By Lora Koenig
I am feeling a little sad as I write this post. I always do when writing the last post of a research season. Being able to share my science is one of my favorite parts of my job. I assume some of you looked at our blog’s photos and thought “they’re crazy,” while others started planning how they too could get to Antarctica. Either way, I hope you have found this blog interesting, entertaining and inspiring and that you learned a bit about how we measure snow accumulation in Antarctica.
For some quick updates: Jessica, Randy, and Clem are back home in Utah, Michelle is on her way back to Copenhagen, and Ludo and I are back at Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland. Our radar gear has already arrived from Antarctica and has been packed away in the lab to wait for another season. Our ice cores made their way from WAIS Divide Camp to McMurdo a few weeks ago but it is uncertain if they will make it back to the U.S. this year: There has been a problem with the ship going to McMurdo, which just passed an inspection in New Zealand and is now making its way to Antarctica. We are hopeful that the cores will make it on the ship northbound but have been told not to expect it. Just another example of the logistical difficulties of working in Antarctica! If the cores do not return this year, it will not affect the science, just our patience. The cores will stay in a freezer until the next ship comes in February 2013. But we’re keeping our fingers crossed that our cores are loaded on this year’s ship.
My next field season, and therefore field blog, is not set right now but please continue to follow online the work that my colleagues and I do at our lab’s website, on Twitter, and through the NASA Visualization Explorer app for the iPad. Results from this research will be posted through those outlets.
Also, the complete collection of our expedition’s blog posts is here.
Until next time, stay warm!
By Ludovic Brucker
The only wildlife we saw during our three-week traverse was three snow petrels and one Antarctic petrel. I still haven’t decided if they were sort of a Christmas gift, or the announcement of a storm!
The birds visited us when we were at camp 5,430 km (265 mi) inland. I was surprised to see them so far away from the coast and once I was back at McMurdo, I looked for a bird specialist on base and found Dr. David Ainley, who gave me some info about the birds that I want to share with you.
Snow petrels are all white except for their black eyes, eyelashes and feet/legs.
The Antarctic petrel is mostly black though white below and with white trailing edges to wings, it has pink legs and black feet. Unfortunately, we didn’t have the time to take pictures of this bird, so we simply enjoyed watching it.
These two species are seabirds. They never leave the Antarctic (that is, they never fly north of the Antarctic Polar Front) and spend most of their lives at sea, mainly associated with sea ice. Adults spend about four months of the year nesting. They build their nest in cavities in the slopes of inland nunataks (exposed rocks in ice fields or glaciers) and mountaintops. Most of these birds’ breeding areas are still unknown to the scientists studying them, though they are known to nest in the Fosdick and Ford ranges in Marie Byrd Land.
About six million Antarctic petrels (30 percent of its total population, according to at-sea surveys) and one million snow petrels (their total population is unknown) feed during summer in the Ross Sea: that is why there’s a push to designate the Ross Sea a marine protected area. Furthermore, according to Dr. Ainley, the Ross Sea also hosts 38 percent of the world’s adelie penguins, and 26 percent of its emperor penguins. You can read about the efforts to preserve the Ross Sea here.
Our traverse was on Mary Byrd land, where, as I mentioned above, many petrels breed. So the birds we were lucky to see weren’t lost, as I had initially thought, but flying from or returning to their nests.
By Ludovic Brucker
Once the traverse was over and we had drilled nine snow cores (with a combined length of 156 meters, or 512 ft), the next step was flying to each of our drilling sites and bringing the cores to the West Antarctic Ice Sheet (WAIS) station to store them before they are shipped (hopefully soon!) to McMurdo and then to Bringham Young University for our analyses.
Three days before we completed our traverse, Michelle initiated talks with the flight schedule team to coordinate pickup dates for the ice cores. Usually, there are three planes operating from Byrd Station: two Twin Otters and a Basler. However, during the weeks following our traverse, there was only one Twin Otter available and it had to be shared with other scientific missions. In the end, the flight schedule team decided to assign us a flight on December 30th .
However, on the 28th, the morning following our arrival to Byrd, the Twin Otter pilots’ weather check at 7 AM revealed that it was impossible to fly another scientific mission planned for that day due to possible fog. They decided they would check the weather forecast again at 10 AM and probably fly our mission instead.
Meanwhile, Randy and Jess were reading in their tents, Clem was somewhere, looking for his brand clean pair of socks, Michelle and I were shoveling snow… yes, it seemed like we weren’t able to stop shoveling even after the traverse was over. Suddenly, Tony, the Byrd Camp supervisor, informed us that the pilots were going to perform our mission in the following half hour! This was excellent news.
The half hour gave us some time to drive 3 kilometers (1.86 miles) out of Byrd to dig out the first 18 core segments (each one of them about one meter, or 3.3 feet, in length) we had drilled three weeks before. Randy and I jumped on a snowmobile and headed there, while Michelle and Clement attached a sled to their snowmobiles to bring the cores to the plane, and joined us a few minutes later. We had to drive very slowly to make sure the cores didn’t get damaged during the ride.
As I mentioned, the plane that was going to help us was a Twin Otter, which is smaller than the Basler that flew our cache with Lora the day after we started the traverse. Due to its smaller size, we would not be able to collect the 18 boxes and five fuel drums at the same time. We would have to fly first to three sites, fly back to WAIS station to deliver the cores (just on time for lunch!) and then fly to the three remaining sites, heading back to WAIS at around 4 PM.
Using our site GPS location coordinates, it was extremely easy to find the orange fuel drums that marked the sites, and then locate the buried snow core boxes.
At each site, the pilot flew over the place one to four times before landing, to determine the best landing spot. That gave us a chance to enjoy our itinerary and former camps from above!
Once on the ground, the plane taxied until it got right next to our cargo, which made it super easy to carry the core boxes and drums inside. Once the plane stopped, it was our turn to work. And by work I mean shoveling snow! By then, I was beginning to consider shoveling to be more of a hobby than work. We had to carefully dig out the snow core boxes and bring them and the fuel drum inside the plane as quick as possible. It was a great day, and I believe we were pretty efficient; it never took us more than 20 minutes between landing and take off.
Because we were in an open field, the pilots had to taxi back and forth on its own tracks a couple of times, to compact and smooth the surface before taking off. Once the pilot and co-pilot were satisfied with the consistency of the snow beneath, they would push the accelerator.
Between each site, we flew at low elevation (100 m). It was incredible to see some of our traverse legs from above, and even though we had encountered some pretty breezy days during the previous weeks, it was still possible to see our snowmobile tracks in some places.
After visiting three sites, it was time to fly back to WAIS Station. The plane was full, and heavy! This last take off seemed longer (much longer) than the previous ones… and definitively bumpier too.
After about 20 minutes in the air, we saw WAIS Station appear on the horizon.
It was a strange feeling, to see a man-made structure appear in the middle of nowhere. It reminded me of the way I felt while, during the traverse, we were looking for our cache, and suddenly there it was, sitting in a great white vastness.
Five WAIS staff people were already on the ice waiting for us, or, more probably, they were waiting for the core boxes to bring them quickly into the freezer.
After a good lunch at WAIS, we continued our ice core picking. By 4 PM, all cores were stored in the WAIS freezer. After then, the 2011 SEAT field work was truly completed. We had stayed safe, we hadn’t broken anything (or at least nothing vital than couldn’t be fixed), and we had had a fantastic life experience that will also help us better understand snow accumulation over West Antarctica!
Fair warning: Keep in mind that the ice cores still had a long way to go before reaching their final destination, the freezers at Bringham Young University!
By Michelle Koutnik
Now for a recap of our adventure! We arrived in Christchurch on November 19 and returned there on January 5. We spent 17 days in McMurdo before leaving to Byrd camp on December 7. It took only a few days to prepare for the traverse and we left Byrd camp on December 10.
The traverse lasted 18 days, with the longest time spent at camps 4 and 5 due to the storm delays. Otherwise, we moved fast! We spent an extra day at camp 3 to drill a second ice core, but by the end of the trip we were such fast drillers that we were able to drill two cores in one day at camp 6. We drilled ice cores at nine different sites (including Byrd Station), dug and sampled 6 snow pits, and collected more than 500 km (310 mi) of radar data.
Back at Byrd, we broke down our gear and with the help of the Byrd cargo handler we had it all packed on palettes in one day. Ludo and Jessica went by Twin Otter to pick up the ice cores on the day after we returned to Byrd so that soon after the traverse ended we were finished with almost all our work! In 18 days we finished all of our science, but to achieve these goals it took near seven weeks of travel and preparation – it is not easy to do work in Antarctica!
After the traverse was finished, we could not get a flight out of Byrd Camp back to McMurdo station for a few days so we enjoyed our time with the Byrd Camp crew and rang in the new year with a gorgeous dinner and dancing with the whole camp. Then we had a fast two-day turnaround from McMurdo to Christchurch. We all worked to clean and return all the gear we used in the field and ship all of the science equipment back to the U.S. It was very satisfying to complete all of our goals and finish on time despite weather and flight delays during the season. Great work, team!!
By Bob Bindschadler
Christchurch (New Zealand), 18 January — This will be my last entry in this season’s blog. I had hoped to tell a different tale the past two months —one of successful science being done in a harsh, remote place by hardy individuals dedicated to getting information that had direct relevance to your lives and the lives of others you know and will never know. But the field season unfolded in a vastly different way. I have prepared an outbrief for the National Science Foundation that speaks to the good and the bad, what went right and what went wrong, and how to use what was learned this season to improve our chances for success next season. That document is the official record and won’t be shared here, yet it contains no surprises from what you have read.
For this blog, I want to be more reflective and to emphasize those more personal aspects of Antarctic field work. It takes a lot of people working together to undertake a project as ambitious and as challenging as this one. This season, a lot of us involved in various aspects of this enterprise came together and grew to know each other a lot better. We did not always see things the same way, but I think just about everyone came away with a greater appreciation for what the project is all about and what talents each player has contributed to the greater enterprise. This was most apparent at PIG Main Camp where the great distance from McMurdo provided a clarity of purpose that often gets muddled in McMurdo. Following our limited success in the final days, I was impressed with how the Main Camp staff shared their congratulations with us. That success made their efforts at camp worthwhile. Our assistance in many of their camp chores showed them that we appreciated their efforts. That is the magic of a deep field camp. Even the Twin Otter pilots, who only dropped in for two days, felt good because we accomplished some objectives together.
I regret that the helicopters never came. I have little doubt the same camp magic would have occurred there, too. I question whether managers of the individual U.S. Antarctic Program components, who spend no time in the deep field, really understand how the deep field camps actually operate. There is a bonding motivated by the Antarctic environment that is much stronger in the deep field than in the more “civilized” McMurdo. Even large, multi-project camps can sometimes be absent of this mystic, but PIG is not of that ilk. You do not resent the person who has helped you set your tent, who you have helped shovel out a fuel bladder, who has watched you to make sure your nose is not frostbitten, and whose sled you have helped pull. The shared experiences bring people together and make for one. Every one of the camp staff expressed their hope to be chosen to come back next season.
As will we. We will succeed. Despite the limited scientific accomplishments this season, we are better positioned (with all the camp material, most of the scientific equipment and scads of fuel already at PIG Main Camp to spend the frigid winter) and logistically wiser to design a better field effort for 2012-13. We have to—it will be our last chance for this project. We’ll use satellite imagery to give us an early look next October. In November, Twin Otters will be used to assess the surface character of the ice shelf and to deliver a skeleton crew allowing us access to the wintered cargo, the fuel and to start on-site weather observations. By December, before the main camp even gets set up, the drilling team will arrive and will be transferred to the ice shelf with the drilling equipment by those same Twin Otters. Building the Main Camp and transferring the helos out will come later, much later if need be. Fewer Herc flights, earlier traverses and more Twin Otter time is a much more palatable recipe.
It saddens me to think that even today we should be working out of PIG Main Camp, making day trips to collect radar and seismic information on the shape of the ocean cavity beneath the ice shelf. Instead, our field team has disbanded. We flew to Christchurch together on Monday, but now we are scattering across the globe on various commercial airline flights. I’ve received word that the second traverse has arrived at PIG and this week there should be the final two flights pulling out the camp staff after they have put all the wintering cargo up on high snow berms. A recent satellite image taken last week shows the camp and the AWS webcam is still keeping watch from the ground. It looks like another beautiful day there.
I’m not exactly sure how to end this blog. I hoped you’ve enjoyed the story. I suppose I could just say that we now reenter the planning phase. There is yet more pressure on us now because we have one more shot to get it right. I think we will, but as always, the big unknown is what Antarctica has in store for us next time.
