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.

During the first few weeks, we had to drive out to Cape Royds from McMurdo on snowmobiles every few days. This was because the folks at McMurdo were way backed up in being able to install solar power at our camp. Thus, we couldn’t set up a permanent camp. It’s a 35 km trip from McMurdo, taking about 40 minutes. We had to drive out in order to look for banded penguins, whether they laid eggs, and to change the batteries in the time-lapse cameras. Here we are on one of the trips; for safety two snowmobiles were required…we took along people from McMurdo so that they could get a chance to see Antarctica:

It is a 40 min drive from McMurdo Station to Cape Royds on snow machines. Here we take a break to watch the plume on Mt Erebus, the only active volcano in Antarctica.

The reason the penguins arrived early, is that with a lack of wind during the winter (that’s true, it wasn’t very windy), the large-scale extent of sea ice in this portion of the Southern Ocean was much less than usual. The penguins winter at the pack ice edge, so with the edge much closer to Ross Island, they had a much shorter, maybe 1000 km less, trip to make.

The situation with the ice patterns involves the wind rather than temperatures. The temperatures are cold, regardless. When the winds blow off the continent in the winter the ice is blown farther and farther northward (away from the continent) leaving open water at the coast which allows more ice to be formed, which then gets blown north and the cycle goes on continuously (in most winters-springs). It’s like a conveyor belt. Winters with continuous winds, which is the usual, create pack ice a long way from the land sometimes as far as 2000 km. This last winter the winds were not strong or persistent and not as much ice was blown away from the continent. Thus, the penguins were not very far away when the sun rose and they began their southward journey. Not having as much distance to cover during spring migration, they arrived earlier than usual.

Once the first penguins arrived, the ‘flood’ began. Throughout the following few weeks, birds continued to come ashore, build their nests, find their mates and on Nov 5th we saw the first egg.

The first egg of the 2008-09 Adélie Penguin breeding season at Cape Royds, a bit early this year Nov 5.

Here’s a graph of penguin counts from the PenguinCam, comparing this year with last (the spaces between counts were days when it was too windy or snowy to get a clear image…many more of these windy days in 2007):

Arrival of Adélie Penguins at Cape Royds, based on photos from the Penguin Cam.

The window of successful laying at Cape Royds is short. If the eggs are not laid by about now (24 Nov), it is unlikely that parents can be successful. That’s because the winter comes early! A major factor that will contribute to the success rate of this year’s colony is the distance the birds will have to walk to find open water and food. After the female lays her eggs, she leaves the male in charge of the nest and returns to the sea to forage. This year, because of the lack of wind, a very extensive continuous sheet of ‘fast ice’ was able to form. Normally, wind would have blown new ice away, but the wind didn’t happen, so the ice sat in place and got so thick that whatever the strength of the later wind, it was not strong enough to budge the ice. It was locked fast in place by various points of land (kind of like a jig-saw puzzle). Now it is a long way from Cape Royds to the ocean and food, 70 km. This means two days of just walking, one way. Many females may decide not to return to relieve their mates, or will return a few days too late. The males will not sacrifice themselves for the sake of the egg, the drive to satisfy their growing hunger outweighing the inclination to raise progeny, and if the females do not return they will abandon the eggs. Only time will give us the answer to this one, but it is likely that the ice will remain in place until January, when the icebreaker arrives.

Here is an image taken by a NASA satellite a few days ago. It shows where Royds is located, and where the edge of the fast ice occurs (out by Beaufort Island). So, the penguins at Royds have to add 4 days to a foraging trip, 2 for walking out and 2 for walking back. Added to that are the days needed to catch food and replace fat reserves, i.e. several days. Four days of walking is a long time when you are hungry.

Satellite image of ice conditions in the Ross Sea area.

That is the scenario we prepared for in our Snowcraft II course or Crevasse Rescue course. Crevasses occur in actively moving ice when the ice is stretched and because the ice in Antarctica is extremely thick, crevasses can be hundreds of feet deep. When our team is out in field, we plan our snowmobile travel to avoid crevasses, but it is always smart to be prepared for any accidents that may happen.

A crevasse near McMurdo Station.

We began the day by getting fitted for harnesses and practicing knot tying and general concepts in setting up a crevasse rescue. We learned that by using a system of pulleys and prussiks (which is a special kind of knot used to grip climbing rope), one person does not have to be very strong to lift someone out of a crevasse.

Mountaineer instructor Danny Uhlmann shows the team how to properly set a snow anchor, one of the first steps in initiating a crevasse rescue. The Under the Glaciers team consists of University of California Santa Cruz Professor Slawek Tulaczyk, University of California Santa Cruz graduate student Jake Walter, University of Chicago undergraduate student Saffia Hossainzadeh, and Northumbria University Professor John Woodward.

After lunch, we drove out to the “crevasse simulator, ” which is a pit that has been dug into the snow on the Ross Ice Shelf, near the site of our Snowcraft I course or more fondly known as Happy Camper School, which we completed earlier in the week. Here, we practiced some of the techniques, we learned indoors, including that you can anchor someone using snow! We got the chance to apply them outside and everyone got lots of practice running through scenarios with our instructor, Danny Uhlmann.

To highlight the importance of these trainings, our camp is so remote and far away from any established bases, it could take a search and rescue team multiple days to reach us in the event of an accident. So we have to be self-sufficient and it is our hope that we will never have to use any of the techniques that we learned in this course. When you come down to the ice, you realize that scientists from all fields and the people who support them here risk their lives daily in Antarctica, in order to pursue their studies of this place, the last continent.