Antarctic Epiblog: Leaving McMurdo

Ice formation outside McMurdo Station After we took our samples out at the ice edge, we returned to McMurdo Station for several intense days of demobilization. We had to return all of the large drills, power equipment and camping gear, and spent a considerable time preparing our...

Station IV: The Ice Edge

Our last station in our Ross Sea transect was out at the ice edge, about two miles north of our previous station, Station III. We were interested to see how plankton in the open polynya were different from the phytoplankton we isolated from areas locked in sea-ice. Polynyas are ice-free areas...

Station III: approaching the ice edge

As we were finishing up our work at Station II, we called MacOps, the radio command center for McMurdo Station, and got a 24 hour weather update: a high to the north of Ross Island was blocking a storm in the south, and we were caught in the middle. The prediction: snow, and lots of it. We had...

Station II, Inaccessible Island

The second storm of our trip hit us while we were packing up Station I for a return to McMurdo. The winds began gusting over 50 miles per hour, and the visibility dropped to near zero. We had already packed up camp, but the orders came in over the radio that Condition 1 had been imposed on the...

Kudos to Ken!

JCVI Professor, Kenneth Nealson, has been selected by the American Society of Microbiology to receive an award that recognizes distinguished accomplishments in interdisciplinary research and training in microbiology. The 2010 David C. White Research and Mentoring Award will be awarded to Ken...

McMurdo Sound

It took another day for the storm to blow itself out, but by Tuesday the wind and driving snow had abated, and we drove our Pisten Bully back out to our temporary shelter near Cape Evans. It took several hours of digging to clear the snow away from our vehicles, but once we started driving away...

Scientist Spotlight: Greg Wanger

Greg Wanger was 3.7 km below the Earth’s surface, trapped not only underground but also in a country distant from his native lands of Canada and Liechtenstein. He looked around him. It was very hot and smelled like rotten eggs. As many people do during their graduate careers, Greg pondered...

Digging out from the storm

The next day offered more snow and wind: we still needed handheld radios anytime we ventured between the warming hut and any of the vehicles. The wind was so strong that snow began drifting up through the dive hole in the warming hut, and the windows completely glazed over with snow. At one...

Out onto the ice

It took an enormous amount of effort, but on Thursday we ventured out onto the sea ice with our train of sleds and snow machines. The tucker is our strongest (and slowest) vehicle, and it is pulling both our yellow research sled and a pair of snowmobiles. The red Pisten-Bully is pulling a...

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