I got up at 6:30 this morning, a very reasonable time considering the jet lag. No coffee shops were open, so to kill time I toured myself around an old cemetery. Judging from the stones, New Zealanders had access to marbles and gabbros, red granites and anorthosite. In the late 1800s, the people dying and receiving gravestones had very English names. Lots of Marys, Edwards, Daniels. Also, WWI soldiers were buried in France but given markers in Christchurch. Many things to be learned, in a graveyard.

We leave for the ice tomorrow. Today was preparation for that—watching safety and conduct videos, checking our computers for viruses, getting a (second, for me) flu shot, and trying on our issued cold weather gear. You put the gear on in the changing room and it feels impossible to be cold. I’m sure that’s false, but it’s kind of like wearing three snowsuits at once.

We’re issued:

A giant coat (Big Red)

A smaller coat

Insulated overalls

Fleece zip-up

Fleece pants

A neck gaiter

A balaclava (which I had kind of thought was a musical instrument?)

A little fleece hat

Two pairs of thin knit gloves

Work gloves

Giant puffy mittens

Snow goggles

Insulated waterproof boots (here-on referred to as bunny boots)

It’s pretty good. And, I have all the warm socks and long underwear I brought with me.

We left Lowell in New England fall, with the locust trees bright yellow and the geese beginning to pass over. Christchurch is in spring, though, which for some reason I was unprepared for. The air smells like flowers. It was a glorious day today. Sunny and warm and all the plants wriggling with life. A lovely last hurrah before the cold.

My thermals are packed and I have a chocolate bar for each week I’ll be gone. Hush, don’t let my field mates know.

I’m in the Boston airport waiting for our flight to Dallas, where we’ll wait for our flight to Sydney, and then to Christchurch, New Zealand. My airline ticket reads a trip total of 31 hours and 54 minutes, including layovers. It’s ok, because I have 46 unheard podcast episodes of The Infinite Monkey Cage, and 18 unheard episodes of The Story Collider. Those, and a few naps, should get me into New Zealand with at least the remnants of sanity.

Kate and I will meet up with Rachel, Jay, and Esther at various stages of our flights. I’m always a little nervous to meet new people who I’ll very be close with in the field. It’s like getting new roommates, except they’ll be tentmates, coworkers, and bffs.

Next update will be from Christchurch!

If you took a glacier, and buried it under a bunch of sand and pebbles, it would still flow. The ice deforms, slowly, bending and squishing downhill. You end up with a ground surface with curves and ridges, shaped like a rumpled tongue.

The trouble is, you can also get such a ground surface through an entirely different process. Instead of burying a glacier, you can just slowly pile up bits of rock and ice on steep valley walls, and eventually, voila, it’s heavy enough and has enough ice inside to deform and move.

We call the first type of rumpled tongue a “glacigenic rock glacier” and the second type a “permafrost rock glacier”. Actually, the community probably uses more terms for these things than you would imagine there are scientists working on them. Terminology causes a fair amount of confusion and occasionally angry arguments thinly veiled under precise scientific wording. Anywhoo. Because you can’t properly decide on a name without knowing the character of the buried ice, we’re just calling everything “viscous flow lobes” for now. That’s right, now you get to read the phrase “viscous flow lobes” over and over.

Here is a nice, distinct example of a viscous flow lobe next to Rhone Glacier, which is my new glacier baby. You can also explore around the area in Google Maps.

A lovely viscous flow lobe located just to the west of the snout of Rhone Glacier in Taylor Valley

Viscous flow lobes are common in the McMurdo Dry Valleys, sometimes glooping down steep hillslopes, sometimes lumbering across the valley floors. Many look like sediment-covered margins of an earlier glacier, whereas others appear to have formed far from any glacier. Some of them, like the one in the photo above, appear to yield streams of liquid water when the weather warms. Others are old and desiccated, their ice lost to the dry air and their motion stalled.

We’ll be studying a bunch of viscous flow lobes this field season, and will hopefully come up with some answers about what they’re made of and how they formed!

PS: If you want a good review on viscous flow lobes in Antarctica, read this 1983 article by Hassinger and Mayewski.

We’re leaving for East Antarctica in a week, and I am exceedingly excited. I haven’t been there before. I know it’s going to be cold, with long strenuous days and probably not any ice cream. But I’m eager to go, especially because of the following:

1. Dead Seals. Yes my friends, I hear there are places in Wright Valleys that are littered with the mummified corpses of dead seals. I’ve been told they get sick and crawl their way inland to die. Some of them have been gruesomely decorating this otherwise mammal-free (scientists not included) region for over 3,000 years.
2. Blood Falls. Tied with “The Labyrinth” for the best name in the McMurdo Dry Valleys. There, salty water dyed orange with microbes gushes out of the nose of Taylor Glacier. I’m going to be camping right up the hill from this marvel of nature.
3. Don Juan Pond. Don Juan Pond would be on my list simply because of its ridiculous name, but it’s also the saltiest lake in the world. I like saline lakes, and I can’t imagine why that affection wouldn’t scale with salinity.
4. Ventifacts. In dry areas where rain and snow don’t contribute much to the breaking down of rocks, the wind can dominate. The wind sand-blasts rocks in the dry valleys, sometimes forming rock sculptures that are a very artistic blend of geometric and organic. These are called ventifacts.
5. Patterned ground. One time, in Greenland, I found a little circle of stones about 2 meters across, half-buried in the mud. It was patterned ground, organized by the freeze-thaw action of permafrost. I was really proud of my find and have ever since looked favorably on patterned ground. In the dry valleys, it’s EVERYWHERE. And MUCH MUCH larger than 2 meters in diameter.
6. Helicopter rides. Being in a helicopter is totally different from being in a plane, because you fly so much closer to the ground. I’ve only been in one once, but the sheer facility of admiring surficial geology from a helicopter seems to be unmatched. And I am guaranteed at least two helicopter rides, one in and one out, unless my field mates decide to just leave me on the continent.
7. Flying feces. We are not allowed to put human waste into the environment, so it all has to go into barrels. The barrels fill up, then get helicoptered back out to McMurdo base. Which means our poo will be flying over some of the most majestic, pristine wilderness lands of the planet. Do not fear, I will dedicate an entire post to this process, once I experience the full flying feces effect for myself.

Pictures and further description of these things will have to await the treasured combination of field luck and internet access.

We’re working in the western central McMurdo Dry Valleys, where the Taylor and Wright outlet glaciers cross over the Transantarctic Mountains. Our field and camp sites are in the valleys of Pearse, Taylor, and Wright (both North and South Fork). The two permanent camps, which are where the internet is, are at Lake Hoare and Lake Bonney. The Labyrinth wins the prize for my favorite McMurdo name.

Click for larger image.

While most of Antarctica is indeed a great white mass of ice, open ground is found in the mountainous region south of New Zealand. This is the McMurdo Dry Valleys, a polar desert where only microbes, moss, and lichen grow. That alone makes it an interesting place, one that has attracted all sorts of extremophile biologists. We are not researching the biology of the dry valleys, though, but rather the ice.

Ice is everywhere here, though it’s sometimes hidden below ground. In the bitter aridity of the McMurdo Dry Valleys, ice withers away. It sublimates, turning to water vapor without the chance to melt. So, if ice is left exposed to the elements for long enough, it eventually disappears. But underground, ice is at least partially protected and can survive for much longer. And its shape and composition holds a record of how and when it formed.

This is what we’re interested in. How did the buried ice in the McMurdo Dry Valleys form? How old is it? What does it tell us about climate changes in the area over the past tens or hundreds of thousands of years? The answers will vary, depending on the microclimate of valleys, the behavior of nearby glaciers, and the elevation of the ice.

This blog details the Antarctic field experiences of our group during the 2015 season. We are geoscientists researching buried ice in the McMurdo Dry Valleys— specifically, Taylor, Upper Wright, and Pearse Valleys (see site map).

We are performing GPR surveys, maintaining cameras for time-lapse photography, collecting meteorological data, and sampling ice, sediments, and boulders.

We are:

• Kate Swanger, PI and professor at the University of Massachusetts Lowell
• Jay Dickson, science data analyst at Brown University
• Esther Babcock, geophysicist at GeoTek Alaska Inc
• Rachel Valletta, graduate student at the University of Pennsylvania
• Kelsey Winsor, postdoc at the University of Massachusetts Lowell

That last one is me.

Learn more in this news story from UMass Lowell.

Welcome to Antarctic Dry Valleys 2015 blog as UMass Lowell EEAS Asst. Prof. Kate Swanger and post-doctoral researcher Kelsey Winsor venture to Antarctica. Read about their adventures right here.

This is not Kate’s first trip to the great white desert. In 2013-2014 she led an expedition to Antarctica to investigate how the continent’s glaciers have responded to climate fluctuations in the past.

They leave October 12, 2015 for a return trip along with researchers from Brown University, University of Pennsylvania, and the U.S. Geological Survey.

The project is funded with a 3-year $330,000 grant from the National Science Foundation.

Learn more.