January 27th: Forgotten Story and Science Talk

Punta Arenas (Where we sailed from) at night.

I am going to skip around little bit, since I forgot a couple of things that have happened recently.  A couple of days ago Mark and Matt went hiking on the glacier behind Palmer Station. I needed to do some work so I stayed in the lab, which may have been my smartest move so far. Remember that I talked about being careful not to fall in a crevasse (I figured out the spelling) when we went up on the glacier?  Well, Mark found and fell partially into a 1-2 foot wide crevasse at the top of the glacier that was covered with snow and not there days earlier. 

Fortunately he did not fall all the way in and was able to get out. When I say 1-2 feet it is not very impressive, but Mark has a video of him dropping a snow ball down it and not hearing it hit bottom for a couple of seconds. When you figure that our bodies are less than the width of the crevasse it is possible to do some serious damage. So now Mark has a crevasse named “Mark’s crack” up on the glacier.  Needless to say, the glacier search and rescue team went up the glacier the next day and moved the safety flags around to make sure that no one else falls in.

Today started out windy, but turned into a beautiful day. We were able to launch the vehicle and get another productive run in. We were even brave enough to drive it up right next to the pier at Palmer Station when it returned from its run. Most of the data has been processed at the basic level and is ready for viewing. I will probably post a couple of graphs for you to look at tomorrow or the next day.

To finish up the night tonight, we had one of the visiting professors, Rick Lee, talk about his research on Antarctic insects. Although our cold right now is not that impressive compared to winters back in the states or the winter here, the insects they are studying are amazing.  There is only one kind of free living (meaning it doesn’t need another organism to get its food from) insect in Antarctica that they have found at this point. There are also a couple of tick and mite species down here that live on the birds. 

An elementary school teacher traveling with Rick’s group also showed a movie she has put together for her school back home, which was a beautiful piece of work and a great learning tool for students. 

See more at http://frozenfly.edublogs.org/ for her blog and 

http://www.units.muohio.edu/cryolab/education/antarctic.htm for Rick’s website and some fun educational games.

As you can tell, it is very important to share our experiences and what we learn down here because what we do means nothing if we can’t share it with others. That may sound a little whimsical, but it is very important in the scientific world and in this particular case it is a great chance to share a couple of people’s trip to Antarctica with a larger group.