LAKE SURVEY

Part of our job as the "stream team" to survey the Lakes.....



...even when it's COLD....
( i am wearing Little Red AND BIG Red!)










.....Notice the RED nose.....

WEATHER

Antarctica
is certainly a continent

of EXTREMES......

Extreme Beauty....











.......Extreme Cold

The first of the YEAR brought a cold snap with 30-80knott winds that disabled all communications...for days! Temperatures in my tent dropped to 10F....cold.

The streams froze ......And the sky was grey....
But like Colorado.... the sun has emerged again (it is SUMMER after all!)
And we are back in business.......more work to follow.......

NEW YEAR

A New YEAR ...and a NEW Helicopter:

We received transport from our friends, the KIWIS,
in their new, pumped up helicopter
(they call it the Porsche of the Astars...)
I like to call it the: BLUE TIGER!

The BLUE TIGER takes us to the Wright Valley
...and the Onyx River......
Over what is called: Gargoyle Ridge:

One of the most exciting flights of my life.....

Project WISSARD-- Life under the ice

Prof anxious to return to Antarctica for scientific mission

Priscu Research Group
John Priscu, second from right, is one of three leaders of a $10 million, six-year research project on the Whillans Ice Stream in Antarctica. Priscu, a Montana State University professor of environmental sciences, has pioneered the study of cold climates over the past 10 years. The 2009 field team for one of his projects included Tristy Vick, Andrew Baber, Priscu and Amy Chiuchiolo (our new friends!)

After more than 10 years of pushing the science of icy worlds, John Priscu has finally defrosted his critics.

Having just returned from Antarctica, Priscu restlessly halted long enough to talk about his latest and largest project so far — the $10 million Whillans Ice Stream Subglacial Access Research Drilling project, or WISSARD.

The three-pronged study will look at microorganisms that live in Lake Whillans, thousands of feet under the ice, as well as use a remote robot to explore the area between the ice sheets and the ocean.

It’s a big expedition. The six-year scientific mission, funded by the National Science Foundation, will involve 13 principal investigators, including Priscu, and nine institutions. Since Priscu helped develop the field of study, he is one of three leaders. He estimated that the logistics of moving people and equipment into the field will cost NSF another $40 million, a small chunk of the agency’s $9.5 billion 2009 budget.

“What’s neat about WISSARD is it’s actually an opportunity to crack through to those lakes and find out what’s in there,” said Dana Cruikshank of the National Science Foundation.

He noted that it’s like an international race, with the British and Russians pursuing the same goals, yet cooperative. He added that the research has big implications for climate science.

“We’ll get a better idea of how quickly the ice sheet is moving into the ocean,” Cruikshank said.

Piece of the pie

About $2.7 million of the $10 million will be directed to MSU’s piece of the puzzle, called GBASE, or GeomicroBiology of Antarctic Subglacial Environments.

Priscu said GBASE will be looking for novel organisms that have learned to survive for millions of years under the Antarctic ice sheet without sunlight.

“There has never been a sample from the bottom of an ice sheet collected for microorganisms,” Priscu said.

The other two acronym-loaded components of the project are LISSARD, Lake and Ice Stream Subglacial Access Research Drilling, and RAGES, Robotics Access to Grounding-Zones for Exploration.

LISSARD will take measurements from Lake Whillans, after drilling 2,300 feet through the ice to the water body. Scientists will measure water pressure and other variables to determine how often the lake fills and floods.

In RAGES, a robot will be lowered into the water to examine the area where the 100-mile long Whillans Ice Stream meets the Ross Ice Shelf to measure the stream’s velocity and how quickly it’s wearing away the ice.

“The U.S. project is by far the most integrated,” Priscu said.

Field work will begin next year, including the testing of the $4 million hot-water drill that has its own purifying system to insure that no contaminants enter the 1-foot drill holes.

Unlike Priscu, UC Santa Cruz professor Andy Fisher, an oceanographer, will be making his first trip to Antarctica as one of the researchers.

His project will be to examine how much geothermal heat from the earth is warming the base of the ice cap. The heat has never been measured before, leaving a gap in calculating about how fast the ice cap may melt.

Why go?

There are several reasons the research is important, Priscu said.

• The Antarctic ice sheet is half again as large as the United States. It contains 70 percent of the world’s fresh water. Should it melt, the Statue of Liberty would be waist-deep in water and many of the major metropolitan areas around the world would be underwater. The ice sheet produces so much water as it now melts that it rivals the Amazon River for contributing water and nutrients to the ocean.

• The ice sheets also harbor a record of the Earth’s climate. Air bubbles trapped in the ice go back 1 million years. The ice also reflects the sun’s heat away from Earth; if it were gone, the planet would be a warmer place.

• The cold environment also offers testing grounds for work on other planets, where ice may harbor extraterrestrial life. There’s also the possibility that newly discovered microorganisms might provide chemicals for medicines as well as insight into how they survive repeated freezing and thawing cycles.

“It’s like a last frontier of life,” Priscu said, “Instead of Antarctica being a big dead place, ice is an oasis for life.”

Walking the Glacier

We had a trip over the glaciers via helicopter......


Now, let us go over the Glacier on foot ...we are hiking over Canada Glacier to Lake Bonney:


We start our Journey at Canada Stream (F1) and head up the drainage......


To reach the Glacier......



And hike OVER the Glacier........


( I am ON the glacier with McMurdo Sound in the distant background)

And get to the other side ......
Lake Bonney sits to our right......

and a warm meal waiting ......... Hope you enjoyed the trip!

WINGS -- Extraordinary Women

WINGS celebrates and supports extraordinary women explorers and promotes scientific exploration, education and conservation to inspire future generations.

iExplore! Your dream, your journey...Discover more about ethnobotany through WOD Rosita Arvigo, and more about life and science on the ice with WOD Birgit Sattler.

Follow our Flags Live in the Field!

WOD'08 Birgit Sattler takes Flag #21 down under as she researches radioactive fall-out and biomass distribution in the ice in Antarctica.

Fellow WINGS in Antarctica (and Me an honorary member!)

Flag carrier Felicity Aston takes Flag #15 to the South Pole as she leads the Kaspersky Commonwealth Expedition, comprised of 8 women from around the globe.

WOD'07 Terrie Williams brings Flag #23 on the Weddell Seals Expedition of 2009 in Antarctica, studying how the seals dive in the sustained dark of the winter.

Check out our interactive Flag Report Program--first-person reports, trip write-ups, photos, and more from around the globe!

Enjoy the Fall '09 WINGS Newsletter! Learn about the 2010 awardees, various updates from the field (and office), and a conversation with Steffi Schwabe.

Meet the WINGS Fellows. Incredible women from around the world who are making strides in a vast array of fields.

Protecting Our Water Dr. Edie Widder introduces "Kilroy," the wireless marine ecosystem monitor.

For more information on these extraordinary women: http://www.wingsworldquest.org/

Global Warming

Recent Article on Global Warming.....Read On.....

Study Busts Antarctica's Chill On Global Warming

It turns out temperatures are rising on a large chunk of West Antarctica, with dark red showing the area that has warmed the most, according to new data. Scientists in Antarctica also report the Wilkins Ice Shelf may soon break apart.

NASA/ E. J. Steig

Antarctica was seemingly the only continent on Earth that had not been warming up, as far as scientists could tell. But now a new study finds that large parts of the southern continent have in fact been getting warmer.

Researchers are particularly interested in Antarctica's fate because the coastlines of the world would be obliterated if Antarctic ice melted away and raised global sea level.

The continent is so remote, scientists didn't put permanent weather stations there until 1957 — and even those were in just a few scattered places. Eric Steig at the University of Washington says that made it hard to take the continent's temperature.

"It's like having data in San Francisco and New York and trying to say something about Arizona," says Steig. "You really need some more information if you're going to say anything reasonable about Arizona."

Steig and his colleagues have done just that for Antarctica, taking the sparse temperature records of the past 50 years and combining them with satellite records that cover a much greater area, but don't go back so far in time. Combining those records, they now report that a big chunk of Antarctica — the western part of the continent — has in fact been warming up, like the rest of the world.

Temperatures have risen by about 1 degree near the equator to more than 5 degrees near the North Pole.

"It's much less than Arctic warming but it pretty much is on par with global average warming," Steig says.

Forecast: More Snow

Up to a point, Antarctic warming can actually reduce sea level. Warming there can take water out of the ocean and deposit it on the continent, in the form of increased snowfall. (We are currently some evidence of this as it is SNOWING........

"West Antarctica should be getting more precipitation along with this increased temperature. But I think the data to demonstrate that are not really available," Steig says.

In fact, the best data from Antarctica show that the continent is putting slightly more water into the ocean than it's taking out.

Re-Assuring Discovery

Previous studies have not found a warming trend in Antarctica. Steig's conclusion is therefore a shift, but it's not a total surprise.

"This one study should not cause anyone to suddenly get more worried. If they are taking it seriously already, then this should not make them change their view particularly," he says.

In fact, Arctic scientist Richard Alley at Penn State University says he finds the new information reassuring — in a way.

"The world looks a little more sensible to me than it did before," he says.

That's because many scientists expected that Antarctica should be warming up, along with the rest of the world. It was a bit of a mystery why it didn't seem to be doing so. And the consequence of warming Antarctic air is not cause for panic, Alley says.

"For now, most of the Antarctic is still so cold that it's very hard to melt it from above. The big question for Antarctic for the near future is what happens to the ocean," he says, "because the warm ocean waters can circulate under the floating extensions of Antarctica — the ice shelves."

And if warmer water melts those ice shelves, they'll release mountains of ice behind them into the ocean.

Scientists have already seen some dramatic changes to ice shelves on the Antarctic Peninsula, which juts toward South America and is warmer than the rest of the continent. The relatively small peninsula has been a major exception to the rule for Antarctica; it clearly has been heating up in recent decades. At least eight large ice shelves around the peninsula have melted away.

David Vaughan from the British Antarctic Survey is on the peninsula right now, keeping a worried eye on the Wilkins Ice Sheet. It was once larger than Connecticut but soon could be gone entirely.

"We landed on the ice shelf just two days ago — flimsy looking piece of ice — and that appears to be hanging on by the skin of its teeth," Vaughan says.

It could collapse any time in the next few weeks, he says.

"Not all of Wilkins will disappear overnight but a large part of it could," Vaughan says.

This ice sheet is already floating on the ocean, so when it melts it won't raise sea level. But it's a powerful reminder that change can come quickly — and dramatically — in this land of ice.

----by Richard Harris, January 21, 2009