Welcome to Season 4!

Welcome to another field season of research in Antarctica with the polar soils research group!

I am making preparations to leave the U.S. and head to McMurdo Station on December 3. It is a busy time of preparations for me! I have a lot of work to finish up, travel plans to arrange, and supplies and equipment to gather. One big difference from the past three seasons is that I am now based at Arizona State University, so I am far away from my fellow teammates at Dartmouth College. That makes preparations a bit more complicated. But, in just a couple weeks, I'll be on my way.

If you are new to the Polar Soils blog, here is some information that might be useful to you:

Where we go:
When most people think of Antarctica, they think of ice. When you're on the continent of Antarctica, it's referred to as being on the "ice." However, the area we study is a polar desert called the McMurdo Dry Valleys, where the glaciers have retreated. Just like deserts in the U.S., such as the Sonoran Desert where I now live, there's very little precipitation, so there's actually bare soil, not just ice and snow! The red dot on the map shows where McMurdo is located:

What we do:
Our research is in the field of soil biogeochemistry, which is just a big word that means we study the way nutrient elements move in the soil. We are especially interested in carbon, nitrogen, and phosphorus, since these three elements are so important for all forms of life. We study how the living organisms influence nutrients in the soil. All of the animals in the dry valleys are microscopic (except for the scientists, of course). While other areas of Antarctica have penguins and seals, the dry valleys' largest animal is a nematode. A predatory nematode is the top of our foodchain- the equivalent to a lion in the Serengeti! We also study the mosses growing in the dry valley soil. Mosses are the only plants growing in the dry valleys and the only living things you'll find above the soil- the equivalent to the redwood forests in America!

Who we are:
Our research team is a little bit different from last year. There are four soil scientists going to Antarctica from Dartmouth. The leader is Dr. Ross Virginia, a professor at Dartmouth who has been going to Antarctica for many years. Also on the team are me (Becky, a professor at Arizona State University), Jenn (a graduate student at Dartmouth College), and Mike (a professor at Indiana University of Pennsylvania).

While on the ice, we will continue to work very closely with another group of scientists from Colorado State University led by Dr. Diana Wall that specializes in the nematodes (they have a special nematode blog). Together, all of us study the nutrients and biology of the McMurdo Dry Valley soils.

About the blog:
Our blog is designed to be an educational tool for elementary and middle school classrooms, but all readers are welcome to follow along! Teachers interested in using the blog in their classes are welcome to contact me (contact information available through my website, listed under my Profile on the bottom-right).
On the right-hand side, there are some links with additional information that is useful for both kids and adults. Many links are added throughout the season, so keep an eye on them!

Off the Ice

Well, we made it off the ice! It was snowing as we left, but we are now warmly back in Christchurch, New Zealand.

We flew back on the same type of airplane we flew in on: A U.S. Air Force C-17 Globemaster. Since it's the end of the season, they're starting to send home a lot of cargo, in addition to scientists. We flew home on a plane carrying one of the helicopters back to New Zealand. We watched on the ice runway as they loaded it.
Now, the season is officially over! It has been successful and productive, and now we are looking ahead to 10 months of labwork and analyses on the samples we took. All of our samples are being shipped home on the ocean vessel that will bring them to the U.S. after our return. Then, we'll be on our way back down again next winter!

One Final Weather Delay?

We are currently waiting for our transport to Pegasus Airfield to catch our flight back to Christchurch, New Zealand. We woke up this morning to low clouds and snow, so we are concerned that we will have one more weather delay to our field season!

Since weather has had such a big influence on our field season this year, I thought it would be appropriate to blog about some of the neat weather-related sites we've seen this year.

Lenticular CloudsThis is a cloud formation we saw when we were trying to fly to Cape Crozier. Mt. Erebus is the southern-most active volcano in the world, and it sits on Ross Island, overlooking McMurdo Station. Flying to the penguin rookeries on Ross Island has taken us in a circle around Mt. Erebus. The first time we tried to fly to Cape Crozier, it was very windy! These lenticular clouds form at high altitudes when winds moving over a mountain circulate on the downwind side. If the temperature is cold enough, moisture in the air condenses and forms clouds. They are aligned perpendicularly with the wind and form a lens shape, hence the name "lenticular". Pilots tend to avoid lenticular clouds, because when they form, you know there is wind and turbulence!

Low Ceiling

When we finally made it to Cape Crozier, the weather was nice. By the end of the day, however, a cloud system had moved in to cover Ross Island. When that cloud cover sits very low to the ground, it's called a "low ceiling" because the cloud cover is so dense, it's like having a roof over your head. Above the cloud layer, helicopters can fly, because pilots can see in front of them. But, they can't fly through a ceiling, because all they would see is white (and it's dangerous when your pilot can't see in front of him!). If the ceiling isn't too low, pilots can also fly under it. That was the case when we were at Crozier. We could fly above or below the ceiling, just not through it. Luckily for us, our pilot found a "window", or a break in the ceiling, to get us out of Crozier and above the ceiling. We flew at a higher altitude over the island, where we could see over the clouds. So you can see the ice covering the base of Mt. Erebus at higher altitude, and the low ceiling surrounding it. McMurdo Station is below that ceiling! Luckily, our pilot found a hole in the ceiling on the other side of the island that got us back below the ceiling so we could land at McMurdo. This is what it looked like as we were dropping back below the ceiling. Cloud ceiling above our heads, low-elevation coastal Ross Island below.
Cloud MiragesThis is the view we had last night from our lounge window that looks out over the Ross Sea. The mirage is the mirror image of the mountains hovering just above them! This happens when the air is very pure and dry and there's virtually no wind, like last night. There also needs to be a strong difference in air and ground temperature. Light refraction in cold, dense air causes the reflection to occur in the clouds. The mirage we saw moved throughout the evening. Sometimes the reflection was low, so that the actual mountains and reflection melded together, but they would separate again like you see here.

The same weather system that brought us those mirages are what brought us snow this morning, and we're concerned will keep us from leaving for Christchurch today! We are supposed to transport to the airfield in just a couple hours, so we hope the plane will be able to land and take us back north. Keep your fingers crossed!

Shackleton's Hut

Antarctica has a rich history of exploration. Since the 1800's, explorers have been traveling to Antarctica in search of adventure, scientific discovery, and fame. When we were at Cape Royd's, we were able to visit one of the huts built during that period.


The hut was built for an expedition led by Ernest Shackleton in 1908. Shackleton and his crew traveled to the McMurdo area on what is called the Nimrod Expedition. A lot was accomplished on this expedition. Some members of the crew were the first to climb Mr. Erebus, the southern-most active volcano that is located on Ross Island. Others reached the south magnetic pole (which is not the same as the geographic pole). However, their main objective was the reach the geographic south pole. Four team members, including Shackleton, set off from Cape Royds and forged a new trail towards the pole in the spring of 1908. Almost a year later, in January 1909, they were within 97 miles of the pole. At that point, they realized that they did not have enough supplies to reach the pole and still be able to return to the hut alive, so they turned around, never making it to the pole. It must've been such a hard decision for Shackleton... to turn back and not reach his goal, even after enduring so much hardship for that goal, in order to ensure that his entire party survived. Still, they had reached a point farther south than anyone else had at that point, which was definitely an accomplishment.

The hut from this expedition still stands today, 100 years later. This was their shelter as they prepared for their journeys- their home-base. The hut was not luxurious! It is small, and basically one large room. A few dividing walls inside the hut were made out of food and fodder supply boxes. In addition to sleeping quarters, the hut housed a biology lab, dark room, printing press, kitchen, library, scientific and surveying equipment, and an acetylene gas generator so that they could have lights!


That big, cast iron stove is how they heated the hut, cooked their meals, baked their bread, and melted ice for water. On the shelves, you can see the remains of their food stores: things like tinned meat, dehydrated vegetables, bottled soup, cabin bread. Not too different from the kind of things we eat in the field now!

Shackleton had his own canvas-lined room, but the other 14 men shared the rest of the space. They lived in two-bed cubicles divided by canvas and slept on home-made beds from spare parts around camp.


It's definitely amazing what these early explorers could do! They persevered through harsh conditions with much fewer resources than we have available to us today. They were able to accomplish amazing things for science through their efforts. It really puts into perspective how relatively easy it is for us to come down and do our research using airplanes, helicopters, trucks, solar energy, and polartec fleece!

This is our last day on the ice! We have packed up the lab, shipped our samples, and tomorrow we should be flying back to Christchurch! The season has gone by very quickly, but it has been a successful and productive one.

(Learn more about the Nimrod Expedition by going here.)

Camp Hair Contest Winner

The 5 days have passed, and the votes have been tallied. The winner of the 2008-09 Best Camp Hair Contest is...

JULIA!!!!

Julia celebrates her victory in her "fancy duds", flexing her camp hair power.
Congratulations, Julia!

A Little Bit of Green in Antarctica

As you've seen from my blog, Antarctica is cold, dry, and gray. But, there's one oasis in this polar desert: the McMurdo Greenhouse.

[Photo credit: www.sethwhite.org]

While it looks like any other McMurdo building on the outside (except for the vegetable decorations), inside the greenhouse it is warm, humid, bright, and full of greenery!

[Photo credit: www.sethwhite.org]

Unlike greenhouses in the U.S., the McMurdo Greenhouse is not made of glass. It is too cold for that! Instead, it is a sealed and insulated building, with a giant refrigerator door to get inside. "Sunlight" comes from high intensity discharge lamps, and the walls are covered in reflective foil to increase the light intensity from the lamps. To maintain a proper temperature, the greenhouse is heated by a furnace at night and the lamps during the day.

[photo credit: www.schundler.com]
Because Antarctica's environment is protected by the Antarctic Conservation Act, we are not able to import gardening soil to grow vegetables here. So, the greenhouse uses a hydroponic system to grow vegetables, meaning that vegetables are grown in water instead.

How this works: Each plant is seeded in a "plug". The plug is a short piece of PVC pipe. In the pipe, there's a combination of vermiculite and Perlite (little pellets that you can buy from a company), which give the roots of the plant something to hold onto. The plugs are then placed in the shelves you see in the photo above. The shelves have a circulating reservoir system of water moving through them. The water is heated and aerated, and nutrients are added to the water to be carried directly to the plants growing in the plugs on the shelf. That gives the plant everything it needs! Each day, measurements are made on the water, and the nutrient content and pH are adjusted by hand. All of the water is recycled within the reservoir system for that shelf. There is a separate reservoir system for each type of plant, so water from the peppers doesn't mix with the water for the tomatoes. All of this is maintained by just one person!

The greenhouse grows a variety of vegetables. In the past, we've had lettuce, spinach, chard, cucumbers, tomatoes, peppers, herbs, and even flowers! The harvests are mainly useful for the winter crew, when airplanes aren't able to deliver fresh vegetables from New Zealand. The greenhouse can provide enough vegetables for the winter crew (up to 230 people) to have a salad every few days, plus some veggies for the cook to use in regular meals. During the summers, the population at McMurdo is too big for the greenhouse to supply completely, so it can only supplement the shipments of "freshies" flown down from New Zealand. But, more importantly, it provides a little piece of "summer" relaxation to the folks experiencing months of cold and gray, and many people visit just for the atmosphere.

Besides the great environment for relaxation and the ability to eat fresh vegetables, I've used the greenhouse in the past to test out our field equipment. The machines we use to measure gas flux (the LICOR) can measure not only soil respiration, but also photosynthesis (which is, essentially, the reverse process of respiration. So, instead of measuring a production of CO2, the machine measures a reduction in CO2.) Since the mosses we study in the dry valleys are so slow-growing, we need to know that the LICOR is working perfectly to measure such small amounts of photosynthesis before we take it to the field. The best place to test out the machinery is in a place where there's a lot of photosynthesis: a greenhouse!

However, this year, they decided not to open the greenhouse for the summer and rely completely on shipments of freshies, which is very unfortunate. I miss my regular visits with the plants, and we couldn't test our LICOR! I hope they change their mind for next summer.

Orca Sighting

As we come into late summer here in Antarctica, the sea ice covering the Ross Sea has melted back almost as far as McMurdo. That means that our helicopter rides back to McMurdo from the dry valleys start to scoot along the edge of open ocean, rather than traveling over solid ice. This makes for great sight-seeing, because there's so much life in the open ocean, even all the way down here! On the ice edge, we see penguins (both Emperor and Adelie), seals, and a lot of whales.

When we flew back from F6 on Saturday, we saw a lot of orcas. My camera doesn't do a great job from a distance, but in this video you can see a lot of them surfacing:


Orcas live just about everywhere in the world, but they tend to prefer polar waters, such as the Ross Sea of Antarctica where I am. They tend to stick to coastal areas, because that's where their food lives. While orcas are commonly called "killer whales", not all of them behave like killers. There are several types of orcas that we could see down here: Type A, B, and C. Type C are the smaller orcas that you see in the video. They have a duller white saddle (that white patch behind their dorsal fin) and eat fish. That's why they're along the ice edge here. The ice has just melted and broken away, so there's a lot of fish now without protection!

Type B are bigger and eat larger animals like seals (and penguins, if they were able to catch them, but penguins are usually too fast). In fact, when I met Sir David Attenborough last weekend, he narrated for us footage the BBC had recently shot of several orcas creating a wave to knock a seal off of a floating ice chunk and into the water so they could eat it!

Type A are the biggest and eat even larger animals, like minke whales. We also have a lot of minke whales in our waters here. In fact, we can see them from outside our lab window in the channel cut by the icebreaker! Minke whales are smaller, baleen whales. Baleen whales are a type of whale that have a plate for filtering small plankton from the water (rather than teeth for eating animals). So, minkes are related to humpback whales and Right whales, which are also baleen whales. It's easy to tell the difference between an orca and a minke because of the size, but also the shape of the dorsal fin. A minke's dorsal fin is small and curved. It looks kinda like the satellite radio antennas that you see on cars. (See what I mean using the photo on Wikipedia.)

We are hopefully going to the field tomorrow to visit Cape Crozier, the final penguin rookery I'd like to sample. Keep your fingers crossed that the weather cooperates!