At Site U1359, Hole U1359B,
Position: 64º 54.25’S, 143º 57.63’E
Water Depth: 3100 meters

ABOARD THE JOIDES RESOLUTION, OFF THE COAST OF WILKES LAND, ANTARCTICA– Hi everyone! As we approach our 2000th meter of drilling I thought I would change things up a bit with this blog and send along some photos of the birds we’ve been seeing. The Southern Ocean is the coldest and windiest on Earth, but it also one of the most bountiful. During the 3 or 4 months of long days and short nights, the “farm” operates 24/7. The plants that live in the sunlit waters here are nourished by nutrients that mix upwards from the deep sea and go into overdrive building their cells. It’s easier for nutrients to mix upwards into the sunlit upper waters here simply because the water column is “isothermal”. This means that we see very little variation in the temperature of the sea between the surface and the bottom waters over 3000 meters below us. It is all close to 0 degrees Celsius. This means that it takes very little energy to move dense cold water from the deep upwards because the surface water is also cold and is almost as dense. So the plants have everything they need. The wind and circulation drive the mixing, which brings in the nutrients, and the sun keeps the farm growing nearly 24 hours every day. Plants (mostly single-celled protists called diatoms) grow fast and the small plankton that eat the diatoms grow fast as well. Which brings us to the birds…..

Albatrosses in a storm.

Our ship is constantly surrounded by Albatrosses, Petrels, and Skuas. Sometimes we see more than 100 birds surrounding the ship. They swoop and dive, looking for food in the water, either plankton or small fish, or perhaps they think we are land. We haven’t seen one try to rest on the ship yet. In fact the Albatrosses rarely set down at any time. They fly 1000’s of miles from their breeding colonies and are at sea for months and even years at a time.

Here are some photos of the seabirds we’ve seen so far.

These first two are of Black-browed Albatrosses (Thalassarche melanophrys). They live throughout the Southern Ocean and breed in places like the Falkland Islands and South Georgia. They can live to be as old as 70 years and spend long periods of time at sea, even encircling the globe. They feed on krill and small fish – that in turn eat diatoms and smaller plankton.

Black Browed Albatross

Black Browed Albatross

The most common bird we saw at our drill sites close to the Antarctic continent were the Pintados, also known as Cape Petrels (Daption capense capense). The name Pintado comes from the Spanish word for “painted”. They live throughout the Southern Ocean, mainly eating krill, especially on and near the continental shelf of Antarctica in summer. A 2009 census estimates there are over 2 million Cape Petrels alive today.

Cape Petrel (Pintado)

Cape Petrel (Pintado)

Cape Petrel (Pintado)

We’ve also been surrounded the past few days by Southern Giant Petrels (Macronectes giganteus). These are indeed big birds….females can weigh up to 18 pounds. Sometimes they are called “stinkers” as they can spit a foul-smelling liquid at predators or when they are perturbed.

Southern Giant Petrel

Southern Giant Petrel

I hope you enjoy these photos! I’ll get back to our science and progress next time and I’ll try to knock out least one more video blog. We are VERY busy with work here now but it all very exciting.

A tranquil scene at Cape Royds: penguins quietly sitting on eggs, dreaming of food, 65 km away. But, tranquility sometimes can be deceptive. Kind of like the Western Movie where one guy says, “Its quiet out there, isn’t it?” And Tex says, “Yes, too quiet!” Then a big shooting battle starts.

The colony has certainly been quiet, with very few birds coming in or going out to sea. In my first dispatch of the season (“The Early Returns”) I detailed the fast ice situation: a continual sheet of ice out to beyond the horizon. Its edge at the open water is about 60 km away now; at the beginning of the season it was at 75 km. Walking about 2-3 km/hour that distance adds 30 hours to a trip, not counting times for resting or checking that there are no leopard seals at any wide cracks along the way. I can recall seeing 3 cracks on trips that we’ve flown out to Beaufort. Penguins can wait at these for hours to make sure nothing nasty lurks in those black waters in the channel between the white ice.

The penguin pairs are well coordinated in their schedules but there is very little cushion for major delays. Adding a day or two to a trip can spell disaster to the bird on the nest who is dreaming of a fish or krill dinner. Well, it’s a disaster for both members of the pair! In fact, this season has been a disaster so far for many. I’ve been keeping track of 38 nests of banded, known-age birds since early Nov. As of today (12 Dec), 55% of nests in which eggs were laid have failed. Each nest started with one or two eggs, plus of course the incubating bird. Such a loss rate means that lots of birds incubating the eggs waited way past comfort…stomach growling…and finally had to leave. Males are prepared to sit for two weeks or a bit more while taking the first turn at incubation. They can lose 30% of their body weight or more awaiting their mate to return.

Here is a penguin that can not wait a minute longer. He has been staunchly taking care of these eggs for 3 weeks, and now it is time to eat. His mate is no where to be seen, but he’s got to go. That’s the way it’s been so far this season, males taking very long first responsibility on the nest while the females search for food in order to be able to sit for weeks when she arrives back.

Sometimes skuas can intimidate penguins to leave. The skuas just sit there staring at the penguin for hours, just out of pecking range. The penguin can’t take it any more. Or, sometimes one skua pesters the penguin by pulling its tail, and then the other grabs the egg when the penguin reaches back to peck the tail-pulling skua.

A few weeks ago there would have been 25 nests in the foreground of this view. Now there are 13 and all are vulnerable to skua staring as there is space free of penguins around every nest. Neighbors are needed to guard one another’s flanks.

A fine meal for a skua, offered by a penguin who had to go in search for its own food.

You can see the result of many birds having given up: broken eggs everywhere. This is quite different from Beaufort (see last dispatch). These nests didn’t roll out of poorly built nests…just look at all the rocks in these nests. These eggs were left by the penguins, and the skuas then arrived to eat them.

Well, so, things are looking kind of bleak at Royds this season, certainly a stark contrast to the ‘happy’ chaos of the Beaufort Island colony and a stark contrast to last season at Royds!!! Many, many 10’s of thousands of chicks will be produced there at Beaufort, in spite of the seeming chaos. What’s with this global climate change? They said it should be getting windier in these parts, and the wind would blow the ice away. I think they also said the weather would be getting more unpredictable and more wildly varying. I guess they got that part right! Kind of sad, though. Gotten rid of your gas guzzler yet?

We rarely know a ptarmigan is near, until a quick movement reveals its presence. While ptarmigan do fly, we most often see them walking on the tundra foraging on plants and berries.

To catch a glimpse of a ptarmigan, watch this video.

The emergency escape card on the Boeing “Combis” 737 aircraft. Cargo travels first class.

When winter temperatures can reach -50F, cars need to be plugged in overnight to keep them warm enough to start.

There are a handful of research activities happening in Barrow, and scientists are in no short supply. At the cafeteria joining the Barrow Arctic Research Consortium (BASC) and the I?isa?vik College, it is not unusual to overhear or join in on a conversation about methane flux at one table while at another the finer points of the year-round hunting season are reviewed in Iñupiaq. The diversity is palpable — some of the most important scientific questions affecting our planet are being asked in a setting shared with some of its most ancient inhabitants.

It takes time to unload the planes at the Barrow airport, affording an opportunity to get to know others that may well become your colleagues. In this case, it was a research team from UC Berkeley lead by Robert Rhew, Bob Reiss (a writer doing an article for Outside magazine), Phil and our driver, Scott.

Scott.

After the 20 minute drive on the dirt road (the only kind of road in Barrow) leading from the airport to BASC, one is assigned a room and meal card. Accommodations are basic… “dormitory style.” It was too late for dinner at BASC, so hooking up with our new colleagues from the Univ. of Colorado and Berkeley we were able to dine at Pepe’s– the northernmost Mexican restaurant in America… in a dry town that’s definintely NOT south of the boarder.

All roads in Barrow are dirt roads, but some have a nice view.

Our accommodations in Barrow.

Walking the 200 or so yards to visit the new $60M+ BASC building, Phil and I we were squawked at by a fairly rare Parasitic Jaeger (also known as Arctic Skua or more formally Stercorarius parasiticus). This is the first noteworthy wildlife encounter.

A Parasitic Jaeger.

Science and native culture are not the only concerns in Barrow. There is a national government presence as well. The new BASC building is currently being shared with the US Coast Guard. The CG provides support for its traditional mission areas (navigation aids, border security, oil spill response, fishery enforcement, and search/rescue), in addition to its science support of resources such as the icebreakers. The warming of the arctic poses new concerns for the USCG and its parent, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS)… less ice means more navigable water. More navigable water means more work for DHS. This is enough of a concern they have coined the term ‘Arctic Domain Awareness’, and the Secretary of DHS has come to Barrow to see how its working. As fate would have it, he was closer than I had really realized…

Already feeling good, I happened upon a Peregrine Falcon scrape. Two falcons, not too thrilled that I was passing by their cliff-side nest, began circling and screaming to chase me off. These amazing birds of prey were once endangered due to the use of pesticides like DDT. After the ban on DDT, and with the aid of protection and reintroduction efforts by people, Peregrine numbers have rebounded. This is a nice example of how people can change simple practices to protect other members of the Earth System.

In this video, listen for the sound of Wheatears (songbirds) chirping and yipping in the foreground.

The Arctic summer is a short but uproarious burst of life. For just a few months, the harsh climate of the Arctic relents. Snow thaws. The sun shines day and night. And in come the birds.

Eiders

Eider down nest with eggs

Sandpiper

Arctic, or Tundra, Swans

Well over a hundred different species of migratory birds fly to the Arctic to feed and breed each summer, taking advantage of the short-lived abundance of food and daylight. Among the birds of summer are albatross, bald eagles, peregrine falcons, tufted puffins, sandpipers, and eiders. The arctic tern makes the longest commute of them all, flying round-trip from the Arctic to the Antarctic—practically pole to pole—each year.

A few hardy species manage to live in the Arctic year-round. Snowy owls live on the tundra and hunt during the day, unlike their cousins, the great horned owls. To achieve seasonal camouflage, snowy owls actually change color. In the summer their plumage is brown with dark spots, to match the tundra. In the winter, they turn completely white. Chicken-like ptarmigans are also full-time residents of the Arctic; like the snowy owls, they change from brown to white each year.

Researchers in the Arctic are studying two endangered species of eider—steller’s and spectacled—for clues as to why their population has been dropping severely since the early 1990s. Lead poisoning from gunshot may be partly to blame, spurring a crusade to encourage hunters to switch from lead to steel shot. Eiders are famous for their down, which is a popular material in blankets. The female pulls this down from under her own breast feathers to line the nest and thereby insulate her incubating eggs, then leaves it behind when hatching is through.

To track the migrations of many of the birds that come to the Arctic, researchers attach radio transmitters to larger birds and “band” smaller ones (attach a colored band around a leg). Believe it or not, using a technique called stable isotope analysis, a wing feather plucked from a bird during the Arctic summer can be chemically analyzed to determine where that bird spent the previous winter.

Crabeater seals resting on a small ice floe.

Jake Ellena and Ken Smith are our bird surveyors. They count birds in flight while the ship is transiting between stations or during iceberg circumnavigation. Snow petrels are the most abundant of them; they are attracted to the iceberg, feeding on the zooplankton congregating within a few miles of the iceberg.

A Snow Petrel near Iceberg A43K.

Our sampling targets the study of the wildlife’s food source and the concept that birds and marine mammals are found in association with icebergs thanks to the physical and chemical modification of the ocean by the presence of the bergs. The icebergs enrich the water, promoting phytoplankton and zooplankton growth.

Ron Kaufmann and Bruce Robison have been monitoring some of this growth by using large nets to sample the macrozooplankton and micronekton around the iceberg. Salps (Salpa thompsoni) have dominated most of the samples at various distances from the berg. Many of these salps had highly colored guts, perhaps indicative of recent feeding, and representative salps have been analyzed for gut contents and pigments. Small phytoplankton cells, abundant at this time of the year, are preferred by salps.

One of the crustacean species that we are catching near Iceberg A43K.

Conspicuously rare in the samples have been large Antarctic Krill (Euphausia superba), though large numbers of young or juvenile krill have been collected. Krill typically feed on diatoms which are not abundant in winter.

The nets also contain large numbers of vertically migrating mesopelagic fishes as well as hyperiid amphipods, small krill and occasional large medusae.

Because of climate change, spring comes earlier than in the past and fall lingers later into the year. The growing season for plants still lasts just 60 days, though, with the frost-free season lasting only 34 days.

Up here in Alaska, we have another harbinger of spring: the snow bunting. A type of sparrow, snow buntings have a striking white head and chest and black beaks and wings. They have a short musical warble, often repeated and sung while in the air. Of the migratory birds, they are one of the first to show up at winter’s end. Their song, and flashes of black against the snow on an early warm day, reassure you that spring is not far away.

Snow bunting in snow– a sign that spring is coming.

While the melodious sounds of snow buntings assure us all that winter is winding down, it can be a stressful period for the researchers down in the lower 48 states. This is especially true if you have a large team of scientists, which may include Principal Investigators, Post-Doctoral researchers, and graduate and undergraduate students. If they arrive too early, there’s lots of standing around, waiting for the snow to melt. However, lo be it to those who arrive late after the snow has melted!

Researchers who live and work in Barrow year-round, like me, can continue office and lab activities, periodically glancing outside to watch the disappearing snow transform the tundra into brown. Usually, I can tell when we have two days left of snow machine travel to the site, so we switch over to moving the larger pieces of equipment needed in just the nick of time. Then we can concentrate on initiating our measurements in the field.

Our site in winter.

Our site in spring.

To avoid arriving too early or too late, most research teams I’ve worked with over the years send up a small contingent of new students and more experienced Arctic researchers. There’s always work to do in preparing for summer field work: breaking things out of storage, calibrating equipment, making data sheets and, in general, getting organized for the long days of research ahead. Often, after the new researcher is guided and instructed on various tasks, the older researcher will stay busy checking on freight, working up data from last year, revising a paper from work over the last couple of years for publication, or putting the finishing touches on a proposal to follow up on current research.

Our field lab during the warmer research season.

What we are all waiting for is “breakup.” Over the last couple of months (March-May) the tundra has been covered with a blanket of snow, often two feet deep. By late May, the layer gets thinner and thinner until patches of brown tundra show up, growing larger each day. The water from the snow melts, then freezes overnight until the landscape is made up of a lens of surface ice with patches of snow. Finally, overnight or during the day, pools of melt water break through their snow and ice dams. This melts other areas until, almost everywhere you look, water is flowing and rushing towards distant lowlands, only marginally following the tiny tributaries characteristic of the tundra. Walking to the sampling sites, careless or inexperienced researchers can often find pools deeper than expected, filling their boots with icy water.

The melting tundra.

Then, in less than five days, the water stops flowing and much if it drains away, confined to tiny drainages and lakes. Winter has ended and spring has started with summer close on its heels.

Adélie penguins at Cape Crozier. Photo by Chris Linder, WHOI.

Biologist David Ainley of H. T. Harvey & Associates has been studying Adélie penguins in Antarctica for more than 25 years. These resilient, charismatic birds, adapted to survive one of the harshest environments on earth, are now being threatened by fisheries depletion and by global warming that affects the sea ice and ocean ecosystems on which they depend. David led a team of biologists who collected data about the changing demographics of Adélies breeding at four colonies, asking how resource availability affects whether or not birds emigrate from one colony to another. Studying how penguins respond to environmental changes—which are happening more dramatically at the poles than anywhere else on earth—will help scientists shed light on how species and ecosystems across the globe will be affected by climate and resource changes.

David Ainley and his team spread out to three different Adélie breeding colonies on the Ross Sea, Antarctica, in November 2008, and visited a fourth periodically. Learn more about the team’s research into Adélie breeding colonies—Cape Crozier, Cape Bird, and Cape Royds—through archived blogs and Webcasts from the team.