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.

Temperatures climbed into the 30s and 40s (Fahrenheit) and the skies continued to clear, allowing us several long days of excellent flying. Tracking conditions had been poor because sunlight becomes quite flat with low overcast skies, making it difficult to see tracks. Clear skies and direct sunlight made tracks easier to see. However, after several days the warm temperatures began to melt out all tracks, making it difficult to distinguish fresh tracks from new tracks.

Following a trail of polar bear tracks on the sea ice. To find bears for capture, we fly low over good habitat – areas of sea ice with cracks and leads which allow seals to surface, making them vulnerable to predation – and look for bears or their sign. In good light conditions such as this photo, tracks are easy to see. These tracks belonged to an adult female with two cubs-of-the-year (COYs).

We captured several sows with cubs, and an adult female and an adult male that were most likely a breeding pair. As we have all season, we fitted some of these bears with GPS collars which periodically record time, date, location, ambient temperature, bear activity, and salt water immersion (as a record of swimming). This data is stored on the collar and it is transmitted to satellite twice per day, allowing us to track the bear in real-time. We will use these collars to locate bears for recapture in the fall. For the possibility that we may not be able to recapture some bears, the collars are programmed to release in November and fall off the animal.

An adult male bear, positioned on the pads used for BIA, with the mask and bag used for breath collection.

An adult female laying on her side with her cub against her chest.

During this last week, I thought about how brutal this environment would be for any living thing that was not prepared. The sea ice and tundra is a beautiful, intriguing area, and I really enjoy spending time here. However, I know I am out of place. For example, I usually carry some kind of emergency fire-starter while doing field work (thankfully, I have not used it). But here, there is almost nothing to burn – some driftwood pokes out of the snow along the coast, but there is nothing on the sea ice. I enjoy cold, snowy regions and I have spent a lot of time doing winter field work and skiing, and the Arctic is quite different than anywhere else I have been. The environment makes the cultures which have thrived up here all the more interesting.

Sea ice breakup continued. One day we flew about 140 miles northeast of Deadhorse to look for bears and on the return flight, we encountered a new lead of open water that looked to be over a mile wide – it had opened that afternoon. Our pilot calculated the ice in the area was moving about a third of a mile per hour.

We counted nearly 100 seals along a single crack in the ice; 10 are pictured here. They hauled out through the crack onto the sea ice to rest and breathe. Seals do not stray far from their holes; if a polar bear approaches they can quickly escape back into the water.

Our last flight day arrived quickly. We flew in the morning but did not find any bears, then returned to Deadhorse to begin packing up. For over a month, I had woken up every day prepared to fly and to work with polar bears and it was surprising how quickly everything changed. We broke down all of the lab equipment, packed it into crates, and cleaned the living space. Over three days our research team departed on the daily flights to Anchorage. I was the last to leave on Friday evening, turning down the heat in the living space, turning off the lights, and locking the doors behind me.

I landed in Anchorage for an overnight layover and it felt like stepping into a different world. The northern coast of Alaska is treeless and it was still coated with ice and snow, while Anchorage, on the south-central coast, seemed to be teeming with green trees and summer warmth. From Anchorage, I flew to Seattle then Denver, took a bus to Fort Collins, and finally got a ride to Laramie. I am glad to be home.

The sun will be above the horizon in Deadhorse until late July. One day last week we flew all day and had several captures. I finished my labwork at about 2am and I took this picture (without using a flash) of Deadhorse as I left the lab. This twilight is as dark as it got, and by mid-summer the skies will be bright through the night.

The “Welcome” sign at the general store in Deadhorse.

Deadhorse sits at the north end of the Dalton Highway, also called “the haul road.” From my understanding, this highway was built as a service road for the Trans-Alaskan Pipeline, which runs from the oilfields of Prudhoe Bay to Valdez where the oil is loaded onto ships. The Dalton Highway parallels the pipeline for much of its long, winding journey. The highway was opened to the public in the 1990s, although it is still mostly gravel and rough driving. The highway begins here in Deadhorse, where I drove past it today on my way to the general store.

North end of the Dalton Highway.

However, we would not be driving to Deadhorse – we have done all of traveling by plane. Alaska Airlines flies to Deadhorse from Anchorage and Fairbanks, and many oil companies have private flights for their workers. The surprising accessibility of Deadhorse – if you are willing to spend days in a capable vehicle or willing to buy an expensive plane ticket – must be due to its role in oil extraction in the Prudhoe Bay oil fields. The town itself feels like a giant construction site. All buildings sit on elevated gravel pads, about eight feet above the tundra. Trucks and heavy machinery are everywhere, and equipment is constantly rumbling.

More accurately, the town feels like a cross between a construction site and a lunar module. Everything is built to withstand the fierce winter weather, with windchills that can fall below -100 Fahrenheit. Most buildings seem to have been built for ease of transport and assembly – many buildings are actually a series of connected, insulated trailers.

Our research team was up here last August for our first season of polar bear captures. We caught almost 30 bears (this includes adults and cubs) for measurements. Some adult bears received a GPS satellite collar as well. We tracked these bears via satellite during September. We returned in October and recaptured as many of these bears as possible, to re-examine them and see how they had changed during the intervening 1-2 months. This spring we are beginning another capture season – our first day of captures, weather permitting, will be Monday, April 20th.

AGAP-SOUTH CAMP, ANTARCTICA– On January 6th, we sat around after dinner discussing how miraculous it was that nothing had gone wrong. This clearly was the cosmic queue for everything to go wrong in the next 27 hours.

First, the inverter blew. The inverter supplies power for the scientific equipment in the plane. Without it, the gravimeter has no blinking lights and collects no data. This flight holds the current record for the shortest flight out of AGAP-south. Beth Burton noticed the lack of power and quickly turned SJB around.

A KBA mechanic works on the left engine of SJB. The plane has been getting a lot of attention lately.

The very next flight, we lost the plane’s tip tanks. In addition to fuel stored near the belly of the plane, there are also gas tanks in the wings. These tip tanks add about 15 minutes of flying capability to any flight out of AGAP and were essential to meeting some of our distant science targets. It was particularly frightening that these pumps malfunctioned when we were considering flying the Recovery Lake lines, which require the use of the plane’s normal tank, the auxillary tank we installed back in McMurdo and the tip tanks.

Finally, in a third stroke of bad luck, we lost the onboard GPS. Without information from our Global Positioning System, we can collect data but we have no idea where we are along the survey line. We know the data represents the Earth… but where on Earth?

Thinking bad things come in 3’s might lead one to believe these would be the end of our troubles but the worst was yet to come. Next the “command center” of the radar system went out. It is as if you were using your home computer and suddenly, you could not see your hard drive anymore. You wouldn’t be able to save new documents, or play your favorite game. It is a situation best described by “Lights on but no one’s home”. Our science team discovered this problem just after I had gotten up for my “night shift” duties. Nick was able to replace the command center and we were still able to fly that day.

Later, in the radar processing, we saw strong vertical offset of the ice sheets internal layers and the bed that lies below. Nick and I set out to investigate this problem by examining an individual radar file from Flight 35, which seemed to be when the problem started. In the end, it turned out that after replacing the radar’s command center, the settings for channel 1 of the radar had been reset but the others (channel 2, 3 and 4) were not set correctly. This was a happy answer to the problem since it meant that we could rescue the data from flights 35-40 if we used channel 1. Not having worked as long or as hard on this project as either Nick, Michael or the PIs at times I feel like the hired help or the free loader who came along because she wanted to be in East Antarctic Field Camp with a population of 31. When I contributed to figuring out why the radar was malfunctioning, that increased my feeling of self worth. I had a moment in which I felt instrumental to ensuring the data quality… not just the making of copies.

A typical radar data product. The bright red line is the surface of mountains under the ice.

This is what the radar looked like after the radar’s command center broke. Fortunately we found the source of this problem and will later be able to recover this data.

Despite all the unfortunate events, the survey has gone well and, I have to say it has gone by fast. It’s hard to believe that we only need 4 more days of good weather to complete our science objectives. It’s hard to put your faith in good weather to make plans for going home but we don’t have much choice. Here’s hoping for clear skies!

A clear day at AGAP-South. This is just the kind of weather we need to complete the survey.

AGAP-SOUTH CAMP, ANTARCTICA– Once we began flying at AGAP, we quickly got into a routine of collecting data, downloading, archiving and running a quality control procedure. We are operating 24 hours a day in two teams. There is almost always someone at the computer copying or reviewing data. Though there have been days that have been flawless, our peak performance of 4 flights per days has been interrupted by weather, which was particularly bad around the New Year.

Life at AGAP revolves around the forecast… which is not always the actual weather. The weather determines if we’ll be allowed to get off the ground and which direction we can point our airplane, SJB. Assuming the weather cooperates, a day in the science tent follows a certain rhythm, paced by the arrival and departure of SJB.

The GAMSEIS science team posed for a group photo before departing AGAP-South.

The day begins with the rising of our day shift operators, Nick and Michael. They pop into the science tent eager to know how things went the night before. The flight plan for that morning has usually been selected a day or two in advance. On the morning of the flight, it is relayed to the pilots and our flight operator, the scientist who makes sure all our equipment is up and running before and during the flight.

Thirty minutes before we leave the ground, our base stations have to be on. Base stations collect a similar type of data as equipment on the plane, but are in a fixed position just outside our science tent. We have base stations for the GPS and magnetic data. The GPS base station is required so we know where the plane is relative to camp. The magnetic base station is needed to capture how the magnetic field is varying in time, while SJB’s onboard system captures how the magnetic field varies in space. The Earth’s magnetic field varies in time in part because of currents in the liquid part of the core of the Earth (i.e. the liquid outer core). The magnetic field varies in space because of different rock types under the ice. By collecting data at the base station and onboard SJB, we are able to separate the changes in time, which we are not studying, from the changes in space which relate to the rocks we see on the radar lines.

Pondering GPS data in the Science Tent.

While SJB is in the air, we are in the office making copies of the data. This is particularly time consuming for the radar data because of its volume. Copying the radar drives takes so long that we have one computer and one person, Chris, designated to the task. After the radar copy is complete, a sampling of the data is plotted and reviewed. Meanwhile, similar procedures are executed on the magnetic, GPS and laser data from the previous night’s flight. Although not an exciting aspect of the work, the QC (quality control) step is essential. It is during this step we identify survey lines that might need to be reflown and also get a sense of how well our system is working.

Working in the science tent again… This actually a different day! Note the eery similarities.

When the plane returns, it is greeted by a flurry of activity. The camp staff are ready to refuel, Chris or Nick will take blank hard drives out to the airplane and swap them for the ones containing the radar data for the flight, Stefan and Dan check on the status of the gravimeter. The flight operator brings in written logs and data on memory cards to archive and copy. The plane only sits unattended in between the day and night shift, while the whole camp is having dinner or on bad weather days.

The pace of the survey makes the days go by quickly. I keep forgetting that the GAMSEIS team is done with their work and gone already! I still expect them to come back from an installation and be sitting in the galley at dinner. With 4 flights a day, we are just barely keeping up with the in-flux of data, which is good because you need something to do in this place or you’ll feel trapped. Fortunately, I never feel trapped when surrounded by science!

A sun dog over our camp.

So at the end and after another set of long Skidoo rides to prep the GPS stations for next winter and pick up the passive seismometers, the Basler came and picked us and our gear up and whisked us off to McMurdo. And after a few days of returning equipment and shipping other equipment home, we left for Christchurch, which is where I am writing this update.

Now that the Antarctica portion of the journey is over, you would think that the drama and excitement is over. However, with science, that’s not the case! Because our instrumentation is so sensitive, and we have collected so much data, it is often hard to know immediately what your data will yield – that’s why we have the rest of the year to toil in front of a computer screen! Our group is just now on the verge of making our little discoveries, because all the data must now be processed and interpreted, which is the fun part! It’s the scientific intrigue that brings people by the hundreds down South and the discoveries that come from that which makes all the bodily abuse worth it. The Antarctic continent has infinite mysteries still left to discover and we can only chip away at them one long and brutal field season at a time.

Professor Slawek Tulaczyk examines the data while still in camp.

We spent the first week or so in the deep field visiting GPS stations that were left out on the ice over-winter and setting out passive seismometers. Whillans Ice Stream behaves in a unique way – it slips twice a day in episodes that are linked to the tidal cycle. The passive seismometers record this slip, because it is a rupture similar to an earthquake, but much slower.

Here I’ve dug a hole and then placed a passive seismometer in the hole. I am roped in due to crevasses in the area.

To get to all of our sites, we used Ski-doos with sledges attached to the rear with all our science and safety gear attached. During setup, at the beginning of the season, and takedown, at the end, Slawek and I would go on rides covering over 150 km and lasting 9-10 hours. It is hard not to hesitate getting on the Skidoos in the morning, when the temperature is at 20 degrees below zero Celsius and there is already a 20 knot wind blowing, knowing you will be going 30 mph sometimes directly into it!

Our Ski-doos with sledges attached to the rear with all our science and safety gear attached.

Because our bodies have to generate all this heat, it is important to stay well-fed and healthy out on the ice. One of the breakfast favorites was frozen eggs. In the video, you see a block of eggs sizzling on the pan. In order to break off a chunk from the main supply, a hacksaw and hammer/chisel are required.

Click below to hear more about it.

Deverall Island, the southernmost island in the world. It is located at the western margin of the Transantarctic Mountains on the Ross Sea Ice Shelf.

The frame that holds all the electronics, weather stations, satellite modems to transfer data, and the solar panels and batteries used for powering the system continuously throughout the year.

The ski-equipped de Havilland Twin Otter aircraft that is used to transport science teams to field sites in Antarctica.

The Ferrar Glacier in the Transantarctic Mountains.

This is going to be a completely new Antarctic experience for me. My previous work in the Dry Valleys was remote in the sense that we were not at the research station, but we were always less than a 45-minute helicopter flight from resources. Tango 1 is truly going to be a deep field experience. I am very much looking forward to being there, and excited to be on the advance team…I mean isn’t this one of the reasons I got into geology in the first place?

From our camp we will have two Twin Otter aircraft, a 20-passenger STOL (Short Takeoff and Landing) utility aircraft developed by de Havilland Canada, operating to facilitate the installations of three high precision GPS systems and seismometers.

Location of POLENET’s Tango 1 deep field camp.

Tango 1 camp, located at 86° 21′ S, 136° 57′ W, is approximately 220 miles from the South Pole. However, not only is this deep field experience different from the field sites I am used to in Antarctica, so is the altitude. Tango camp sits around 8500 feet in elevation. The elevation and latitude will make it cold and harder to work. This will be the highest elevation I have ever worked at and with that come its own set of unique considerations.

The Transantarctic Mountains.

Physio altitude is a term that describes what altitude your body feels like it is at. The barometric pressure does not affect the saturation of oxygen in the air (oxygen is consistently about 20% of the atmosphere around you) and neither does altitude for the matter, but altitude does change the density of that oxygen. As you go higher in elevation the same amount of space contains less oxygen. The lower the barometric pressure that oxygen gets less is that same space making it harder to breathe in the needed amount of oxygen. Antarctica is notoriously known for it’s low-pressure weather systems. As these low-pressure systems pass over you it will quickly change the altitude in which body thinks it at. Tango 1 camp at 8500 feet the physio altitude can change to make your body feel thousands of feet higher.

I will not have an Internet connection from Tango 1 camp but I will have a satellite phone in which I plan to keep you updated.