Journal Entries

2004-05

 

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Click here to access journal entries by Marianne Kaput or Giancarlo Lopez-Martinez.

January 19, 2005:

This morning I get to have fun playing with the digital microscope camera, which is great for getting good clear shots of Belgica, Alaskazetes (mites), Ixodes (ticks) and the Collembolae (primitive insects) we've been seeing — provided I ice them first. With the lights pointed at them they heat up fast, and before long they're running around like a sped-up video and all the pictures are blurry. But I get the hang of it, and get enough pictures to make a new page for the website, a bestiary (list of animals) of the critters we find on land around here.

The staff here has been really amazing. They've made sure all along that we have whatever we need to do our work, even bringing down little speakers so we can listen to music while we do some of the tedious work like picking larvae out of the mud. We've found all the miscellaneous lab equipment we needed in the storage containers, including squirt bottles, glassware, tubing, spare parts to build aspirators. And of course there's the three makeshift Berlese funnels that they basically custom-built for us. The point is, this is the best research support I've ever seen, and these folks deserve a big thank you for it.

As I type, I can see another leopard seal sleeping on a floating chunk of ice. The interesting thing this time is that there are maybe 8 Adélie penguins waddling around on a chunk right next to it, completely ignoring the fact that they're in easy grabbing range of what is basically a penguin-killing machine. It occurs to me that maybe seals get away with being so lazy because penguins aren't very smart.

In the afternoon I make a trip out to T5 — a small building up the hill a bit from the station. T5 is the domain of Johan, whom I've met already and has volunteered to give some of us a little talk about what he does. Johan is in charge of keeping track of several different research projects at once, mostly monitoring the earth and its atmosphere and involving heavy instrumentation. The data from these projects is sent right to the appropriate investigators in the US. Johan is a remarkably good teacher, and goes as deeply into the science as we want him to without confusing us at all. The projects include:

A fairly old system of trapping and analyzing air particles for radioactivity — basically a fallout meter that tells us if there have been any nuclear explosions or other events. This, like most of the other equipment here, is part of a worldwide network of many similar instruments, all sending their data to the same place to be analyzed.

A machine that monitors the levels of ultraviolet (UV) radiation coming from the sun. This instrument helps us keep track of the hole in the ozone layer caused by ozone-damaging pollutants called CFCs (chlorofluorocarbons). This hole lets more potentially harmful UV rays strike the earth, and it opens every winter and closes every summer. This is because of something called the polar vortex, a circular air current that keeps a lot of air here in the winter but lets it disperse in the summer. Also, apparently the hole has an oblong shape that sort of wobbles, so that different parts of Antarctica are exposed to the increased UV radiation at different times. This year, the hole was open for a shorter duration than it has been in recent years. This could be a fluke, or it could (we hope) be a sign that the hole is shrinking and has begun to go away.

A very sensitive seismograph, on which it was apparently possible to see the quake that caused the tsunami disaster. Johann elaborates on how waves travel through and around the earth, which is really interesting from him but would probably bore the heck out of you if I described it in detail.

A VLF (very low frequency) antenna that is one of the coolest things I've ever seen. It has its own little hut, and if you go in and Johann turns up the volume, you hear this loud continuous static-sounding roar. As you listen, the sounds separate a bit, and you can pick up some individual bursts when it slows down a little. What you're hearing is, get this, every single lightning strike on the planet. Plus the occasional burst of encoded submarine communication, and some other stuff even Johan can’t identify.

Finally, there is a GPS system that is much more accurate than the handheld ones, and is actually used to help calibrate the GPS satellites, among other things — it is accurate down to a few centimeters, instead of the few meters accuracy you get with the handhelds. I have a lot of fun learning from Johan, and there are still some projects that I haven't seen yet, so I plan to go back

It’s Wednesday, and so time for the weekly science lecture. This time it’s Heidi, part of the group we call “the birders” — they're studying Adélie penguins, brown skuas and giant petrels (“Jeeps” for short. Get it? G.P.?) I learn a lot — Adélie populations are declining rather quickly here, and the center of the population is shifting further south in response, they think, to warming. There are 2 likely reasons for this: first, penguins feed on krill (small ocean crustaceans), and Antarctic krill depend on floating sea ice, under which they breed and raise their young. The total amount of sea ice has decreased in response to warming, so — less krill. Secondly and probably more importantly, warming has increased annual snowfall in Antarctica (the short version is that warmer air holds more moisture, which precipitates as more snow). When Adélies lay their eggs on bare ground, they are not expecting to get blanketed by a meter or more of snow, but that happens quite a bit these days. The parents are fine, but when the snow melts, it immerses and kills the eggs, which need air contact to carry out gas exchange. Gentoo and chinstrap penguins, by contrast, which never used to hang out this far down the Peninsula, appear to be thriving, and could end up replacing Adélies here if the trend continues.

- Luke Sandro

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January 20, 2005:

Science-wise, Scott has decided he should do some work on analyzing larval lipid content (to see if they're changing their cell membrane composition to help them survive heat or cold), which he'll do back in England, but for which he will need more larvae. So we head out to Torgie, where we've found the best density of critters, and fill up some more Ziplocs. Also, these larvae are a deep purple color, and we realize pretty quickly after we mash a few up that the pigment is in their hemolymph (blood) rather than in their exoskeleton. There's a possibility that this is an adaptation to block UV radiation, so Joe's going to use a spectrophotometer (device used to find which wavelengths of light a sample absorbs) and see if we can find anything out.

We climb the glacier in the evening, and Joe and I throw a Frisbee at the top, which gets difficult when the wind picks up.

- Luke Sandro

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January 21, 2005:

Another breakthrough today. Dave's experiments on Belgica larvae appear to show that they are able to do something called rapid cold-hardening (RCH). This is pretty much the same thing as thermoprotection, which the adults are able to do, except with cold temperatures. So if you put the larvae at -10°C for an hour they die, but if you put them at -5°C for an hour and then at -10°C, they're fine. This is great news, and fits with what we've seen of their environment — adults don't really have to deal with much low temperature for the brief time they're out, so they don't cold-harden, but the surfaces they walk on (moss, rocks) can really heat up in the sun, so they thermoprotect very effectively. The larvae stay buried in mud under rocks most of the time, so don't have to deal with high temperatures much. Therefore, they don't thermoprotect, but they do overwinter (albeit under the snow, in the subnivean [under the snow] air space where they are fairly insulated from the really extreme cold) and so it makes sense that they can do RCH.

- Luke Sandro

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January 22, 2005:

We have refined our pickin' methods now that we have the fine, clayish, larvae-packed mud from Torgie to work with — each of us does it a little differently, but I'm having good luck with the swirling-and-pouring technique that Rick has devised to get rid of the fine particulate, in combination with a three-level sieve that gets the big chunks out. After that it is relatively easy to get the larvae crawling around in the sandy stuff, after which we do a few transfers from container to container to really get the grit out. It takes a while, and now that Scott is doing lipid work we have a lot to pick. We listen to a lot of Johnny Cash while we work, and Scott confides to us that these days he can't hear Johnny Cash without thinking about larvae. I've been having dreams about them. At dinner I start to see things squirming in Joe's beans, which look a bit like the mud we're picking from. We need to go back out in the field, and soon.

Saturday evening is fun — we have a champagne toast and celebration because Jeff has proposed to Cindy, and they are now officially engaged. Both are scientists studying the seabirds around here.

- Luke Sandro

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January 23, 2005:

I spend the morning in the lab taking osmolality readings.

The number of sleeping leopard seals floating around on chunks of ice is high today (maybe that should be part of the local weather report), and in the evening one floats really close to one part of the shore, which is a good photo opportunity. It actually yawns, and you can see its very sharp-looking teeth.

 

- Luke Sandro

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January 24, 2005:

Today we get back out in the field, and head to Torgie to see if any adult Belgica have come out there yet. On our way, we finally see a leopard seal in the water, active. It circles the boat, checking us out, for about 15 minutes — this is actually a fairly scary animal — they've been known to bite through Zodiacs when messed with, but we are very careful.

Lots of cool photos, then on to Torgie — where somehow we can't find any larvae. Weird. We have fun anyway.

My backyard dehydration of the Torgie soil and larvae is going slowly — this mud really hangs onto its water — maybe that's why the larvae are so thick there.

Grilled T-bone steaks for dinner — we're calling it the "gain a pound a day" diet. Everything is just so good. The rest of the day is good but fairly uneventful.

 

- Luke Sandro

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January 25, 2005:

In the afternoon we travel to Stepping Stones and Cormorant Island to look for adult Belgica. We’ve been to Stepping Stones before, but Cormorant is absolutely beautiful — big jagged cliffs with bright orange lichens and bright red iron deposits all over them.

There is more different vegetation and lichens here than we’ve seen so far — and of course, nesting blue-eyed shag cormorants all over the place. These are graceful, very beautiful birds.

We also see one of the only two types of flowering plant that exist on Antarctica, and it is in bloom. It’s a cushion plant called Colobanthus — it kind of looks like a moss with little green flowers, and is very pretty.

Back home in time for dinner — a full-on Thanksgiving feast. Also, Scott gives us the news that the larvae that have been dehydrating for a week at 98.2% humidity have "turned the corner", meaning they have lost over 50% of their water, and are now beginning to actually reabsorb some moisture from the air, probably by changing the number of solutes dissolved in their blood. Yet another cool, successful result. We really have an amazing amount of data, and seem to be finding out new things every day.

- Luke Sandro

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