We've now had the first official team meeting for the Lake Joyce expedition! After school yesterday, we convened on the U.C. Davis campus to meet each other and discuss the team's science goals for the coming expedition.
Researchers Tyler Mackey, Sasha Leidman and Megan Krusor at U.C. Davis
Tyler Mackey, our senior graduate student and one of our leaders, shared his past experiences in Antarctica with us and let us know what to expect this year. Megan Krusor, Sasha Leidman and I haven't been before, so we had lots of questions for Tyler. Along with learning about the logistics of the trip (which you'll see in future blogs), we got an overview of the scientific investigations we'll engage in.
Lake Joyce is home to the microbial communities that Megan introduced us to in the earlier video. Because this environment is so isolated, it limits who can live there, so there's really nothing preying on or burrowing through the microbes. This allows them to grow, forming mats that turn into really wonderful shapes that are very similar to microbial communities preserved in rocks from an earlier time on Earth. Below, you can see a photo of the modern mats on the left, and mats from 2.5 billion years ago on the right. In the ancient mats, the dark parts are inclusions of organic matter that are interpreted as layers of microbial mats. The white areas are carbonate minerals that precipitated on and within the mat to turn it into a rock:
Photos courtesy of Dale Andersen and Tyler Mackey
We are going to observe these mats, take samples and photographs, measure them and figure out how they change over time and in different environments. Hopefully, our insights will help us accurately interpret fossils from long ago.
In particular, we want to know how changes in the environment affect the mats. Due to climate change, the lake level has gone up by 7 meters in the last 30 years! This is largely due to glacial meltwater running off, bringing sediment with it. How much sediment is going into the lake, and where in the lake is it going? How does this influx of water and possibly nutrients affect the mat communities? These are some of the big questions we hope to explore during this field season.
Photos from Polar Geospatial Center and Google Earth, Courtesy of Anne Jungblut
I look forward to sharing more of our scientific processes as they unfold. I left our meeting with a better understanding of the science we’ll be doing and great sense that we’re going to have fun together in Antarctica!
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