Returning from Cape Barne. You can see Mt. Erebus in the background (right) and Tent Island.
We’ve had a busy couple of days getting geared up to start some field work. On Monday we took a long trip out on the sea ice with Dan, a New Zealander who works for the USAP and has long experience with the sea ice in McMurdo Sound. Two years ago Dan was involved with a New Zealand research program out of nearby Scott Base that conducted an extremely challenging series of sea ice observations throughout the winter, something that had never been done before (almost all science programs shut down for the winter in Antarctica). It was slow going, we were moving over sea ice that hadn’t been traveled on yet this season which meant lots of scouting and drilling to make sure the ice was thick enough. We made it to Cape Barne, just a few kilometers south of Cape Royds, which is traveling pretty far from McMurdo for this time of year. From where we stopped we could just make out the ice edge where we will be conducting most of our work in the weeks ahead.
Without hunting and land predators Antarctic seals are a pretty docile bunch. Rules state that they can be approached so long as they don't react. This one decided to take a look at us, so time to back off...
Most of the ice surface looks like a desert, flat and devoid of any obvious life (in contrast to the marine waters underneath). When we get close to any crack in the ice however, we are likely to find some seals lying about. One of the most amazing things about the wildlife in Antarctica is the lack of any response to approaching humans. These seals aren’t hunted and there are no land predators to threaten them. On the ice they are quite relaxed and easy to approach. The rules for interacting with wildlife in Antarctica allow you to approach so long as the animal isn’t responding to your presence.
Shelly clears snow off the ice so we can take some ice cores. The long red tube that I'm holding is our soon to malfunction corer. On a successful day we fill the blue barrels with ice for transport back to our lab at McMurdo. Tent Island can be seen in the background.
We were back out today with Jen to conduct our first sampling and give our gear a shakedown. Jen is another USAP guide with a lot of sea ice experience. The first sampling effort of a field campaign never goes well, and this was no exception! The motor to power our coring equipment wouldn’t start, and our backup motor was missing critical pieces. More importantly we had been issued a beautiful, brand-new sea ice corer to use with these motors, but an essential piece of the corer was packed in factory-grease and totally unusable in the cold! After several hours of struggling with gear we called it quits and headed back to McMurdo. Just a couple of kilometers from the station the wind came up so strong that we could only identify our outgoing tracks on foot. So Shelly and I bundled up, and with Jen driving behind us we were able to (with only a couple errors) retrace our steps. We made it back just in time to switch out our inoperable gear for a fresh effort tomorrow, if the weather is better!
Hey Jeff, thanks for the awesome blog! A life full of sacrifice in the name of science! Fun to read as we roast in the finally-arrived summer heat.