4th Annual Camp Hair Contest

Back by popular demand... it's the Fourth Annual Camp Hair Contest!

The water restrictions in the dry valleys means that we are not able to shower or wash our hair while we're out at field camps. That means that people's hair gets very dirty and oily, which of course leads to some very fabulous hair-do's! This is what we call having "camp hair." Having great camp hair is a matter of pride, and the person with the best camp hair is honored throughout McMurdo. So, once again, I'm going to leave it up to everyone reading my blog to decide who has the best camp hair for the 2010-11 field season. Review the photos below of our "camp hair" contestants, and send in your vote! Anyone reading this is welcome to vote, and can do so by sending an email with your choice to me.

Let's meet this year's contestants!

Steven:
University of Colorado student and Stream Team member, Steven has mastered the sight and smell of the unshowered. His gnarly hair is complemented by his Handlebar Fu-Manchops, a look that's only attainable after having been in the field since October.

Chad:Stream Teamer Chad is a more recent arrival to the field, but has lost no time in catching up on the camp hair. Chad's hair specializes in volume, as provided by the Trucker Hat Salon. He gives a thumbs up to stream gauges, flow meters, and campbell data loggers, but a thumbs down to combs and shampoo!

Mike:
Wormherder geologist Mike is back in the running this year. A 12-hour workday of hiking and digging soil pits gives Mike's hair its special flair... and his eyes a crazy look. Carefully balanced by a scraggly beard, his hair needs no additives to defy gravity.


There they are: the 2010-11 season's Best Camp Hair contestants. May the voting begin! The champion Camp Hair will be declared in 5 days.

Fertilizing a Polar Desert

This week, Mike, Jenn and I have been working on one of the long-term experiments we're running in the dry valleys. This experiment investigates how the soil responds to nutrient fertilization. Like I mentioned yesterday, nutrients are important for organisms to grow and metabolize. Our experiment asks which nutrients are limiting to growth of soil organisms and how giving them extra nutrients influences soil processes (like nutrient cycling). The three of us have added nutrient treatments to our research plots. We added the three major elements that are important to life everywhere on the planet: carbon, nitrogen, and phosphorus. We do this by adding those nutrients dissolved in water. Every year we add more nutrients and measure the response.

To add the treatments to the plots, we have to bring a LOT of water to the field: 775 pounds of water! We do this at two different places. On Monday we did the plots near F6 where I have been living. Today, we did the plots at the other end of the valley, near Lake Bonney. We carry the solutions to the field in 35 ten-liter carboys, and then transfer 5.6 L at a time to pour jugs with sprinkle caps to be applied to the plots. There's a very specific technique that's important to use. In this video, Jenn and Mike are demonstrating the technique, working at two different parts of the plot at Lake Bonney. Jenn is in the distance sprinkling water over the plot through a plexiglass cone, which helps guide the water to the correct spot like a giant funnel. Mike is closer up preparing to pour by placing his cone in the correct spot.



It's a lot of heavy-lifting of water! And how do we carry all 35 of those carboys? Teamwork.

In the video, you can also see the clouds that were encroaching upon us while we worked. In one direction, skies are blue. In the other, there's nothing but a ceiling of clouds. Right now, I'm back at F6, and those clouds are hovering right over our hut! I hope they pass quickly, because tomorrow I'm scheduled to start the measurements on the plots to see how the organisms are responding. They are much more active when it's sunny and warmer out. Keep your fingers crossed for the return of beautiful weather!

Coastal upwelling

You wouldn't think that the oceans around Antarctica would have a lot of exciting marine animals. But it does! The shores around Antarctica have quite a variety of marine life, because it is a zone of coastal upwelling.

The water in the ocean doesn't stay in one place. Water moves. You're probably familiar with currents and tides, which are a couple ways that water moves around in the ocean. But water also moves up and down in the ocean, not just around the surface. Here's how.

Water that is on the ocean surface gets pushed around by the wind. When the surface water is pushed away from an area, other water has to move in to replace it. Along the coast of a piece of land, there's no surface water to replace it, so the bottom waters have to rise up to replace that water. Where the bottom waters come up to the surface is called "upwelling".

The surface waters being pushed away will move around the surface and eventually sink to the bottom. It will then eventually upwell to become part of the surface ocean again. It's a big conveyor belt that moves water up and down, in addition to around the surface.

While water is on the bottom of the ocean, it collects a lot of nutrients. The nutrients come from dead things that sink to the bottom and start to decompose. So, at areas where bottom water is rising to the surface, it is bringing along with it a lot of nutrients that had been collecting. Those nutrients are important for living organisms at the surface.

Around the coast of Antarctica, the westerly winds push water away, and it is replaced by the cold, nutrient-rich water below. The high level of nutrients in the upwelled water around McMurdo mean that there is a lot of productivity. There's a lot of phytoplankton in the water that use those nutrients to photosynthesize. Because there's a lot of phytoplankton, there are a lot of animals that eat the phytoplankton, and therefore a lot of animals that eat those animals... a whole food chain! So, there's a lot of animals living off the coast of McMurdo. Some of them are very colorful, just like in the tropics!

The marine biologists here at McMurdo keep a touch tank with some of the animals they catch. Here's what I saw in the touch tank:There's a lot of different types of animals in there, of different shapes and colors. And they all live right here near McMurdo! It's all of this life that lets the oceans support the larger ocean animals that you might be more familiar with:(See the whale and the penguins at the ice edge?)


Even though it's so cold and icy, the oceans are home to several species of whales, penguins, and seals. They can live here because of the upwelling that brings all of those rich nutrients to support the entire food chain in ocean around Antarctica.

[Photo credit: upwelling diagram from sonoma.edu]

Merry Christmas!

I hope everyone had a great Christmas. For the holiday, I hiked from F6 with the Stream Team to Lake Hoare, where everyone in Taylor Valley gathered for Christmas.

To make the journey, we had to ride the ATV across the ice covering Lake Fryxell to the other side of the lake. Then, we hiked up the hillside, crossed the Canada Glacier and hiked down the other side to the camp at Lake Hoare. It's the Antarctica version of going over the river and through the woods to Grandmother's house.

Here I am with the crew from F6 as we hiked over Canada Glacier:

At Lake Hoare, there are a lot of great Christmas traditions. One of the most fun is building the gingerbread house and decorating Christmas cookies! Here's this year's creation. We use only edible items to build the house, including the Twizzlers that my sister sent me in a care package. This year's gingerbread house is even energy-efficient, with solar power and a wind generator!
After the decorating, we have a big family-style dinner of ham, asparagus, potatoes, and bread pudding. We follow that up with coffee while playing the gift-swap game. Then, we turn the lights out and have a dance party until we get too tired and crawl into our tents to sleep.

It was great to spend time with my Antarctic family in the dry valleys! It was a fun Christmas as always. Here's the beautiful view we had from the front door of the hut around midnight on Christmas:

Have a happy, safe holiday season!

Patterns in Antarctic Soil

One of the most noticeable features of the soil in the dry valleys are the strange shapes that cover the ground. These are most noticeable when you're flying over the dry valleys in a helicopter. The irregular shapes are created by cracks that develop in the soil.

These polygons in the soil are very large. They can be many meters across. To give you a sense of scale, here's an aerial shot from a helicopter of F6 camp where I'm staying right now. You can see the polygons in comparison to the hut.


And here's what they look like from the ground. There's still soil the cracks. The cracks are not gaping holes that you can fall into. They are just crevices filled with finer-grained sand than the rest of the soil.
The cracks are created by the freezing and thawing of the ground ice below the soil. Water in the soil expands when it freezes and shrinks when it thaws, which creates the crack, and the finer-grained soil falls into the crack. Because ice and freezing plays a role in the formation of the cracks, they are called "cryogenic cracks".

Our research in the dry valleys has shown that biodiversity is lowest in the cryogenic cracks. So, when we walk across the soil, we specifically walk in the cryogenic cracks so that we are only harming the least diverse part of the community. As you can tell from the first photo, that means we don't walk in many straight lines!

Cryogenic cracks are not unique to the dry valleys of Antarctica. They are commonly found in cold places where permafrost underlies the soil, such as the Arctic tundra. They're even found on Mars, which is one piece of evidence that leads scientists to believe that there may be water on Mars.

New Outhouse

A helicopter delivered a package to F6 camp. It was our new outhouse!

At the camps in the dry valleys, there is no plumbing. All of our waste material has to be contained in barrels and buckets and shipped off the continent at the end of the season. We can't release it anywhere in the dry valleys, because it is a protected environment. Therefore, we use an outhouse where all of our waste is collected.

At F6, we had an old outhouse that was pretty small and rustic. There was a bucket with a seat that we used for solids. That was covered by an old garbage can lid. For liquids, boys stood outside and used a funnel in a barrel, and girls squatted over a tin can in the outhouse that was then poured into the barrel outside. Here's a shot of the old outhouse:
But the NEW outhouse is much more luxurious! It's bigger. There's two comfortable foam seats with real seat covers: one over the bucket for solids and one where girls can sit over a big funnel that leads to the can. There's a urinal inside for boys, so they don't have to stand outside. But that's not all! There's also hooks to hang up your coat, ventilation panels, and a sunroof! The plexiglass panels let in light, but also heat the outhouse like a greenhouse. Plus it's bigger, so there's more room to store the extra supplies and still be able to move around comfortably. We are very excited to have such a fancy new outhouse!

Here's a video tour of our fancy new outhouse.


Exciting times at F6!

Nunataks

Today I flew back to the camp at F6 on Lake Fryxell in Taylor Valley.

Because there were two stops we needed to make before dropping me at F6, I got to fly over some pretty cool scenery. Instead of coming in the mouth of Taylor Valley from the (frozen-over) sea ice, I flew from over the Asgard Range of mountains that border Taylor Valley on the north side. There are alpine glaciers that cover a lot of the area up there.

This is the view I had coming over the Asgard Range, most of which is covered by the glacier. Just beyond the mountain peaks in the foreground is Taylor Valley. (In the background of the photo are the Kukri Hills, which make up the southern border of Taylor Valley.)

There is a lot of land under the glacier, we just can't see it. However, some of the mountain peaks are tall enough to poke out of the glacier. These are called "nunataks". You can see an example of a nunatak on the right-hand side of the picture above. Nunataks are isolated from the rest of the land by the surrounding ice, which is how they get their name. "Nunatak" is an Inuit word that means "lonely peak". They are not created by the glacier, but were a part of the mountain range before the glacier was there. While organisms living on land below the glacier will probably be killed by the glacier, they may be able to survive for a long time on the nunatak. Scientists find all sorts of organisms living on nunataks in Antarctica, such as bacteria, lichens, and mites. So, even though nunataks are isolated, they are not uninhabited.