Penguins, Neutrinos, and Mars on Earth
Scientist Adam Lewis looks out on the McMurdo Dry Valleys.
A peak in the Arena Valley in the Dry Valleys of Antarctica.
As the last leg of our science coverage during the International Polar Year, the Exploratorium’s Ice Stories crew is traveling to the bottom of the world in December 2008. We’ll be based at the main National Science Foundation Antarctic research station of McMurdo but also have plans to travel to the Adélie penguin colony at Cape Royds, visit the historic huts of early explorers Scott and Shackleton, fly to the South Pole station to check on the IceCube neutrino telescope, and spend a few days camping in the Dry Valleys where the dry, cold environment resembles that of the planet Mars. In Antarctica, the best-laid plans are subject to the vagaries of weather but, wherever we are, we plan fifteen Webcasts and regular posts to the Ice Stories Website throughout our icy expedition.
Our first two weeks will be spent in McMurdo, getting our “Happy Camper School,” sea-ice training and helicopter safety tests completed. We’ll also be setting up our Webcasting equipment and snagging interviews with some of the scientists who are leaving “Mactown” in early December. We’ll record a Webcast with polar geologist Robin Bell of Columbia University before she and her team head off to the South Pole to get their bodies adapted to the high altitude and cold temperatures of her East Antarctica research site. Robin will tell us about outfitting the airplanes to survey the Gamburtsev Mountains, a vast mysterious range under the ice sheet. We also hope to catch Steve Pekar of Queen’s College, the City University of New York, when he comes out of the field after searching for ancient sediment deposits at the bottom of McMurdo Sound. Steve is the leader of the Offshore New Harbor Project, which will be reported on by his students, Ice Stories correspondents Andrea Balbas and Howie Koss. We also plan on spending time with Ohio State geologist and Ice Stories correspondent Kelly Carroll to check on the progress of the Polar Earth Observing Network (POLENET), which aims to create a network of seismic and GPS instruments across the Antarctic continent.
Other scientists we’ll feature in posts and Webcasts include glaciologist Slawek Tulaczyk of the University of California, Santa Cruz, after he finishes imaging two subglacial lakes with his team that includes Saffia Hossainzadeh and Jake Walter. We’ve scheduled a Webcast with Allan Ashworth and Adam Lewis from North Dakota State University, who are featured in the recent film Ice People. We’ll talk with them about their recent discovery of 14-million-year-old fossils that provide evidence Antarctica was once much warmer than it is today. Allan and Adam found their fossil treasures in the Dry Valleys, a unique polar desert ecosystem nearly devoid of snow. We plan to travel to the Dry Valleys’ Lake Hoare by helicopter and interview biologists, glaciologists, and geologists who are part of the McMurdo Long Term Ecological Research project.
Of course, no trip to Antarctica would be complete without spending time with the continent’s biological ambassadors: penguins. We’ll host a Webcast with Scripps Institution of Oceanography’s Paul Ponganis, who studies the diving physiology of emperor penguins, and we’ll camp with David Ainley near the Adélie penguin rookery at Cape Royds. Penguins depend upon the rich underwater ecosystems of Antarctica to survive, and we’ll feature a Webcast with marine biologist Stacy Kim from the Moss Landing Marine Laboratories. She leads a team of engineers and scientists using a small camera-equipped remotely operated vehicle (ROV) to investigate the bottom-dwelling creatures under the sea ice. We’ll also revel in underwater photography and moving images captured by Ice Stories correspondent John Weller, who is spending much of November and early December 2008 diving under the ice in McMurdo Sound and the Ross Sea.
If there’s bed space for us and we can catch a flight to the South Pole Station, we hope to investigate the unique science of the polar plateau being conducted there. We’ll interview physicist Mark Krasberg, a member of the University of Wisconsin’s IceCube Observatory. This under-ice telescope, which looks into and through the earth, can only be described with superlatives: When completed it will take up a cubic kilometer of clear ice and will measure some of the smallest, most abundant, and most energetic particles in the universe. Called neutrinos, these particles are nearly massless and almost impossible to detect, but scientists hope that the largest telescope in the world will be up to the task. At the South Pole, we’ll check in with our friends from the University of Chicago who are running the newly built South Pole Telescope. We also want to spend time at NOAA’s South Pole Observatory, which has been measuring carbon dioxide and other atmospheric gases since the International Geophysical Year of 1957–58.
A storm at the South Pole.
Finally, we’ll be celebrating history and holidays in Antarctica. We plan to tour Robert F. Scott’s historic Discovery Hut near McMurdo with New Zealand scientists who are studying the condition of well-preserved but endangered relics like this from the golden age of exploration. It won’t be all work for the Exploratorium crew. With 24 hours of daylight, but plenty of snow and ice, McMurdo has its own way of celebrating the holidays: There’ll be formal dinners, an art show, and gingerbread for Christmas, while an all-day festival of home-grown music and a chili cook-off contest known as Ice Stock will ring in the New Year.
The lab in Scott’s Hut.
