Hellllllo, Sorry it’s been a while. Since coming back from the field originally, we’ve practically been living in the lab. Most days we start working around 8 am and finish around 9 or 10 pm. We’re back out in the field now for a couple days. I’ll post some photos and explain what we end up doing a little later. For now… this post is about a night out in McMurdo with Elmo… In my last post, I mentioned the coast guard “coasties”. They arrived, and the first night was coastie-okie at Gallagher’s Bar - karaoke when the coasties are in town! It was… interesting. The strangest part of the night happened after though. Matt and I were heading back to our dorms after coastie-okie, when we see a guy who works in the Galley (where we all eat, basically a cafeteria) that we had met a few weeks prior. He told us to wait for him to go get his costume. “What…?” He comes back dressed up as Elmo, says he’s going down to the coast guard ship to watch the drunk coasties walk back, pass out cookies in exchange for tickles, and that we should come with him. Of course we went. Side note: alcohol may or may not have been involved. You do the math. Anyways, he walks us to some bikes that we ride down the hill to the ship. The majority didn’t have pedals or seats. We find 3 that are good enough, and we start biking down the hill. Elmo and Matt realize they don’t have brakes so they’re just using their feet to slow themselves down. We ~casually~ and ~gracefully~ end up by the ship with a dude dressed as Elmo, cookies and maybe a beverage in hand. The coasties start down the hill, and most are really excited to see Elmo. One guy didn’t know what Elmo was, and said he was not interested in having a cookie from the Big Red Thing (expletives left out). We met a guy who works for the McMurdo fire department, and he yelled time updates to the coasties running down the hill. If they’re late for curfew, apparently they can’t leave the ship the next day. Pretty harsh since they’ve been stuck in the ship for weeks.
We hung out for a while, and I took a series of ridiculous videos. Sorry, they’re definitely not going on YouTube. So, life advice: if anyone says “wait for me while I get my costume”, you should probably wait. McMurdo is weird.
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Day 6 in the Field This day Matt and others from the wormherder group met Jeb and I at Many Glaciers Pond. It was about an hour and a half hike from our camp. Here, there's a project called P3 that has been happening for a couple years. It's a permafrost thaw experiment, where they're simulating thaw by adding hundreds of gallons of water to the soil. This alters the soil characteristics, which influences the nematode habitat suitability. Permafrost thaw is expected to increase with a changing climate. We sampled soil in set plots, and they will processed in the lab at McMurdo for nematode extraction & identification and also some soil characteristics like pH and conductivity. After sampling, we decided to take some awesome group photos... That afternoon we flew back to McMurdo, while Matt, Jeb, and Marci stayed behind to finish P3. The Coast Guard icebreaker ship comes in to McMurdo, breaking the ice so the cargo vessel can come in. I heard there's about 200 coast guards ("coasties"), so town gets pretty crowded for a week. Since coming back from the field, we've been staying busy with lab work. Not much exciting has happened! ~
I'm in Antarctica to do field work for my Masters thesis and to help out with a couple other projects that our group is involved in. My project deals with hyperspectral satellite imagery of stream channel margins in the Taylor Valley. Algae grows in mats in these margins, and their production signature can be seen in these images. Basically, these mats are photosynthesizing and this can be seen from space at certain wavelengths. This method is commonly used when studying forest and agricultural areas, but it can also be applied to the Antarctic. Before I dive into this, we're doing some ground truthing on the area that we'll be analyzing images from. Day 1 in the Field During our first day at Lake Fryxell Camp, we hiked to Canada Stream (about 30-45 minutes) to check out the area we'd be sampling. We searched for areas that had dense algal mats at the margins of the stream. The weather was awesome that day, sunny and not too cold. Day 2 in the Field The next day we didn't have as good of luck with the weather. I woke up to snow, and it was real windy. It's Antarctica so it's always windy, but this day was quuuite windy. We hiked back to Canada Stream to the area we picked out the day before, and we started sampling. We take GPS points and photos and collect soil and algal mat samples at various locations within the 20 x 20 meter plot we chose. Basically, I scoop up algae and soil and put them into vials. We finished about half of the sampling. It took longer than we expected, but besides that everything went well. Day 3 in the Field Weather was great this day, and we were able to finish up the sampling for this site. The majority of the mats in this area are 'black mats' which are cyanobacteria consisting mostly of nostoc. In these photos it's the black area on the soil. This area receives water from glacial melt. It's basically like a wetland. A lot of the soil is really soft, so collecting samples is interesting, since we have to balance on rocks to try not to disturb the area. Day 4 in the Field This day we set up a smaller plot in an area close to the original one. The weather was much nicer, but it was significantly colder this day compared to the previous one. I haven't mentioned yet how it's light 24 hours a day. I knew this coming down obviously, but I figured it would go behind the mountains at some point but it really doesn't. I sleep with my beanie pulled down or I put my buff over my eyes. I've woken up around 3am every night (not sure why 3am), and I assume it's morning. The first time it happened, I was so convinced it was morning because I felt well rested. I started getting up and ready before checking my phone. Once I checked my phone, I realized I still had hours left to sleep. It was a weird feeling. Despite this though, I have been able to sleep really well. Day 5 in the Field After finishing up the sampling around Canada Stream, this day we hiked to McKnight Creek. This creek is fed by the Commonwealth Glacier. We set up another small plot here and sampled. The hike there took about an hour and a half because it was so windy and the terrain is rocky. Lost Seal Stream was named after a seal that had wandered into the Lake Fryxell area in 1990. There were people researching the streams when they found the seal. They contacted some seal researchers, and they decided to fly the seal back via helicopter to McMurdo Sound where it had wandered away from. Diane McKnight actually wrote a children's book about it. The water here is so blue because of glacial flour. Glacial erosion causes really fine particles of rock to become suspended in the glacial melt water. In person it looks much more turquoise. Super pretty!
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