a day of calm sailing out of the Strait of Magellan, we entered the Drake Passage. Boy, has it been quite a ride! Winds have averaged about 30-40 knots (roughly 35-45 mph), with frequent gusts up to 50 knots! Waves have been around 10 feet. So, while it certainly could be worse, it’s been quite a trip! It takes a lot of effort to walk anywhere on the boat, and anything not secured has been flying around! Last night Uffe flew right out of the chair he was sitting in, and I gave up trying to eat with a plate in the galley and just stick to fruit that I can hold in my hand. Most of us have hunkered down in our bunks to wait it out (except Connor, who has been busily studying and doing his homework for classes back at ASU! I’m impressed that he is able to read and write through this, because I have a hard time just staying upright in a chair!)

I tried to get some pictures through my porthole to show what it’s like, but the photos don’t really do it justice.

We were followed for a while by some albatross and petrels. I stood out on the deck to watch the albatross before the weather got bad, but now we’re not allowed out on deck at all. I don’t have much desire to go out there anyway, since with wind chill it’s -20°C right now!

We’ve been moving at a steady 10 knots (about 11.5 mph) since we left Punta Arenas. If you’d like to watch the boat’s movement, you can look at these two websites that track us (and other boats in the area):

http://www.marinetraffic.com/en/ais/details/ships/shipid:454309/mmsi:368138000/vessel:LAURENCE%20M.GOULD

http://www.sailwx.info/shiptrack/shipposition.phtml?call=WCX7445

Tomorrow we’re expected to hit our first stop, which is a point at the base of the Drake Passage. A couple years ago, some other scientists anchored some moorings that have been measuring sea temperature. We’re going to pick up the data loggers for them, since we’re passing by, then move on to the first sampling point for our soil research. Hopefully the water will smooth out before then so that we are able to get our gear together and prepare!

Under Way

We are at sea!

Yesterday, we stowed all of our gear on board our ship, the Laurence M. Gould (or LMG for short). This will be our home for the next month!

Here is the LMG in port at Punta Arenas. You can see the crane towards the back working hard, unloading the gear from the previous research project and loading gear for ours:

The LMG is named after Laurence McKinley Gould, an early polar scientist and geologist. He came to Antarctica on Admiral Byrd’s famous first expedition. He died in 1995 at a ripe 99 years old! Two years later, the LMG was built and named after him. It’s 230 feet long, and specially designed for Antarctic research. It can break through 1 foot of ice, and has laboratories and dive and boating facilities, as well as a galley (dining hall), dorm rooms, and everything else we need to live on board.

This morning, we set sail. We stood out on deck watching the men work to complete loading and remove our moorings, and then away we went! Here’s the view of Punta Arenas as we sailed away. Do you see the yellow and blue building in the middle? That’s the warehouse for the U.S. Antarctic Program and the pier that we left from.

As we were leaving Punta Arenas, a pod of Commerson’s dolphins followed us!

We are currently in the Strait of Magellan, at the southern tip of Chile and Argentina. South America is to the north of us, and Tierra del Fuego is to the south. Tomorrow, we will be out in the Drake Passage, which is the waterway between South America and Antarctica, connecting the Pacific and Atlantic Oceans. It is famous for being very rough waters, with high winds and big waves, and a lot of people get sea sick. The journey will depend a lot on weather, but we could be in for a very rocky ride for the next 3-4 days! We’ll see what tomorrow brings…

Punta Arenas

We made it to Punta Arenas, Chile! This is a port town at the southern tip of Chile, along the Strait of Magellan. This is where we get on the research vessel to head down to Antarctica. You can see our boat, the Lawrence M. Gould, there at the dock. It's the orange one, which is far less fancy than the cruise ship that it's next to. You can also see some shags and gulls on the beach:

All five of our team members are finally together! Here in Punta Arenas, we get all of our gear and load everything onto the vessel. Then, we have a little bit of time to explore the town. In the town square, there is a statue of Magellan. It is traditional to rub his toe for good luck before beginning a journey. Now that the group is all together, here we are rubbing the toe. Certainly, this will help us have a smooth journey across the Drake Passage and down to Antarctica!

So this is our team! In the photo there is Uffe, me, Connor, Kelli, and Dave. We're ready to set sail tomorrow!

...Go!

Connor and I begin the journey south today! We will fly from Phoenix (where Arizona State University is) to Punta Arenas, Chile. In Chile, we will be outfitted with our gear and get everything loaded onto the ship. Next time I post will probably be from Chile!

Get ready... Get set...

It’s almost time to start our next field season! Our field season begins when we fly south on February 18. That’s just a couple of weeks away!

This year, we will complete our “latitudinal gradient” along the Antarctic Peninsula. For this project, we are exploring the diversity of soil biological communities along the entire Antarctic Peninsula. We will discover what species live in all of the places we visit. We will also compare who lives at each site with the plants and soil chemistry to understand how the environment influences the soil biology. That way, we can predict what will happen to the soil biology as the environment changes.

The entire latitudinal gradient will cover 10-12 sites along the entire length of the Peninsula. Last year, we were based at Rothera Station, about halfway down the Peninsula, to visit the southern sites. This year, we will visit the northern half of the Peninsula. Here’s our plan:

The red tacks are islands we definitely plan to sample. The yellow tacks are places we hope to sample if we have time. But, of course, with Antarctic field work, the plan can always change at the last minute if the weather doesn’t cooperate!

This season will be very exciting for me, because I’ve actually never been this far north in Antarctica! I’m usually much further south where conditions are harsher, but the northern part of the Peninsula looks more like a lush tundra, rather than a polar desert. I will see more wildlife than I have been able to see before, and that will be very fun!

This is also the first year that our research will be based on the research vessel. Normally, marine scientists work on the ships so that they can sample ocean water, and we soil ecologists work from field camps on land. But the ship is the best way for us to travel between the islands, so we’ll be living like marine scientists for a season! We’ll be traveling and working on a vessel called the Laurence M. Gould, which is named after a geologist that traveled to Antarctica back in the 1929. You can read all about the ship here, here, and here.

So, on the 18^th, I begin my journey by flying to Punta Arenas, Chile. I’m flying down with one of my students, Connor. In Punta Arenas, we will meet up with the rest of our research team: Uffe (who you might remember from last year), Dave, and Kelli. I’ll keep you posted!

Preparing for the next field season

Usually, by this time of the year, I'm already on my way to Antarctica. This season, we're leaving for Antarctica a bit later than usual. We won't be heading down for our next field season until February of 2016. (That's usually when we're coming home!)

Even though we don't leave for another couple of months, we've still been busy preparing for the field season. I built some equipment that we'll need while we're in the field. You might remember from last season's photos that we built a make-shift contraption to extract small invertebrates from the soil:

The heat from the light bulb causes the invertebrates to dig deeper into the soil, but instead of finding more soil, they fall into a funnel that drops them into our collection vial. At Rothera Station, we built one out of things we could find around the research station. We used cardboard boxes to make the stand, soda cans from the lounge, and gauze from the doctor's office. We added the funnels and Christmas lights that we packed, and it ended up looking like the picture you see above.

It worked pretty well! This year, we wanted to make two of them that were sturdier than cardboard. I constructed better versions out of plywood. You can see my progress part-way through the process:

So, you can see that science isn't just about doing analyses in the lab. I get to practice my carpentry skills, too! I learned how to use a hole-saw so that I could make these frames. And my students drank a whole lot of soda so that we could have 50 cans to put into the holes!

Now, the newly-built extractors, and all of the other gear we need, has been packed up and shipped to Antarctica. It takes the slow route by boat, which is why it has to leave much earlier than we do. I won't see it again until I'm on the research vessel in Punta Arenas, Chile!

I usually post about the results of our experiments as they are published. This time, I don't have to post, because it was covered by a reporter! You can read about some of our research on soil CO2 on Nature World News, where we show that the movement of CO2 into and out of soils is impacted by water source, as the result of both geochemistry and soil microorganisms.

Here are some photos that show you the equipment we used to make the measurements in a couple of the wet locations we studied:

The LI-COR machine in one of the permafrost seep patches

Me using the LI-COR in an area along the edge of Lake Fryxell

These results are published in the paper:  Ball, B.A. and R.A. Virginia. 2015. Controls on diel soil CO2 flux across moisture gradients in a polar desert. Antarctic Science. doi:10.1017/S0954102015000255