Beautiful Antarctica

We’ve been moving right along with our sampling. Our original schedule was to sample five locations, with two additional sites that we could sample if we had time. We’re so far ahead of schedule that we’ve already sampled six of those sites, and we’re on our way to the seventh. Since we’re doing so well, we asked permission to sample sites even further south, so that’s where we’ll be headed next!

One of the fun things about this field season is that we get to sample at so many different places from north to south. Each island is different, so we never get bored even though our sampling routine is a bit repetitive. Plus, traveling between islands has allowed us to sail through some beautiful places! Here are some photos of what we’ve seen recently. This will hopefully give you an idea of the amazing diversity of ecosystems here along the Antarctic Peninsula.

Becky, Kelli, and Connor at the base of our sampling site on King George Island. Look at all of that grass and moss!

Columnar basalt from old volcanic activity at Byers Peninsula on Livingston Island (another one of our recent sampling sites).

A beautiful sunset over the ocean.

It was very hard to find a spot for sampling plant cover on Spert Island because of these steep rocky cliffs. We had to circle the entire island in zodiacs, but we eventually found a great spot tucked away in a secret nook!

A few of us in a zodiac next to an iceberg as we circled Spert Island to find a good sampling site.

Passing through the Lemaire Passage. We headed straight ahead into that small opening! (It’s actually wider than it looks. Those mountains are very big, but far away.)

Seals galore

Our research is about soil and the microscopic organisms living in it, but we also get to see a lot of bigger animals that live in Antarctica. We’ve seen whales, dolphins, seals, and lots of different birds. We’ve seen a few different species of seal, but mostly elephant seals and fur seals. Anyone who followed my blog last year knows all about elephant seals, because there are a LOT of them at Rothera Station. This is the first year I’ve worked around a lot of fur seals.

Fur seals are more closely related to sea lions than they are to other seals. They have external ears and can walk on all fours, like sea lions. The Antarctic fur seal is one of two species that live in Antarctica. Its scientific name is Arctocephalus gazella, and it is also known as the Kerguelen fur seal. They live on rocky or sandy beaches along the Antarctic Peninsula and nearby islands, including all of the places we’ve sampled so far. Here’s a great photo that our lab technician Cindy took at Signy Island:

Antarctic fur seals are dark brown, and have what we call sexual dimorphism. That means that the males and females look different from each other. Males are much bigger than females, weighing a few hundred pounds (anywhere from 200 to over 400 lbs), and they get a silver-streaked mane.

Fur seals eat mostly krill during the summer (right now), with occasional fish or squid. They will go out to feed for several days, following the krill up and down in the water column. The rest of the time they mostly lie around on the beaches. We usually see them lying around lazily, but sometimes they’re also playing in the water, which is fun to watch! 

We are here in Antarctica right at the end of their breeding season. Fur seals breed in groups, where a dominant male can mate with around a dozen or more females. Females are pregnant for just over a year, and pups are born during the following summer. About a week after they’re born, they are left alone in groups while the mothers go out to feed. The mothers return to feed them about two days out of each week, and they are weaned after four months, leaving the colonies in late summer (right about now).

Because of their dense fur, they were hunted for their pelts. In many places, they were hunted to local extinction. (Local extinction means almost completely gone from that particular area, but still living in other places so not totally extinct. It means the population is overall smaller, living in fewer habitats, and therefore more at risk of going extinct altogether.) So many Antarctic fur seals were hunted that they went locally extinct over most of their range, but a small population remained and expanded once the fur seal became a protected species and hunting stopped.

Fur seals are much more aggressive than other seals I’ve worked around, and they’ve been known to charge at people. They can move pretty fast, despite being over 6 feet long and weighing hundreds of pounds! We try to stay as far from them as possible, because we’re not allowed to disturb the wildlife (and don’t want to be chased!), but many of the beaches we land on are covered with a lot of them. Mostly they just snort at us, just like the elephant seals do, but the other day while we were walking to our sampling site on King George Island, one charged at us. We ran! Kelli ran the fastest, because she does NOT like fur seals. I still like them better than elephant seals, though, because they’re less noisy.

(Source: Stonehouse, B. Encyclopedia of Antarctica and the Southern Oceans. Learn more about them on Wikipedia.)

Katabatic winds

We’ve been trucking right along with our sampling! Our sampling at Elephant Island was quite a challenge. The katabatic winds coming down the cliffs made it difficult to get the zodiacs in. Katabatic winds are created by cool air masses rushing down a slope. They rush downslope because cold air is denser than warm air. The cold air is at high altitude because of the height of the island, but at the coast (where the island stops), the air is so dense that gravity causes it to rush down to sea level. (You can learn more about katabatics here.) The winds can be quite strong, sometimes reaching hurricane force! The katabatics at Elephant Island weren’t that bad, though they certainly caused very windy conditions for us. Even a mile or two offshore in the LMG, the wind was too strong to safely send a zodiac to shore because they are too light-weight and can be flipped over in 30-knot winds. Plus, we could see the winds churning up the water right at the shore, which would have prevented the zodiac from reaching the beach.

Later in the afternoon, there was a lull in the wind that gave us a window to use the zodiacs. We took just one zodiac with three of us (Becky, Uffe, and Dave) and two marine techs (nicknamed MT’s) to attempt a landing on the beach. It was a very bumpy zodiac ride over the swells! The MT’s didn’t want to bring the boat to shore because the swells would swamp it in the shallow water leading up to the beach. They had a plan that worked: They dropped the anchor a ways off shore, with a long rope attached. We let the boat ride a set of waves in closer to the beach where the three of us leapt out and waded to shore, letting the anchor line pull the boat back out to deeper water before more waves came.

The coast of Elephant Island is pretty steep, so we had to climb up a ridge to get to the plant material we wanted to sample under. 

The MT’s waited for us out in the boat while we sampled, but called us back down when they felt the wind was picking up too much again. Luckily, we were almost done! They then redid their anchoring trick to pick us back up. We waded back to the boat, jumped in when the time was right, then pull-pull-pulled on the line to the anchor, through the waves, until we got the boat to water deep enough to put the motor back in the water and zoom off. It was an adventure and we got a bit wet, but it was a lot of fun! We are so impressed with the skill of our amazing MT’s Mike and Garrett, and we all returned to the LMG dripping with seawater but laughing.

After our sampling at Elephant Island, we moved south to Admiralty Bay in King George Island. It was a pretty chilly day, and it snowed on us a little bit. After sampling, we had the chance to visit the Polish research station on Admiralty Bay, called Arctowski Station (named after a Polish scientist who worked in Antarctica). They were very nice hosts who welcomed us with hot drinks and sweets while we talked about our various science projects. Here we are posing in front of the station with some of the LMG crew and a couple of the Polish scientists we met:

Now we’re headed south to Livingston Island for our next sampling site. We’re well ahead of schedule!

Following the footsteps of Shackleton

Antarctica is the most remote continent on the planet, but people have been coming here for over 200 years. The earliest visitors were whalers who set up stations at some of the sub-Antarctic islands and sailed their ships through the Antarctic waters to hunt whales. Then, explorers started visiting the continent in various attempts to discover new lands, make scientific discoveries, and earn the glory of being the first to reach the South Pole. There are some amazing stories about the adventure and hardships faced by these early explorers! 

One of those famous explorers is Ernest Shackleton. He made several attempts to reach the South Pole. He also attempted the first crossing of the entire Antarctic continent, an expedition that started here on the Peninsula. His team attempted to sail as far south as they could in the Weddell Sea, and then trek south across ice and land to reach the South Pole. However, their boat became trapped in ice, was crushed, and slowly sank. The had plenty of time to abandon the ship and grab the gear they wanted and were living on the ice shelf over the Weddell Seal. When their boat finally sank, they had to haul all of their gear across the frozen ice to find help. They didn’t have pack animals, so this was all done by man-hauling. They man-hauled all of the food, gear, and three life boats! They walked as far as they could before the ice started breaking up, which left them on Elephant Island. There, they fixed up one of their life boats (a boat named the James Caird) using parts from a second life boat. A few of the men, including Shackleton, sailed in the small, repaired life boat in the open seas all the way to South Georgia Island where there was a whaling station, which helped them arrange rescue from mainland Chile. The third life boat was flipped upside down to make a shelter for the men remaining on Elephant Island until a ship from Chile came to get them over a year later. The men spent four months on Elephant Island, surviving in an overturned boat. Amazingly, everyone survived!

As you know from my last blog post, Elephant Island is one of our sampling sites. We had a chance to visit the site where the men built their camp 100 years ago while waiting for rescue. There isn’t anything remaining from that adventure except a statue that the Chileans built to honor the captain of the Chilean ship that eventually rescued them.

It’s a very dramatic site, but rather bleak in comparison to the other areas we’ve visited. It’s very rocky without much vegetation (but there were a lot of chinstrap penguins and fur seals!).  Plus, we were there on a very foggy day which added to the mysterious feeling. I sure wouldn’t want to spend two winters living there!

It was very special to be able to see a site with so much historical significance. It’s always amazing to think about how they handled the crazy and unpredictable conditions in Antarctica without all of the modern technology that we use to travel here. So much has changed in 100 years (yet in other ways, much is still the same). 

Two more sites

A couple days ago we made it to our second sampling site: Signy Island. Signy is at the top of our transect, all the way up at 60°S. It is a very beautiful place!

The British Antarctic Survey has a research base on Signy Island, and we started with a visit to the scientists living there. 

Then, the five of us hiked up the hill behind the base to look for a sampling site. We actually had a hard time finding a good spot, because while there’s a TON of green stuff, it’s mostly moss. We had to look for a while before we found an area that had a lot of grass.

After sampling, we spent the next day processing the samples in the lab while we sailed to our next site at Elephant Island. We currently sit just off the south shore of Elephant Island waiting for the wind to die down. The LMG can’t sail right up next to the islands, because the water gets too shallow. We have to take zodiacs (small boats) from the LMG to the islands. The zodiacs are light enough that wind this strong can flip them over! So here we wait…

Processing samples

We have had a busy few days working in the lab to process the samples we collected at Biscoe Point.

First, we spent a day at Palmer Station. We were supposed to only be there overnight to drop off passengers and cargo, but the wind picked up. We can’t use the cranes to offload cargo when it’s windy, so we had to wait overnight until the wind died down. That gave us the time to use the lab facilities at Palmer, which has more equipment than the LMG. It also meant we could visit with the people who live and work at Palmer, which was a lot of fun.

Then, the busy times in the lab began! There are several things we must do to each of our samples before we can freeze them to ship home. Freezing can kill the organisms that we want to study, so we have to remove them before-hand. Plus, some of the chemistry we analyze is better on fresh soil, rather than frozen. We have to do all of these things relatively quickly, so that we can freeze the soil within a couple of days of collecting it. Otherwise, the organisms and chemistry in the sample can change and ruin the sample. To do all of these things in 1-2 days, all five of us were busy working together to make sure it all gets done.

It would take a long time to tell you about all of the analyses we do in the lab before freezing it, so I’ll tell you now about one of them. (I’ll explain other things later.) One of the first things we do is extract the arthropods from the soil. The arthropods we find include insects and other very tiny things like collembola (commonly known as springtails) and mites. These arthropods like being cool and moist, so to get them out of the soil, we use heat. In nature, when the sun shines on the soil, the top layer gets hot and dry. The arthropods don’t like that, so they move lower in the soil to where it’s still cool and moist. We use the same principle in the lab. We put the soil or plant sample on a metal funnel and shine a light bulb over it. That acts like the sun to make the soil hotter and dryer. The arthropods move lower like they would in the soil, except instead of more soil like in nature, there’s a funnel! They drop all the way out the bottom and through the funnel into a collecting jar. You might remember the photos I showed you of the extractors I built to do this. Here’s that extractor in use with our samples from Biscoe Point:

After a couple days of sitting under the heat of the light bulb, we remove the samples and preserve the arthropods in the vial. Because they’re so tiny, it’s hard to see them without a microscope, and it’s very hard to use a microscope on a moving boat! So I can’t show you good pictures of what we’ve found, but here’s a close-up of what was collected in one vial. We can see that there are a few different species of collembola in there, and a midge (a type of fly).

Tonight, we arrive at Signy Island which will be our second sampling site. Signy is at the top of the Peninsula, and we’ll be slowly working our way back down to Palmer. Tomorrow we should have another busy day collecting samples, followed by busy days processing them in the lab.