Heading North

Panorama of Lake Joyce
Fishing the Fishless Onyx River
Don Juan Pond (Mars)
Helo and the Taylor Glacier

My time Down On The Ice has come to an end.  Unfortunately I've had some technical difficulties and was unable to upload the slide show to the blog.  I've included some of my favorite pictures, from the last few days.   Two days ago, I boarded the same C-17 cargo plane that brought me down to a new world, just over 3 months ago. It was great to land with a dark sky, warm weather, and the sights and sounds of everyday life.  The day after I returned to civilization I rented a surfboard and caught some waves, about 15 hours after leaving the ice, not to shabby.  The journey has been incredible and I am thankful for how lucky I have been.  The days were long (as well as the beard), the people were great, and the experience was amazing.  I would like to thank the different classes for their questions and excitement.  Thanks to everyone who has followed the blog and shared this journey with me.  I will miss the 7th continent but welcome the next adventure.  Anything is possible!!!

My Man Stan

Flat Stanley and I Working at Lawson Creek
Flat Stanley at the Onyx River Box With Lake Vanda in the Background
I Put Flat Stanley to Work Shooting Lake Levels
Flat Stanley and I at Don Juan Pond...It Felt Like We Were On Mars
Flat Stanley's First Helicopter Ride

There has been a new addition to the Stream Team.  With all the work we have had to close out the season, we were able to get a friend, by the name of Flat Stanley, to help us out.  Mrs. Lemieux's first grade class, from St. Francis Xavier School in my hometown Acushnet, MA, dressed our friend Flat Stanley in a Big Red jacket along with other cold weather gear and sent him south.  He arrived not to long ago and has accompanied me inspecting gauge sites, making discharge measurements, and shooting lake levels.  He even has his own sleeping bag set up in my tent.  He snores a little bit, but with the long days we have been having, I'm still able to fall asleep.  Today we had a great trip closing out three remaining gauge boxes and shooting lake levels, to see how much the lakes have risen from the stream water that has emptied into them.  Flat Stanley is a great shot.  We visited new lakes and valleys that I had yet to visit.  One location goes by the name of Don Juan Pond.  It is located between steep mountain peaks and an elevated plateau.  There are scattered boulders in the area and a tint of red to the surrounding rocks.  With the remoteness of the area and color of the rocks, my team, Flat Stanley, and I, all said we felt like we were walking on Mars.  Today was truly amazing, the sights were like nothing I have ever seen before.  Flat Stanley has been a great help and I don't know if we could have gotten the job done without him.  He has brought a change of clothes and will join me as I do some backpacking in New Zealand and snowboarding in Colorado, after I leave the ice.

Flat Stanley couldn't have arrived at a better time, as tonight will be my last night in the McMurdo Dry Valleys of Antarctica.  We closed up our main base camp at F6 on Wednesday, and will be leaving our camp at Lake Hoare tomorrow afternoon.  My time in the Dry Valleys has been the experience of a life time.  I've learned many things along the way, about Antarctica, about stream gauging, and about myself.  I've met incredible people doing amazing research and have seen things that seem to be from another planet.  My camera has snapped over 2,ooo photos and I'll be able to look back years from now and remember all the awesome experiences I have had.  I have been putting together a slide show of my favorite shots I've collected, and will post those on February 4th, my last day Down On The Ice.  Tomorrow we will head to two more lakes to shoot levels, which are in a remote area that I have yet to see.  Then we will take the 45 minute flight across McMurdo Sound to McMurdo Station, where we will spend a few days finishing up end of the season duties.  As for tonight, I think Flat Stanley and I will go on a short hike, take it all in, and enjoy the last night sleeping in a tent in the McMurdo Dry Valleys.

Bye Bye Summer

Hiking Across a Cloudy Canada Glacier
What I Awoke to One Morning
A Snowy Gage Inspection

Over the past week the temperatures have begun to drop and the blue sky has been blocked by low lying gray clouds.  As you can see in the pictures above, we have seen a little bit of snow fall as well.  The streams have begun to shut down/stop flowing.  A couple of sunny days and warmer temperatures may bring about some more flow, but at this point the glaciers have been cooling, no longer producing melt water.  During the last week, the team has been conducting a few different diel (24 hour) studies.  One experiment was looking at nutrient transport from the headwaters (top) to our gauging site at the stream delta.  The crew sampled at the top of the hour, every hour, at the two different parts of the stream.  My professor, Dr. Diane McKnight, and I were conducting an experiment that looked at how increased flow might scour (scrape) algae from the stream bed.  We placed a plankton net in the stream to catch any scoured algae and would collect samples every four hours.  In a previous post, I mentioned that the Dry Valley streams have a high flow and low flow period over the course of twenty four hours.  Our study was an attempt to see how those increased discharges affected the algae attached to the rocky substrate.  We sampled together until 2200 (10 p.m.), then I took the 0200 (2 a.m.) shift to collect the water and algae sample and continued sampling at 4 hour intervals.  The samples were filtered and stored to be analyzed back at the lab.  This was around the time when the whether turned and things began to slow down.  

I'm sitting in the F6 hut and the thermometer is reading 24 degrees outside.  I have 11 days remaining in the Valleys and quite a bit of work ahead.  We will be running levels to see if our control structures have shifted over the summer.  We will also swap out our storage modules so we can analyze the discharge and data we have collected over the season.  After the modules are replaced, the gage box is secured and winterized.  In addition to leveling the streams, we will run levels on different lakes in the Dry Valleys to see how much the stream discharge has caused the lake level to rise.  I hear this trip is amazing, stopping at different locations that I have yet to see on this amazing frozen continent.  

I have entered a camp hair contest, on the blog of a fellow researcher in the field.  Dr. Becky Ball and her team are studying soil carbon cycling, stoichiometry, and soil biota in the Dry Valleys.  You can check out the wild dew and cast your vote at her blog: http://polarsoils.blogspot.com.

Q & A part III

Seuss Glacier at the Defile, a Frozen Lake Hoare, and Canada Glacier
Hiking on a Different Planet
Reflection in the Wright Valley

The last two weeks have been quite busy. We recieved a lot of high flow after returning from Mactown and had to do a bit of work repairing some gauge control walls. However over the last 3 days the whether has been cloudy and dropped below freezing. I even awoke to the pitter patter of snow on my tent yesterday morning. That made crawling out of the sleeping bag a bit difficult, but a hot cup of coffee soon warmed me up. Today the weather remained cold with low lying clouds, which caused helicopters to remain grounded and we stayed at Lake Hoare Camp. With lower temperatures and cloud cover, this may be the beginning of the end of the flow season here in the Dry Valleys.

I have received some more great questions from the students in Mrs. Guenette's class at Old Colony. Here is some more Q & A.

1. What exactly are you researching the melted glacial water for? Why do you need to track and record it? How long have scientists been collecting and tracking this data?

The McMurdo Dry Valleys are part of the National Science Foundation's Long Term Ecological Research Network (LTER). The LTER is made up of 26 research sites, including the Harvard Forest in Massachusetts and Niwot Ridge in Colorado. At these sites there are diverse types of ecosystems being studied. The Dry Valleys are a place where life approaches its environmental limit due to extremely low temperatures and low precipitation (average of 10 cm per year). Our main objective is to measure discharge, the volume of water moving through the streams that have melted from the glaciers. My team is the stream team, but there is also a soil team, glacier team, and limno team (lakes) conducting various studies in the Dry Valleys. The streams are a link between the glaciers, soils, and lakes. For example, there are currently experiments being conducted on nematodes (microscopic worms) and algae in the streams, which will use our discharge measurements to help explain changes the organisms incur. Scientists first began monitoring the streams in the manner we do today back in 1990.

2. Have you seen any other wildlife since the penguin? Do you know what happened to it?

While I was in Mactown at the start of the season I saw a seal on the ice. In the Valleys, the only other wildlife I have seen is a skua. A skua can be described as the seagulls of the Ice. They eat garbage in town and have been known to attack people carrying food. We do see them in the Valleys from time to time. One night after a long day of hiking and measuring, three skuas flew over head and it was a bit eerie to see something other than people in the polar desert. Unfortunately, I did bump into the penguin again, but it was no longer living. I came across it one day on a hike across the lake ice. No sooner did I look up and there was a skua circling over head, probably circling its meal. I was saddened by the penguin but knew there was nothing I could do.

3. What kind of ATV are you using? Is it solar or gas powered? If gas powered, is there a gas/filling station nearby? Also, is there a lot of rough terrain?

We were using a 6 wheel ATV at the start of the season, but that was sling loaded off the lake ice by a helicopter back in mid-December. It was removed for fear that the ice would melt and it would fall through. The ATV was gas powered and we had 50 gallon drums of gas stored at our camp, F6. The lake ice could be hard to negotiate at times. The ATV use was confined to the lake ice as to not disturb the surrounding environment.

4. Do you have to keep that red jacket on 24/7 out in the elements to stay warm. Does it really do the job?
I used the red jacket "Big Red" alot in the start of the season when the temperatures were in the teens and twenties. And it definitely keeps you warm. Since the temperatures have been warmer lately, I haven't used Big Red too much. We are required to wear Big Red in helo flights between Valleys and across the sound

5. Where are the Kiwi people from?
Kiwis are from New Zealand. They are given this name because their national bird is named a kiwi.

6. Do you have to be a certain age or have a certain degree to be selected to go to Antarctica on a mission like this? Is this a paid position or part of your graduate study?
I believe you have to be 18 in order to come to Antarctica. There are a number of degrees or jobs that can bring someone to the ice. I am being payed for my work but others are being funded through their graduate study. My degree is in Environmental Studies, but I am also working with people who have a degrees in biology, civil engineering, and environmental science. I have met others who are studying glaciology, soils, geology, geography, archeology and even film. Others are doing computer programming for different science projects as well. In town there are carpenters, electricians, plumbers, mechanics, and other skilled laborers that are sent out to set up and maintain field camps.

Back in the Mac

Icestock Welcomes you to 2009
A Flight Across the Sound. Mt. Erebus, an Iceberg, and a Cloudy McMurdo Sound

Animal Life on the Ice

After being in the Dry Valleys since November 10th, my crew and I returned to McMurdo Station on Tuesday (12/30). This flight had a different feel than the previous flight across McMurdo Sound. Back in November, my eyes were scanning in every direction, and I didn't allow myself to take in the beauty of the world around me. This time, I was able to suppress the giddy little kid in me, and enjoy the sights. There were low lying clouds that hid McMurdo Station until we were just a few miles out. Once we landed, a place that was so familiar to me back in November, felt a bit foreign. There were vehicles and people shuffling all over. Living and interacting with only a hand full of people for the past 50 days had an effect on me that is tough to describe. It is as if life in town and life in the Valleys are two different worlds. It took a bit of time to adjust.

Once in town we were assigned a dorm room fitted for five, fortunately it is only myself and colleague in the room. The first item on the to do list, a hot shower! The next item on the to do list, laundry! If only the blogosphere had sensory outputs in addition to the visual outputs (consider yourself lucky). We then went to the galley for dinner, it was nice to have your meal cooked and dishes cleaned for you. Another change I realized, I now get ice cream stuck in my mustache when I eat an ice cream cone, a little added flavor if you will. We then turned in for the night to sleep in an actual bed and flick a switch to make the room completely dark, another foreign feeling. The next day came quick and we were organizing, regrouping, and preparing for the celebration of the New Year.

Icestock began at 1830 (6:30 p.m.), with bands playing, people dancing, and spirits flowing, we began 2009 with a bang! Some people were wigging out (thats what we do on holidays), I left mine in the valleys. A little bluegrass and cover songs were played that worked people into a frenzy. The ten second count down began and the sky was as blue as can be. Who would of thought I'd have a new years with complete daylight? An experience I will never forget. After the fun police pulled the plug, the party was shifted to an old storage building equipped with a DJ and colored lights. On the dance floor people were grooving and shaking, myself included. We partied late into the night and then I walked back to my dorm under the summer sun high in the sky.

Today we tied up a few loose ends and got some rest to prepare for the work ahead. Tomorrow (1/2) I will be heading back into the valley for another extended stay. When we left the streams were ripping and roaring, I expect the same upon our return. With the passing of the New Year we should see a drop in temperatures and stream flow over the next few weeks. Only time will tell. After spending so much time in the field for the first leg, this next month will fly by. As for now, Happy New Year!!!! Welcome to 2009!!!