Schuyler Borges
Antarctic Fieldwork
Getting Ready to Leave11/22/2018 Packing has been an adventure in and of itself as I have had many questions about what I will need while I'm down there. I have spent many hours packing and repacking only to find myself second guessing everything in my suitcase after I finally decide I'm finished packing. Because of this reiterating process, I am ready to finally hop on the plane and start my journey; once I leave there's no going back, and I will have to deal with whatever I have. All of the Extreme Cold Weather (ECW) gear will be provided by the US Antarctic Program (USAP), so all I really need are base layers, boots, clothes for inside the stations in Antarctica, which are all heated, clothes for New Zealand, and any other essentials like our white elephant gifts. Thankfully it will be in the 20's and 30's (Fahrenheit) while we're there (we are going during Antarctica's summer months), so nothing I'm not already used to having gone to school in Wisconsin. The sun will also be out nearly 23 hours of the day as well, so hello sleeping masks. I fly from LAX to Auckland and from there to Christchurch, New Zealand. This is where a grad student from Virginia Tech, Sarah Power, my advisor, Mark Salvatore, a scientist from the National Ecological Observatory Network (NEON), Lee Stanish, and I will get our equipment set up and prepared to head down to the ice. We'll spend a couple days in Christchurch before fly into McMurdo, a small town-sized hub for all Antarctic activity. We'll then spend a couple days there before taking a helicopter out to Lake Fryxell to do our field work. We'll effectively be in the "field" for 8 weeks. There will be a "hut" for us to warm up, cook, and use running water in, but we will be sleeping in tents (no showers for 8 weeks though). We'll be doing day hikes to and from streams around Lake Fryxell, taking biological samples and spectral measurements of the mats in these streams. Spectral measurements are data representing the rays of sunlight that are reflected, refracted, and/or emitted off of a surface. Every surface or object has a different spectrum or spectral signature, and we are interested in quantifying these microbial mats' spectral signatures from satellite imagery. In order to do this, we need to take measurements in the field and correlate them to the measurements we get from satellite imagery. This process is called "ground truthing." Once we can correlate these measurements and find the spectral signatures of these microbes, we can look at past, present, and future images of these organisms and see how they respond to climatic changes in Antarctica. We can also try to determine if these spectral signatures can be found on other planets. These microbial mats are interesting for a variety of reasons. One is that they are extremophiles, which means that they live in harsh environments. For those that occupy the land in Antarctica, they go dormant for 9 months of the year and only become active when they are wetted by streams created from glacial melt. They are like sponges and can be a variety of different colors: black, green, and orange. They are also pretty old; microbial mats are known to be as old as 3.5 billion years. Mats that live inside the lakes are also not widely understood as their morphology changes from lake to lake in the Dry Valleys. Understanding more about these microorganisms and the conditions in which they live can help us to better understand what kinds of microorganisms could exist on other planets. If you have any questions about the overall trip, feel free to comment below!
1 Comment
Fry Intia
12/5/2018 02:14:10 pm
Loving the pictures of Antarctica so far! Can't wait to see more!
Reply
Leave a Reply.Schuyler BorgesAstronomy and Planetary Science PhD student at Northern Arizona University Archives
February 2019
Categories |