Christine received an e-mail full of wonderful questions from Ms. Kristi Crawford's 2nd grade class at at Longfellow Elementary School in Bozeman, Montana. Here are the fabulously thoughtful questions and Christine's answers.
Thanks so much for sending the great questions to our team. 1.) How do you keep warm? - On our way down to Antarctica we stop in Christchurch, New Zealand where the United States Antarctic Program has a place called the Clothing Distribution Center, or CDC for short. Here we receive our extreme cold weather (ECW) gear, which includes a large red parka, black ski bib type pants, long underwear, fleece, gloves, hats etc. All the things you need for a day playing outside in Montana during the winter. 2.) What do you eat? --While in McMurdo, which is the main research station, there is a galley similar to your cafeteria that serves breakfast, lunch and dinner. While out at our field camps we are responsible for cooking our own meals. Before we fly out we select our food, put it in boxes, weigh these and take them down to the helicopter to fly out with the rest of our camp and science gear. 3.) How many different kinds of penguins are there-- There are 17 different kinds of penguins, like Rockhoppers, Chinstrap, Gentoos etc, but we only have two types of penguins near McMurdo and they are the Emperor and Adelie penguins. The Emperors are quite regal and elegant while the Adelies have a lot of energy and run around like you all do at recess. 4.) How cold does it get and how warm? Well, it is currently the Austral summer down here so the temperatures are actually quite nice. Right now it is -2C or 28F with a wind chill or -8C 18F, you can check Sarah's journal postings to see what the last few days have been like as well. Because you have been so cold in Bozeman lately (-20F I heard), it is warmer down here right now, but the coldest temperature ever recorded on Earth comes from the Russian Antarctic station Vostok, where they have confirmed the coldest temperature as being -128.6F (-89.2C) in July of 1983. The coldest temperatures in Antarctica happen during the Austral winter in July and August when the sun does not shine and the winds are blowing quite strongly. The warmest temperatures occur down here during December and January. 5.) How deep is the snow? Do you ski in the powder?-- Where we do our research is in a place known as the McMurdo Dry Valleys. They are a polar desert, actually part of the coldest and driest deserts on our planet. I have a tshirt from down here that reads, "Ski Antarctica, 2 miles of ice and 1 inch of powder" as most of the continent is covered my lots of very thick ice. In fact, 70% of all of the freshwater in the world is contained in the Antarctic ice. 6.) What other kinds of animals live there? -- In addition to penguins, there are seals, bacteria and nematodes, skuas, a bird that is similar to a seagull, and lots of marine life in the ocean (fish, seastars, isopods, crustaceans etc.) 7.) What do penguins eat?-- Penguins eat fish, krill - a shrimp-like crustacean, and sometimes squid. 8.) What is your week like? -- Out in the field we sleep in tents and take care of camp chores. The camp at Lake Fryxell is fantastic, it has a solar panel array and a wind generator that supplies power to run our science experiments and our computers. On a typical morning we wake up, have breakfast and then hike over to our sampling site to collect water and take measurements in the stream, or we hike up to the glacier and collect ice cores. This generally takes a few hours. We return to camp with our samples and begin to process them in order to understand what types of bacteria are there, how many are there, how active they are, and how they get their food in the form of carbon and nutrients. We carry lots of water in our backpacks in 5 gallon (20L) containers so that we can send this back to McMurdo Station for our colleagues to concentrate the carbon in the water for further studies. After our science is done for the day we cook, clean up and work on our computers. The next day the helicopter may pick us up and take us to our site on the Cotton Glacier, about half an hour away by helo. They drop us off with our science gear, water collection jugs and survival bags and come back 5-6 hours later. The survival bags are there in case the helicopter is not able to come back and pick us up, that way we have a tent, sleeping bags and a camp stove. The other day we were stuck in some really bag cold fog and the helicopter could not get to us. We had to load up our backpacks with our instruments, and as many samples as we could carry and head towards where they were able to land. Luckily the pilots are great and we used our satellite phone, radios and GPS to find the helo by hiking up and down the glacier for over an hour to get to the helo so they could load us up. They ended up going back later that night to pick up our samples. We feel quite lucky to be able to work in the field in such a beautiful and pristine place.
Thanks again for all of your great questions and to Dr. Fields for getting these to us. Merry Christmas, Christine and DOM team.