Yesterday, I left my home and my fabulous dog, Lucy, to head into Seattle for a two-day visit with my family before taking off for New Zealand and Antarctica. Do not worry; Lucy gets to hang out with a wonderful friend of mine while I am on my adventure. Before I left Whidbey Island, I received a great list of questions from Ms. McCourt's fifth and sixth grade class at Island Christian Academy. The questions her students composed were so thoughtful. They addressed a lot of my Antarctic expectations- "what if this happened...," "what about this...," "why...?" As I have not explored Antarctica before and have never worked with Dissolved Organic Matter and microbes found in glacial waters, my answers are full of speculation and hopes. I had a blast answering every one of the questions and wanted to share the Q & A with the rest of you. Question: Why are you going? Answer: I have dreamt of visiting Antarctica since I was a little kid. The idea of doing scientific research on a continent almost wholly saved for science totally fascinates me. Also, I love exploring remote and extreme corners of our beautiful Earth. I have this opportunity to go to Antarctica through a program called PolarTREC. PolarTREC connects teachers with researchers and sends the teachers to the Polar Regions to work alongside scientists.
Question: What are you going to study? Answer: I am studying some of the most awesome organisms in the world- bacteria! My team is exploring the relationship between bacteria and the dissolved organic matter (DOM) that we find in streams located at the top and bottom of the Cotton Glacier in the McMurdo Dry Valley region of Antarctica. Essentially, DOM is microscopic bits of organic stuff that settled into the glacier as the glacier formed, which often takes hundreds of thousands, if not millions of years. We know that bacteria "eat" DOM, but we are not too sure what kinds of DOM bacteria particularly like and how much bacteria and DOM are in the Cotton Glacier.
Question: How big is the place you stay? Answer: I am spending quite a few weeks in McMurdo Station. In the summer months (Nov.- Feb.), upwards of 1000 people stay at McMurdo. There are scientists, pilots, carpenters, machinists, cooks, artists, and many other support staff that keep operations going at McMurdo and in U.S. field camps all around Antarctica. I get to spend a couple weeks at a field camp in the McMurdo Dry Valleys in the shores of Lake Fryxell. While at Lake Fryxell there are only 6-12 people at the camp. We have a few metal and wood huts built for science labs and cooking facilities, but the people at the camp, myself included, will sleep in tents! The McMurdo Dry Valley region is a desert so I do not have to worry about too much snow, but it can get very windy on the shore of Lake Fryxell. Lake Fryxell is a salt-water lake, so for drinking, cooking, and cleaning water while at the field camp I get to melt chunks of glacier ice!
Question: What do you think it will be like being there? Answer: Cold, beautiful, full of new experiences and sensations. I am really looking forward to experiencing the silence I often hear people talk about. On a windless day in Antarctica the silence can be so complete that the loudest noise is the beating of your own heart. We don't have silence that total in the world too often, there is usually background noise of some sort- refrigerators humming, wind blowing through trees, cars rumbling in the distance or even insects flying are louder than most of Antarctica!
I will include a few more questions from Island Christian Academy in journal entries in the coming days. If you have any questions for me click on "Ask the Team" on the top navigation bar. You may post a question there for me to answer. If I do not know the answer to your question I will certainly seek help from others in the DOM team or around McMurdo to get your question answered as completely as possible!