Spending a week in New Zealand was great. Christchurch really has a good variety of restaurants to choose from and it was nice to be able to take a shower every day instead of our 2 per week. You also tend to forget how nice humidity is! The South Pole is so cold and dry that it wreaks havoc on the sinuses and skin. Aside from enjoying some showers and food, I was able to meet up with a friend from high school and college in Queenstown. Queenstown is probably one of the most beautiful towns I’ve seen. It’s set right next to The Remarkables mountain range which provides a gorgeous backdrop. I was even able to get a round of golf in at the spectacular Jack’s Point golf course! The R&R definitely did its job and I came back to the Pole feeling refreshed and ready to endure the winter.

When I got back to the Pole, I’m sure my partner at ARO (Atmospheric Research Observatory) was happy. He did not arrive early enough in the summer to take advantage of R&R so he was left to take care of things on his own while I was soaking it up in New Zealand. He must have been busy while I was gone because things looked great when I got back!

A view of Akaroa Harbor.

A paraglider suspended over Queenstown.

A beautiful round of golf in Queenstown!

Another great view from the golf course.

About a week after I returned from R&R I was getting ready to head out to ARO when I sat down and my teeth kind of bumped together. It ended up knocking off a piece of tooth that was repaired last spring. Luckily I was able to grab a quick flight to McMurdo and see the dentist only days before she was leaving the ice! It really would have been annoying having to deal with a broken front tooth for 8 months through the winter. She did a great job on repairing it though and actually looks better than the previous repair job.

It turns out that this broken tooth was a blessing in disguise. On my flight back to McMurdo, I was able to capture some spectacular video of the Transantarctic Mountains. We also went over the Dry Valleys, out over the open water, and then ended with a great fly-by of McMurdo. Well worth the dental work!

A view out of the LC-130 window as we enter the Trans-Antarctic Mountains.

A glacier spilling down through a valley.

Another glacier carving it’s way.

Beautiful blue sky over some peaks and valleys.

The Dry Valleys.

Some broken off sea ice in the Ross Sea.

Mt Erebus.

McMurdo Station Fly-by.

Now as we approach mid-February, people are leaving by the bundles. A little less than 2 weeks ago we had about 250 people on station. Now we are down to about 125. There are 2 more major passenger flights out of here in which we will lose about 80 more people leaving us with about 48 people for the winter. It’s strange having all the open space in the galley during meal times. And it’s only going increase the next several days. Tomorrow is the last day for any outgoing mail, and Monday, February 15th, we have our last flights! The sun is very noticeably lower in the sky and temperatures the past week have been much colder. Today is the coldest day since I arrived here last October at -40F. Hard to believe it’s just about here but it is. Winter!

See us installing a new GPS station in the video below. We previously assembled the tower, which contains solar panels and wind turbines, to charge the batteries. The batteries and the GPS hardware are in the gray cases. We use towers to keep the solar panels from being buried by accumulation and drifting snow. Note the old station in the foreground and how close it is to the snow surface. This video is played back at 15x speed.

We always have a handheld GPS on while we’re driving our snowmobiles, just in case we get lost or conditions change and we can’t see. This way we can know where we have gone and were safety lies. I compiled all of our GPS tracks and made this map.

This map our snowmobile tracks.

We have ten GPS station around the ice sheet, plus a few other locations of interest (seismic instrumentation or flag pole to re-measure) which we visited at least once each during our field season. I drove over 400 km during our 4 week field season.

Here we measure a flag pole to see how much it has moved since we measured it last (the year previous, in this case). Some times the flags were frozen into the ice and we couldn’t get them out. As a result we measure a location next to the flag and make careful notes about how far away our antenna is.

A snowmobile outfitted with a kinematic set up: simply a GPS antenna strapped to the side. We’re not moving in this picture, but are we record positions whenever we drive around.

We can use this kinematic set up to measure surface elevation and if we have multiple measurements, as in the image below, we can see changes in the ice surface topography.

In this image four kinematics GPS profiles are shown and the elevation differences between the two time periods are different. We can see that the surface of the glacier is changing rapidly. The reason for these changes are that highly pressurized water is creating a cavity below the glacier which floats the ice up. These cavities can also drain allowing the surface to deflate.

We began drilling the glacier ice and despite the weather conditions the day started well as we were recovering beautiful, clean, bubbly glacier ice. But soon the borehole reached a small sandy-pebbly layer within the ice and the pace of drilling came to a crawl. Drilling sediment rich ice releases enough heat to melt the ice between the sand grains. When the drill slows down the ice quickly refreezes and makes a sand ice slurry (yes, I referred to it as “crap” in the video) which adheres to the auger like cement making cleaning an arduous process.

The round depression on the top of the recovered slurry core was caused by the down-hole vacuum which assists in removing broken up rock and ice cemented debris created during drilling. Material not removed by the vacuum is hopefully recovered via use of the core barrel as shown in this video. After a few more cleaning runs with the vacuum and core barrel, we were back into clean ice once again!

Hassan is part of the glaciology team for the McMurdo Dry Valleys Long Term Ecological Research site (LTER for short), which is led by Andrew Fountain of Portland State. The LTER Network includes 26 sites mostly in the US, and includes ecosystems from the poles to the tropics. Scientists study the areas from many angles, combining their research to give a broad view of how ecosystems work. (Video by Lisa Strong-Aufhauser)

Canada Glacier with frozen Lake Hoare in the background.

Summer melting from the Canada Glacier feeds a stream that flows into Lake Hoare.

The Dry Valleys are dry because very little snow falls here, the average water content is less than a centimeter. Yet a fully functioning ecosystem exists here, in the ice-covered lakes and the soils of the valley floor. Even though the ecosystem is all but invisible to the naked eye, it still has a basic food web: primary producers (mats of moss and algae in the lakes, bacteria, yeast, fungi and other microbial life in the soils ), grazers (microscopic invertebrates called rotifers and tardigrades), with the top of the food chain consisting of tiny nematode worms. Curiously, there are no known predators in the Dry Valleys soils. These valleys constitute a Long-Range Ecological Research (LTER) study site and represent what scientists believe might be a model for life on Mars if it exists.

Lisa Strong on a hike with Canada Glacier behind her.

The origins of Seuss Glacier pouring through a mountain pass in the Dry Valleys.

Lisa and I went for a walk up the Taylor Valley to see whether we could uncover any evidence of life and saw little, except for a couple of long-dead seal mummies (why they traveled so far from the sea ice is anyone’s guess) and some algae-covered rocks and brown floating scum, looking for all the world like whipped chocolate mousse. We did see plenty of wind-scoured rocks and glaciers pouring through gaps in the surrounding mountains.

Bones and skin of a seal mummy that perished hundreds or thousands of years ago.

Biological scum on Lake Chad.

For easier walking, I tried to cross the moat between land and solid (white) lake ice. What I thought was thick ice wasn’t and I broke through up to my knees for my own version of the polar plunge. After changing into dry pants and socks, we continued on our walk but the only macroscopic life we saw was a lone skua winging up the valley.

Mary after breaking through lake ice.

I knew I needed to dig deeper, so I’ll turn to the LTER scientists studying the different parts of this ecosystem from the glaciers that feed life-giving water to the lakes and soils, to the ice-covered lake waters that support microbial life, to the soils that provide habitat to bacteria, yeast and fungi, and invertebrate creatures that make up “charasmatic megafauna” of the Dry Valleys. Look for upcoming video interviews with these LTER scientists.

Glaciologist Hassan Basagic of Portland State University explaining the dynamic of Canada Glacier to Lisa.

A little later in the flight, I took this short video of the Beardmore glacier, flowing through the snow covered mountains. The glacier was discovered by Ernest Shackleton in 1908 during his failed attempt to reach the pole. The mountains on either side of the Beardmore contain a treasure-trove of dinosaur fossils and was one of the earlier study sites for paleoecologist Allan Ashworth who uncovered fossils in ancient lake sediments there.

Icebergs are broken off pieces of glaciers and contain snow that fell 10 000’s of years ago. When you move close to one, what you see is several 100 feet tall and yet only 10% of its actual size and you come to understand not only how much ice there is here, but also how long it has been here.

Sea ice to the horizon.

The end of a glacier as it comes off the land. Here you see frozen ocean holding the edge of the glacier ice in place. This wall of ice is 200 feet high with 9 times that much under water. That’s a lot of ice!

This is also part of a land glacier which has moved off the land over the ocean. It is called an ice shelf because although it is still attached to the land portion of the glacier it is floating on water. This shelf is the size of France and a couple thousand feet thick. That’s a lot of ice!!!

Icebergs off the coast of Beaufort Island. What you see is several 100 feet high, and only 10% of its size. These are enormous pieces of glacier that broke off from the ice shelf above, floated around for a while and are now grounded. Much of the year the frozen ocean holds them in place.

There is a lot of ice in Antarctica.