Penguins, Sea Ice, Dry Valleys

Hi All,

It’s Saturday night, the eve of the Halloween Party. This is the first big show of local creativity, as well as the first big party of the season. Heading into the galley for dinner tonight, one is confronted with a bunch of “drunks” sitting by the side of the “street” hassling passersby and panhandling (they were occasionally successful!).

I am skipping the party this year because I am hoping to skate ski tomorrow: I’d better get this drafted. Strange that’s there’s barely anyone here in the computer kiosk now (just us losers not going to the party).

Shortly after arrival this year, I noticed that I was focusing much more on the people than the facilities and many unusual details of life “on the ice”. Upon arrival my first season, I noticed the facilities and landscape much more so than the people. Like any tight community, where people work hard together, live together, and play together in a harsh and isolating environment, surprisingly strong bonds develop even in relatively short time periods. I was surprised at how much I enjoyed seeing people again, how genuinely warm and enthusiastic the greetings were when the planes started landing in McMurdo earlier this month. Not unlike the long term friendships that develop in guiding and especially outdoor education. It seems that many people crave strong community connections, even if the community is not very traditional or long term.

At work things started out a bit rough this year. We have 3 new people; only me and my boss returning. It became obvious to me how much one guy in particular last year did in the 6-week pre-season (before we arrive) to set up for our classes. This year our gear was a mess, at least in the eyes of someone who really likes to have her logistics tight so that courses flow smoothly and professionally. When we hit the ice, we are super busy teaching courses so have very little time to do any of the background work. Before people can go out into the field, they either have to have the one day Refresher course if they are returnees, or the Happy Camper and maybe Sea Ice courses before they can leave the station to any real degree (supposedly). This means we might teach up to 5 of our 6-day work-week for the first week or two, leaving little time to get gear dealt with… our supervisor describes it as “triage mode”.

This year we are also down to a staff of 5 because the South Pole Traverse (SPT) hired their own mountaineer because of our sudden shortage of people with ground-penetrating radar experience (me). Also, they wanted one person for their entire drive to the South Pole. A person who worked in our dept years ago and also with the SPT and their radar, has signed on with them (a guide with the same company I work for, actually).

Three of our guys from last year are returning as mountaineers for specific projects. This is a common retirement plan from our Field Safety Training department because the contracts are much shorter. It’s great to see them again, even if they’re only going to be in town for short periods of time.

Our new folks, one of whom is a woman (we are now 40% female! This seems to be a historic year), are catching on quickly and have been fun. Months ago I turned down the offer to come down here in mid August for the pre-season, so a new guy did instead. He picked up the Sea Ice Point of Contact role as it starts during the pre-season. He seems to like it and is doing well, so it makes sense for him to stay in that role.

My boss has long been the Search and Rescue team leader and really understands the administrative side of it, so I’m also happy not to be in that role. I will take a lead role in training the Secondary SAR team, and that’s about the right amount of specialization (almost none) I want. I am enjoying being in the role of the versatile veteran. It means I have more variety than the others and get to do more of the unique projects that require program experience. It also means that I get more of the best projects, and this year I’ll get to focus on going to places I’ve not yet been. The biggest one of these is Mt Erebus, our 12,800’ active and open volcano right here on Ross Island. Lots of research going on up there, but I’ve yet to see the molten magma down in the crater, or even just get to the rim. There are also really cool ice caves from the steam vents on the sides of the mtn. Cross your fingers for me to get a chance to get up there! (see January '06 update)

One of these prime assignments was getting to accompany the NSF Representative (top of local heap) and 4 photographers on a visit to a Emporer Penguin colony. The role of the NSF Rep was to be penguin cop: to enforce the 50m guideline (distance from the birds) in the international Antarctic treaty to prevent over-stressing the parents and chicks. If the birds in the outer edge of the colony began flapping their flippers, then we were too close, which could result in bad outcomes for the chicks.

My job was to assure safety in case the terrain was weird. It wasn’t, so the only thing I did that actually felt somewhat useful was to hop out of the helo right after it landed on the sea ice to determine the ice thickness. The pilot kept the power high in case the ice wasn’t thick enough. Then I, with the props screaming overhead and everyone waiting, used a 2” diameter hand drill to make sure the ice was over the required 30”. When they land on a glacier, sometimes they bounce the helo up and down a bit to get some idea of whether they’re on a bridged crevasse. Then they dump us out to probe (with an ice axe, not a 3 meter avalanche probe which would get into the rotors) before they power down the engines.

The photographers originally had planned to go to Cape Crozier, but it turns out that there are ZERO chicks there this year. This sad state of reproductive affairs is a result of that mega-berg you have been hearing about for two years now, “B-15”. This berg has moved north and is no longer directly influencing our region, but it’s effects are still very much with us. No chicks, but maybe next year. Fortunately in B-15’s northward migration, it managed to avoid taking out several other Emporer colonies along the way; this was a great relief to the Penguin Ranch researchers in particular.

We instead went north about 60 miles to Beaufort Island after I taught a full-day sea ice course. We went late to get better light. We landed on a most beautiful evening, behind a small berg (only about as big as a big-box store), and walked around the corner to the colony.

Being close to penguins was as wonderful as it is rare (no doubt it’s the #1 dreamed of experience here, yet VERY few get to have it). Penguins lack land predators and are quite curious. The non-breeders wandering around will often approach, so the trick is to get reasonably close and just sit down. With camera.

Pretty dang amazing experience. They’ll walk up, and if you can keep from laughing at their swaying gait and very intent, serious expressions, they might get within arm’s reach from you. They do astounding things with their necks: they have No Neck position, Giraffe Neck Position, Rubber Neck position (to sides), and also Chin Tuck position, which may be accompanied by a sound between squawking and trumpeting. Sometimes they were too close to get good photos especially as they moved around. I enjoyed hearing their reptilian feet padding along on the hard snow.

The chicks, in the distance from us, entertained their parents by throwing their heads up and back or to the sides, emitting a more normal cheery bird-like singing call with each head toss. The chicks were about 40% to half of the parents’ height. They are quite funny, esp. through binoculars. They’re built just like you saw in the movie: like the circus clowns who have giant inner-tubes in their costumes down by their ankles. When the chicks move, it looks much like the clown in that you can tell the part above the innertube is seemingly somewhat hollow, mostly skin in this case. Quite funny. The chicks mostly stand but also toddle around followed closely by a very intent parent in Chin Tuck Neck position. Not unlike my friends attentively following their toddlers around…!

Watching the adult penguinos interact is fun as well. That movie is actually quite good, so you know exactly what I’m talking about. These birds are much closer to open ocean than the ones by the French station (movie), and it looked like they were at the stage of parents taking turns going fishing. Some were fatter and cleaner than the others, so we assumed they were recently returned from food and bath. It was even funny to notice a tail suddenly rise, then the green spew onto the snow.

A penguin colony is not a quiet place. The sound is a bit like that stereotypic staccato monkey sound mixed with general squawks and punctuated with the lovely chick songs (at some point they trade in the sweet voices for squawky voices but elegant plumage). Their voices seemed to flow through the colony like waves.

We did see a trio of smaller, faster, flappier-flippered Adelie penguins move along the periphery. There’s an Adelie rookery on the other side of the island, but the vast majority of the Adelies (cute) won’t arrive until a few more weeks at which point they’ll begin mate-selection, nest building (little rocks), and raising their young.

After a couple hours the sun dropped behind Beaufort Isl (we were very close to it) so we lost the light and the chill crept in. I got home at about 12:30; a long day, but no doubt this will be among the best couple hours of my season.

I missed the next day’s SAR scenario, a complex situation with numerous patients in a couple crevasses spread over a couple hundred feet and accessed by helicopter. It was a great exercise, so I hear, but went late: all the better that I didn’t participate. I slept in and worked on a number of the projects we always have in our dept needing attention. I think I’m at the point now where the long haul of the season is setting in: not a bad thing, just need to remember to pace myself.

The other SAR trainings we’ve done include the white-out scenario, where we cardboard up the windows of the Hagglund and find each other out on the ice shelf with GPS. It works best when you don’t run over the person you’re searching for, so we have someone with their head popped out the hatch. We also play with regular radar which is great for finding vehicles, and we also train with Radio Direction Finding equipment, which is what wildlife biologists use to track collared wolves and such, so we could find you if you just had your radio out on the ice.

Last week we had our helo SAR training day: focusing on how to load litters, and how to turn off the engines, fuel, and batteries in the event of a “hard landing”, which seems to be the euphemism for crash. There was one, from 200’, three years ago, so these skills have been added to our SAR training. We also learned where the batteries are in the two types of helos we have, as well as looked through the crash rescue kits: collections of tools used to pull apart a helicopter, which they say is surprisingly easy once the integrity is destroyed in the ‘hard landing’. Some of the medieval tools look like something out of movies about crusaders, and would no doubt get anyone’s testosterone flowing as much as one’s adrenaline would be. The helo in that last crash was pulled apart, to get out the pilot and helo-tech (both survived), with just an ice axe and a “leatherman” multi-tool.

Enough on that.

This year our department has finally come up against the reality of having had our vehicle replacement requests postponed repeatedly. Last season our Nodwell, the large tracked 1970’s behemoth that we hauled Happy Camper students in, died, so we borrowed another massive machine called a Delta (tires taller than me and 3x as wide). We had to give up our SAR Piston Bully because science groups need them; these are the most modern and reliable vehicle we have: they are truly nice. During a SAR training while we were at the Kiwi base 2 miles from McMurdo, the wiring under the dash in our Sea Ice Course Hagglund started a fire, making for a rather interesting morning. That vehicle won’t run again this year, perhaps ever. The inside is rather burned out, including the windshield being partly melted. This leaves us with what was our SAR Hagglund, which after having been recently fixed, goes as fast as about 12mph. At least now defrost works, so we can drive places that are not flagged without having to almost constantly scrape the windows (flags assist one in staying on roads during white-outs) We are using this Hagglund for Sea Ice classes, and working with keeping the Delta running (not entirely successful) and also dealing with the oil that it spews. This involves large plastic buckets that we fill with oily snow out at our Happy Camper school area, and dropping them off at Hazardous Waste on the way home. YeeHaa.

On a more interesting note, the sea ice this year has been doing things we have no institutional memory of. Namely, we have pressure ridges in places we haven’t seen them before, and the Barne Glacier crack is too big for the usual road north to Cape Royds (see previous updates about the Adelie rookery there as well as one of Shackleton’s huts). We had to re-route the road past the Erebus Ice Tongue (five mile long, mile wide tongue of glacier ice floating out in McM Sound from Mt E) because of the roller that formed there, then compressed further, then cracked on the crest creating a pressure ridge. It also cracked in the trough, allowing sea water to flow in, fill, refreeze, fill, refreeze, add weight and push the trough deeper below the surface… Last week on a Sea Ice course we measured the ice in the middle of that. There was a half meter of drifted hard snow on top of about 3 meters of very stiff slush: the original 3m of sea ice has rotted out! Rollers are now forming along the detour road, so we’ll see what happens there.

No one knows quite what is going on, but we’re watching carefully. The concern is for the science camps in the area and further north. Not only do they need to get around, but after they’re done, heavy equipment needs to be able to get out there to retrieve their huts, which are mounted on giant skis.

On one Sea Ice Course, we visited with Gretchen Hoffman, a Primary Investigator (head “beaker”) working on fish physiology. She was fishing in the crack we were measuring, with a silly-looking 2’ long rod, putting the prehistoric-looking fish she caught into a insulated plastic water cooler. It was quite a funny scene, her tucked behind the Piston Bully out of the wind, fishing with the micro-rod through the slush in this little fresh crack. They also have a little hut with a hole in the floor. With the Piston Bully they pull the hut over the cracks and fish in the comfort of the heated “tomato” hut (that’s what it looks like). They do some dissections in there as well, for later study of anti-freeze proteins.

The Scott Base (NZ station 2 miles away) rollers and pressure ridges are becoming more dramatic as well. The Kiwi base, very small, is located quite near where the McMurdo Ice Shelf meets the multi-year sea ice. Is the ice shelf pushing harder these days? Same with the Erebus Ice Tongue? Or is this a factor of the fact that now for the first time in USAP history (50 yrs) we have fifth year sea ice where it used to be annual?

We have this ice NOT because of temperature changes (it’s warmed over time) but because of B-15 having spent 4 years blocking the ocean currents that led to the annual melting of the sea ice. At a recent Icebergs lecture, I took notes on some B-15 stats: When the berg broke off the Ross Ice Shelf in 2000 as the largest known berg in world history, it was about 1000’ thick, about 185 miles long, and approx the area of Connecticut. It could supply each person on Earth with 2.5 gallons of water per day for 75 years. Because of meteorological and climatic reasons, including tidal differences of less than a foot as well as air pressure/wind, it remained lodged just north of Ross Island (partly aground on Beaufort Island). A year or two ago a large chunk broke off, but it’s still BIG. We see it on the daily infrared satellite photos (when clouds allow) and its gone north out of the Ross Sea and about to turn the corner west to get into the Antarctic circumpolar current.

Evidence suggests that mega-bergs break off the Ross Shelf every 50 years, so they are trying to learn as much as possible about this one. There is a massive crack these last couple years on the Ross Ice Shelf, called the “nascent berg”, and glaciologists are studying how it’s breaking off, among other things. Turns out that these bergs come to the end of their lives quite catastrophically. Surface meltwater forms from the sun’s heat and cover much of the surface. These pools fill the crevasses, providing a warm and very heavy wedge. In a matter of days or a week, the berg disintegrates into tiny chunks that soon melt. The dust and minerals trapped in the ice provide an important source of nutrients for algae growing on the bottom of the ice, which then feed larger critters.

The edge of the sea ice this year is out far again, 80 miles like last year (pre B-15 was 20 miles), but I haven’t heard any of the Higher-Ups stressing about is as during last year when we had this much ice. It may be that this year’s weirdness (pressure ridges) will lead to a massive break-up of the multi-year ice?? It’s truly anyone’s guess. This place is an ever-interesting place to live.

Unfortunately the tentacles of corporate America have reached McMurdo with all their absurdity. Now, as they continue their efforts to improve the safety record here (sprains and strains mostly), they have instituted a rule that no one can lift anything heavier than 40 pounds or be above 4’ off the ground without safety mechanisms in place (harness and all). Clearly whoever made this decision has never been here and has no real understanding of operations in a program such as this. They sent down a safety guy to prepare us for the safety audit coming up, and he sure had plenty to do. In many cases, compliance is all but impossible (objects such as batteries and propane bottles that are too small to get the required number of people around it to lift) in the field. In town there can be all sorts of mechanical aids, but in the field, esp helo supported operations (there are many) where weight is an issue, and on surfaces like ice, snow, sand, rock… these rules are quite unfollowable. We have an exemption for SAR related activities, but even our Happy Camper Class food boxes weigh over 40# when full. The number of micro-tasks that now require 2 people is enough to substantially affect operations… if they were consistently followed. The NSF grantees are under no such rules, so they get a kick out of offering to help us, which is funny when it’s a tiny female scientist offering to carry something for the huge burly carpenter guy.

There are all sorts of rumors regarding this being related to them wanting to save money by not paying worker’s comp if one is hurt lifting 41 pounds… but the safety guy assures me that such an idea is nonsense. He has zero sense of humor (I had him in a Refresher class and found this out for sure as I tried to playfully needle him a bit), and I believe he genuinely believes everything he says!

I think it would be quite interesting to have a Safety Compliance Day, during which everyone agrees to follow the rules precisely. Some people think that this is exactly what the company wants: to stop operations and thereby convince the NSF they need more money… this place is as good as any for the rumor mill. I was tempted to put an official looking sign up in the weight room saying that “next week” all the weights over 40# would be removed…

This past week I got to check out a different valley in the Dry Valleys for the first time. A few years ago a battery was lost in the ice of Lake Vida, a battery that held solar power for a ice data gathering instrument. I went out with a gal from the Environmental department and another guy and we used the ground penetrating radar (GPR) to search for the battery.

The GPR we used to detect crevasses on the South Pole Traverse was reasonably user friendly as it was configured for Windows. This unit is less straightforward and challenged us, esp. given how fast the batteries ran out despite our best efforts to keep them warm. Kaneen and Peter dragged the antenna unit across the ice in a dish-washing basin, and I sat on our packs interpreting the lines on the screen, trying to separate out the wires in the same area. We found two objects in about the right place and flagged them (2.5 and 3m down), but it’ll be awhile before they return and melt-dig to see whether we were right.

The use of GPR is still VERY new here, so this was more experimental than anything. I was most relieved to hear that I was not expected necessarily to be able to find it. Fortunately a true radar expert met with Kaneen and I for a couple hours so we could get the specific settings that would give us the best chance.

After the batteries died we still had several hours before our helo pick-up (gotta love helicopter commuting), so we were forced to walk around and explore the area a bit. As with much of Antarctica, the scale is massive, but still it was fun to get to the edge of the lake, admire the largely clear and aqua blue, partially cracked ice. The ice here is still absolutely fascinating, everyone takes pictures or at least enjoys the landscape here, even the crusty old-timers. Amazing old granite, very granular, and wind-shaped basaltic “ventifact” rocks. The whitish scale underneath is not a mineral deposit (necessarily), but a bacteria that goes into suspended animation for years and years till it’s exposed to water again, then POOF it becomes alive and does it’s thing till it dries up again, not unlike warmer deserts.

There’s also a whole nutrient flow involving algal mats under the 20m of ice on this and other lakes, that float up to the ice bottom on the O2 they produce. They incorporate into the ice and eventually reach the surface where they are blown to the lake edge, into the summer edge-meltpools, and get back into the lake again, supplying nutrients and/or growing again. Or some story much like this. This is the level of ecosystem in the Dry Valleys, much like what is expected on Mars.

Lake Vostok, several miles under the East Ant. Plateau (under the Russian Vostok station) is expected to be much like the surface of Jupiter’s moon Europa, and plans are underway to drill down to find out what’s living there. This is a very difficult technical challenge because of the requirement not to contaminate the water once they reach the lake, and the other difficulties of drilling into about 2 miles of ice.

This place continues to amaze me.

On a more personal note, Larry just received the soy milk maker he ordered, and we had our first batch today. It’s pretty good, actually, esp with vanilla added.

It’s been great living with him, having my best buddy around to process all that unfolds in our lives down here. This year he (science construction: builds anything and everything the scientists need) didn’t get to the Dry Valleys for camp set-ups, but was assigned to set up the numerous sea ice camps. He’s disappointed, but he’s probably had more (or same) Dry Valleys time (incl hiking) than anyone else in his dept for the last couple years. Soon he heads out for 3 weeks to West Antarctica to help set up a camp for a 7-year project to measure the changing West Antarctic Ice Sheet, which has received much attention lately because the land under the ice is below sea level and there are huge ramifications for global climate and sea level over the next century if this ice sheet continues to ablate at the current rate.

My good friend from home, Marlow, is working here in the kitchen. He is partners with my wonderful housemate Krissi, and running the morning egg-line. He is on the night shift, and enjoying that quieter time of day. It’s great to see him and get little updates from home when I manage to get to breakfast with enough time to get in the egg-line.

The weekly official NSF USAP newsletter is back in print, and available at antarcticsun.usap.gov, if you’re interested.

Well, my fingers are tired!

Love and wild winds, Susan