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

The chemistry of penguin poop

In the past, I have posted about working in the penguin rookeries. Most people associate penguins with ice and water, but Adélie penguins nest on land. Their nests can change the soil, because where penguins nest, they poop! You can see that poop (called guano) in the photo below. It is sort of pink-colored because of the krill that the penguins eat.

Bird guano contains a lot of phosphorus and nitrogen, so it adds a lot of important nutrients to the soil. Guano also has a lot of carbon, which all living things need for energy. It is very easy to see that some of the soil will be different, because some areas of the rookery have a lot of guano (and are very pink), and other areas do not. It's like fertilizing part of your garden, but not the whole thing, which would mean plants would grow better only in the part that's fertilized.

However, guano isn't a perfect fertilizer that makes the soil "better". It has a lot of nutrients, but too much nutrients can become toxic for soil organisms. Also, guano is very acidic, which is also hard for soil organisms to live in. Plus, the guano can dry into a very hard layer over the soil, which you can see in this video. Ross had to work hard to get the soil sample!

(You will also notice that a penguin rookery is a very noisy place to work! It's also smelly!)

The impact that birds, such as penguins, have on soil is called the ornithogenic impact. "Ornitho" is a term that refers to birds. (Ornithology is the study of birds.) "Genic" means "produced by". So, ornithogenic soils are soils that are heavily influenced by birds. We studied the ornithogenic soils in penguin rookeries. A lot is known about ornithogenic soils in penguin rookeries along the Antarctic Peninsula, but less is known in the relatively colder and drier climate of the McMurdo Sound region. (Check out the map below.)

We worked in three different rookeries on Ross Island in McMurdo Sound. The rookery at Cape Royds has the smallest colony (about 2,000 mating pairs of Adélie penguins). The rookery at Cape Bird is mid-sized (about 35,000 mating pairs), and the rookery at Cape Crozier is the largest (about 120,000 mating pairs). That's a lot of penguins creating a lot of guano!! We wanted to know if the penguin influence on the soil changed with colony size.

At each rookery, we studied soil that was either heavily influenced by the penguins by sampling right in their main nesting area (the pink spots). We also looked at soil that received less guano by sampling in lines from the nesting area all the way to soils outside the rookery area. The red lines in the photo below show some of our transects, going from the very pink (high activity nesting) areas into the gray soil where penguins walk but don't nest. We also sampled where I was standing, outside of the colony with no penguin guano. This way, we could find out how much penguin activity is needed to see a big change in the soil.

So what did we find? Soils with a lot of penguin guano (in the pink-colored nesting areas) had more carbon, nitrogen, and phosphorus than areas with low or no penguin activity. That's exactly what we would expect, since guano contains those nutrients! We also measured more respiration from the organisms living in the soil with a lot of guano. So, these nesting areas are "hotspots" where the extra nutrients allow soil organisms to be more active.

Even though guano adds a lot of carbon in the soil that wouldn't be there without the penguins, the microscopic soil organisms are still carbon-limited, meaning they have more nitrogen and phosphorus at their disposal than carbon. They're always looking for more carbon! We thought that the large amounts of guano would give them all the carbon they need, but it didn't!

We also learned that the size of the colony did not make a big difference for soil nutrients. It was a matter of penguin activity within the rookery, not the size of the colony that changed the soil the most. In other words, it didn't matter whether there were 2,000 or 120,000 mating pairs. If there was a penguin nesting area with a lot of guano, there were more nutrients and soil respiration.

These results are published in the paper:  Ball, B.A., C.R. Tellez, and R.A. Virginia. 2015. Penguin activity influences soil biology, biogeochemistry, and soil respiration in rookeries on Ross Island, Antarctica. Polar Biology. doi: 10.1007/s00300-015-1699-7