Polar Bear of the South

I have been looking forward to writing this post but other exciting events keep getting in the way. The first time that I became aware of Hydrurga leptonyx was in reading Endurance, an account of Ernest Shackleton’s struggles on the pack ice of the Weddell Sea. One of his men was almost eaten by this “polar bear of the South.” In fact several years ago, a British diver was grabbed and drowned by a leopard seal in a tragic accident. The leopard seal is the only seal that eats other mammals, and it is ferocious. It hunts seals and penguins with teeth designed for slashing and flaying prey. Its jaws open an awesome 160 degrees for maximum grip. This in addition to its technique of flailing its prey in order to break their necks makes me think of a combined viper/crocodile-like creature. And in fact it does look quite reptilian. This is no downy, big-eyed seal.

So you can imagine my excitement when I saw my first leopard seal lounging on an ice floe right next to the station. Its body was over 10 feet long but sleek and sinuous. Its back was dark gray and its belly was a lighter gray with spots, hence the name leopard seal. Amanda and I were no more than 20 feet away on the shore, and it could definitely hear our hushed amazement. It stretched its flippers, which are connected to its body with large flaps of skin such that they resemble bat wings. Then it yawned wide, showing its impressive teeth and pink mouth that was even spotted inside. How cute! Except not.

When others described leopard seals to me before I saw one, their description centered around the observation “And their heads are huge!” When I saw one for myself, all I could think was “And its head is huge!” Even on such a long body, the massive head is out of proportion. And there is something really creepy about their faces. Maybe the jaws are set high on the head, maybe it is just the size of the grin, but you can see for yourself that these are like no other seals. And it is hard to even think of them as seals. They seem to be unique creatures, part polar bear, part snake, part crocodile, part curious dog.

Another part of the mystique of leopard seals is how little is known about them. There is very little information about their lifespan or breeding habits, and in fact one of the leading leopard seal researchers has only twice seen a pup. Leopard seals are known to hang around zodiacs, checking out the passengers, chewing on the ropes and sometimes puncturing an air chamber. So for all their more sinister aspects, they could be called endearing. One was certainly interested in us as we collected water samples one day. It surfaced several times near our boat and I could see its nostrils set high on its snout like a crocodile. I felt so lucky to be sharing the water with this animal that was first in awe of as a child and never dreamed that I would see with my own eyes.

Reaching out

I never expected that my first step onto a bona fide cruise ship would be in Antarctica. Actually it wasn’t really a step so much as a shimmy up a rope ladder. Before I came here, I didn’t realize that “outreach” is an important aspect of the United States Antarctic Program’s mission. I am for the busiest season, when two or more ships come to Palmer station each week. They range in size from a 45 foot sailboat housing a French family on their way around the world to the National Geographic Explorer to a 780 foot Holland America Line cruise ship. The sailboats and commercial yachts tie up in the harbor and come ashore for a tour, a visit to the station souvenir shop, and lunch or brownies and coffee. Any scientists who have time are encouraged to come to the galley and talk to the visitors about our work and life on station. This is actually a great public relations opportunity for the USAP, to show what they are doing with taxpayer dollars. And of course the visitors are excited to see real live Antarcticans. The question they all ask is “How did you get here?” often closely followed by “How can I get here?” For some, this is their first interaction with scientists. I was told that I didn’t look crazy enough to be a scientist (What, no googley eyes or Einstein hair?), to which I replied that I am still practicing.



However the cruise ships with more than 200 passengers, which are too large to enter the harbor don’t come to us. We come to them, on zodiacs that to them appear to have materialized from the icy hinterland. As the ship cruises around the nearby waters, we spend several hours giving science talks and question and answer sessions. It is a really fun opportunity to leave the station and explore the surrounding landscape. It is also a chance to get haircuts and enjoy the pools onboard! On our last Sunday at Palmer, the cruise ship Amsterdam visited and we took a ride down the Lemaire Channel. This narrow passage is one of the most popular tourist destinations on the continent, and for good reason. The entrance is marked by a black cliff thousands of feet high surrounded by gleaming ice. It seemed to me like an obsidian-dark version of El Capitan, rising from a watery valley floor. More mountains and glaciers stretching miles back from the shore continued to unfold as we made our way between the walls. According to Wikipedia, this area is called “Kodak alley,” and we were lucky enough to see it on the only brilliantly sunny day in over a week of fog and snow. We had to stop about halfway through because further on the channel became too narrow for the ship to turn around. In the spirit of Antarctic giddiness, the captain did a 540 degree turn, just for fun.

But seriously, the outreach at Palmer and onboard the ships was one of my favorite activities in Antarctica. I loved answering questions from “Why is the ice blue?” and “How is coal formed in Antarctica?” to “What food do you miss most?” (Answer: None, I eat better here than at home!) Explaining what I do here simply and succinctly, without using any scientific terms is a challenge and an exercise that I think every scientist should do frequently. It makes you really think about the significance of say, bacterial growth rates, without falling back on jargon. Other scientists are so devoted to their work and understand the joy of it so easily that I don’t have to justify myself as much to them. “Understanding biogeochemical pathways” is enough of an explanation. But the public is much more demanding because pinpointing chemical reactions is not a raison d’etre for them; they want to know the big picture. And in the end, both in the interests of integrated science and competition for limited grant money, the big picture is what every scientist needs to be able to explain best. I think that communicating science, either to the public or to policy makers may be a role that I am interested in pursuing further in my life. But first I need the science credentials to back it up, so bring on the biogeochemistry!

I have posted an exciting video on my Day of the Whales post, you may enjoy watching it. I've also added photos to Palmer Station, Palmer Science, Polar Plunge and Camping in Antarctica so check them out. And comment, comment, comment! If you like a particular post, please let me know! It will put a smile on my face and even if you can't see that smile, it's there - smiles aren't like trees in the forest.

Day of the Whales

Today was my last day at Palmer station before crossing the Drake Passage, and it was a great way to say goodbye to Antarctica. My first inkling of how special this day would be was when Amanda and I were wrapping up at our second water sampling station. The boating coordinator got on the radio and asked us about some visitors. I asked if he meant the sneaky leopard seal that was checking us out as we processed our water samples, but it was unlikely that he could see the seal from where he was, ¾ of a mile away. He meant something…bigger. We stopped and looked around for a couple of minutes but didn’t see our marine friends so we came back in for a long day of lab work. As we arrived on station, we saw several boats going out to look at a group of humpback whales who were hanging around the harbor. The station employees had today, Monday, off because they worked yesterday due to a visit by a cruise ship (hopefully more on that in a later post). However Amanda and I had a full day of time sensitive experiments to carry out, so it wasn’t possible for us to play with the whales. Around 4:30pm as I was just coming to the end of my lab work (except for the experiment I have to end at 10pm), the cook came looking for us. She said that the whales were still playing and asked us if we would like to come out with her and the station doctor. I want to thank Amanda for letting me post the photos that she took of the whales.

We piled into a zodiac and took off in search of humpies! We had been seeing their spouts all day from the galley windows but I wondered how we would find them in the whole expanse of the ocean. I needn’t have worried; there were at least five groups, about 20 individuals in total. We started out with a group of four who were bubble-net feeding. This is a technique in which the whales work in teams to hunt schools of krill. One whale will emit a sound that attracts the krill and the others swim in a tight circle trapping the krill in vortex and working them to the surface. We knew that the whales would be coming up soon when the surface of the water turned pale blue from all the bubbles. Then three or four huge beaky mouths would stick up above the surface, gulping hundreds of gallons of krill-filled water. The pleats of their throats would stretch, showing the white accordion bits. I could see the water slosh around and jiggle the surface of their pouches, which are more flexible than I would have imagined. Their jaws have barnacles in addition to natural bumps, and distinctive white and orange markings. The top-side of the beak is flat with nobs like the bosses of a shield. Sometimes I could see the pink roofs of their mouths. They would all rise up together and open their jaws, like a mound of mussels topping off a paella. Often I couldn’t really tell what I was looking at; it was jumble of gigantic blue, white and pink body parts. A fin would hang above the surface, white with dark scalloped nobs. The fins were incredibly long and huge, at least 10 feet long, 3-4 feet wide, and quite floppy. We were very close to them – at one point they were about 15 feet away and coming straight towards us, so we just sat tight and waited for them to pop out on the other side. When viewed straight on, their backs looked like the inverted hulls of small boats – wide and tapering to a ridge along the back. Sometimes the whales would arch backwards as they opened their mouths at the surface, swimming along on their backs with their blue and white striped bellies in full view. Then they would turn and show their dorsal fin before diving down and showing their flukes.

I have posted an album of photos by my friend Rex on picasa.
The flukes had incredible variation in shape and color from animal to animal. Some had a sharper angle in the middle, some tapered off at the ends more, some were completely white, some dark blue, some white, blue and orange. Some had scars or what seemed to be birth defects. It was really fun to see so many individuals, to follow one and learn to recognize its fluke or dorsal fin, and then to spot a new one and think, “Hello stranger.” I liked following a group, seeing the individuals separate and join new groups, or to see one who kept to itself the whole time. Amanda took some really great photographs of the whales we saw, which you can view on her picasa page. This is a video taken from one of other boats: Kyle's voice gets...very high when he's excited...

We heard them exhale puffs of mist every several seconds. One whale made a more nasal sound, like sucking snot or blowing your nose. The one really distasteful part of the experience was the whales’ bad breath. It smelled rotten, not like rancid meat or the sweet fermentation of fruit, but sour, like rotten vegetables. This would be the only air pollution that I am aware of that originates in Antarctica.

The last group we hung out with had a small, possibly juvenile member who would hang back behind the other three. Then this one decided to give us a show. About 40 feet away from us, the whale breached out of the water. It seemed to be in slow motion, the pointed head, stark white and black pleats and white flippers, streaming water. Then it breached again, higher and spinning halfway around in the air and landing with a big splash. Another adult jumped up and back showing its belly and flippers. I never thought I would ever see this sight in my whole life. It was invigorating, seeming to make my blood circulate faster; my fingers had been freezing even in my lined rubber gloves, but after the breach I didn’t notice the cold anymore. The whale disappeared under the water, leaving no trace and I found it hard to believe what had just happened. Think of it: a whole 30-foot, many-ton whale out of the water! Watching whales is kind of like being one of the three blind men who meet an elephant – you can see a fin lingering above the waves, a nose poking up, the pleats of the throat, and tails disappearing under the water, but you don’t get a sense of the whole body. The breach put all these disparate body parts together on one, strange-looking animal.

There hasn’t been another day like this all summer, and I like to think of it as Antarctica trying to keep me here, or entice me to come back!

Wasting away

In this post, I am going to take you into the world of a “wastie.” And no, I am not drinking away my days down here; wasties are the waste management employees here. As there is no landfill or solid waste dumping here, waste management is a really important aspect of the station operation. Glass, metal and cardboard are separated from solid waste and are sold to recycling companies in Chile. In fact, the based at McMurdo recycles 70% of their solid waste. However the changing economic climate has made it more difficult to sell recycled materials globally. All solid waste is packed into shipping containers called millvans and transported off of the station every two years.

Surprisingly, there is no chemical sewage treatment at Palmer station although plans for a new sewage disposal system are in the works. Instead a macerator breaks up large particles and the diluted effluent is discharged into the harbor. Drinking water is reclaimed from the ocean by reverse osmosis. This strips the water of all ions, so potash is added to it so that the “hungry” deionized water does not dissolve the pipes. Still, the water is relatively “soft,” meaning that it has few dissolved minerals. This makes it very easy to work soap into a lather, and hard to get it off! The toilets use seawater in order to conserve freshwater stores.

At the moment Palmer station is powered by a diesel generator although things change in the future. This year 10% of McMurdo station's power is supplied by a wind generator set up at a nearby New Zealand base. Hopefully Palmer will move toward a more sustainable power source as well.

Radioactive waste is tracked from cradle to grave: the facility knows how much radioactive material was issued to you, and you must record how much you use in each experiment. Then the radioactivity in all of your waste streams – liquid, solid, test tubes, etc must add up to the amount that you were issued. The waste that Amanda and I generate from our radioactive experiments is the most complicated and expensive waste possible: radioactive, caustic and flammable because it contains tritium, trichloroacetic acid, and ethanol. A 2L bottle costs about $5,000 to dispose of!

However for all the effort put into making a minimal impact on the ecosystem here, the base undoubtedly makes a mark. On a small scale, we have to collect our surface water samples immediately on arrival at the collection site or else the diesel exhaust from the outboard motor will contaminate them. Our presence makes an impact. This ecosystem would be more pristine if we weren’t doing science here. But maybe our documentation of an ecosystem responding to rapid warming justifies it. This is important to keep in mind here and everywhere. Can I justify my presence?

Watch the Bergy Bits

Well today I had planned to write about waste management practices but due to recent events, this post will be more exciting than I expected it to be. But don’t worry you waste junkies – I won’t forget about the macerator.

Amanda and I woke up early this morning to start a 12-hour experiment before we went out to collect water samples. There was a bit of wind forecast for today, but when we got on the water it was almost entirely calm and we were in high spirits. We hit heavy brash ice on the way out – floating chunks anywhere from inches to 15 feet long. According to the International Ice Patrol, pieces of ice less than 1 meter long are “Growlers” and pieces 1-5m long are called “Bergy Bits.” So we made our way through a mixture of Growlers and Bergy Bits, which are a pain because they can get stuck between the outboard motor and the back of the boat, hampering your ability to steer. Amanda slowed the boat to a crawl while I looked out for Bergy Bits. Ice constantly hit and crunched against the bottom of the boat. We finally reached open water before we got to Station E, the further of our two sampling sites. It was quite calm at E and we did our usual routine, lowering the bottles, tripping the closure mechanisms and hauling them back up. Amanda filtered the water for dissolved organic carbon and isotope measurements. I programmed the GPS unit and headed to Station B, which is on the way back to Palmer. I gladly sped over the calm water and Amanda wondered aloud “Where did all the ice go?” I figured that the wind had already moved it further out to sea. But we needn’t have worried about where the ice went; before long, it found us and wouldn’t let us go!

Half a mile from Station B, we entered the brash ice patch again. I drove in a sinuous path, which clears the area behind the boat and decreases the amount of ice trapped next to the motor. However it was difficult to keep the ice off, and the more it built up, the more difficult it became to steer and avoid still more. Finally I was trying to turn right and the boat just wasn’t responding. I asked Amanda “Isn’t this ridiculous that I’m turning as hard right as I can and we’re still going left?” It was just after that that I realized that we were on top of an iceberg. It seemed to be holding on to the bottom of the boat for dear life. I tried to kick it away but it meant business. That was probably the moment that I should have gone into reverse and backed off of it, but I didn’t realize how big it was. The boat has an oar, and although I think it’s intended for motor emergencies, the oar seemed like a pretty good tool for the job of escaping the grasp of an iceberg. I tried pushing it down and back past the boat. Although I was making progress, I wasn’t liking what I saw; the ice just kept coming and coming. I could see the air bubbles trapped in it, like the whites of its eyes. Amanda tried her hand, and we worked out a system in which she pushed on the oar and I pushed on her. In retrospect this was already going in the wrong direction, but we felt like we were close to success. Unfortunately, we weren’t.

Amanda slipped and hit her knee on a metal shackle. She said it really hurt, so I took over and she sat on the pontoon. My back was to her, and about a minute later she said that she wasn’t feeling well, that she was tired. Then she said that she felt like she was going to faint. At this point I realized that I had a bigger problem than a clingy iceberg. My first thought was to get her sitting down. She was quickly becoming unresponsive so I helped her onto the floor of the boat and stretched her legs out, trying to get her comfortable. I think the last thing that happened before she lost consciousness was me asking her if she wanted any water. Then her head fell back against the boat and her eyes rolled back. I was shocked, and what made the situation scary was that I still hadn’t made the connection between Amanda’s fall and her loss of consciousness. She hadn’t cried out or crumpled or done anything that would make her fall seem serious. The way she was slipping away was sudden and inexplicable. I felt very alone, in the middle of the ice with a person who to me, was unconscious for no apparent reason. After what seemed like a long time but was really probably a split second, I called Palmer station and said “This is the A Team and we have a medical emergency. We have an unconscious Amanda.” The doctor on station got on the radio and the ocean search and rescue team was contacted. I heard the station manager say “OSAR this is not a drill, I repeat this is not a drill.” Apparently I managed to sound cool as a cucumber on the radio even though I felt scared and helpless.

I was incredibly relieved when Amanda woke up. Although I didn't let myself articulate it, until that moment I wasn't sure that she would wake up. She said that if I hadn’t firmly sat her down on the floor she definitely would have fallen out of the boat, and we would have had a much bigger problem. The rescue team, made up of employees who we work and play with every day, did an excellent job of caring for Amanda. When Ryan arrived on the OSAR boat, he was calm and communicative. He didn’t rush in; he spoke to me respectfully and told me that he was going to step into our boat. I had total trust in him already as the boating coordinator, and he handled this situation perfectly. We returned to the station and the doctor checked Amanda out while I did some time-sensitive work in the lab. She was fine but thoroughly shaken up; what happened was that she fell on a particularly sensitive part of her knee and the acute pain caused her to faint. Afterwards the only trace of her injury is a faint pink spot and a general tenderness in her knee.

This experience was quite a reminder that although we have a great time in the boats, Antarctica can be a dangerous place. Luckily everyone worked really well together, and I am so thankful for how the search and rescue team and the doctor helped us out. And to all those lonely bergy bits out there, I have plenty of friends already thank you very much.

Winterover-ing

With endless days inevitably come endless nights. The period during winter when supply vessels or aircraft are unable to access Antarctic bases is called “winterover.” At Palmer station, winterover is from April until August, and it is never dark for a full 24 hours because it lies north of the Antarctic circle. However at MacMurdo station further south and on the other side of the continent, winterover lasts from February to October with a significant period of total darkness. Rex, the research assistant for the meteorological instruments here, spent 12 months at MacMurdo. He described it to me as a magical ordeal: magical because of the beautiful phenomena he saw during the winter, but an ordeal for the mind and body. On a night (well day, but it was dark so night gives you a better mental picture) when the temperature was about -40F, a special thing happened. The air around him sparkled with miniscule ice crystals. They weren’t visible straight on, but through the corner of his eye he could see them catch the light, and then disappear. As Rex was recounting this phenomenon to me, his voice fell away and there was a silence. “The only word to describe it was….magical.” The aurora australis or southern lights, appear frequently as well. When solar particles collide with nitrogen and oxygen atoms in the atmosphere they “excite” them into a higher energy state. When the atoms eventually return to the unexcited, lower energy state, they lose the energy by emitting light. This light is what we call the aurora, with red and green colors emitted by oxygen, and red and blue colors emitted by nitrogen. Auroras are most visible at high latitudes because the earth’s magnetic field lines direct the solar wind particles toward the poles and increase the number of collisions there.

The greatest wonder Rex saw that winter however was something I had never heard of and occurs only in Antarctica. Nacreous clouds are formed in the spring when clouds of ice crystals high in the atmosphere are illuminated by the sun, which has not yet risen above the horizon. The ice crystals act as tiny prisms, scattering the light into all the colors of the rainbow. Rex said that he almost got frostbite because he was standing on a roof in rapt wonder for hours.

However, darkness and cold take a toll on the body. Apparently after living in such cold for an extended period of time, the brain stops making one of its neurotransmitters and actually slows down. It becomes difficult to focus, which gives Antarctic winter conversations a distinctive quality. People drift in and out and at any given time, there will be at least one person staring off into space. Looking back at the emails he wrote during that time, Rex can only conclude that he was in a different mental state. I am imagining a zombie-town Antarctic base with people wandering off across the dark ice, "frostee boy" soft-serve in hand. This is the reason that the United States Antarctic Program requires a psychological exam before wintering over, and employees are not allowed to stay on “the ice” for more than 14 months continuously.

One bright spot in all the darkness is the solstice, “Midwinter’s day,” when the bases from all 22 countries represented call each other, exchanging news and sharing group photos. However, trippy nacreous clouds notwithstanding I do not plan to spent a long night in Antarctica any time soon!

Marooned 5

So there are officially a big four hours without sunlight here now, and although it is still never dark, they do make it easier to go to sleep before 1am. But more importantly than that, it is much more appealing to sleep outside now that there is a short, dusky night.

Last night I went camping with four other people on an island near the station. It was a beautiful sunny day with very little swell so we threw a couple of tents and a stove and our sleeping bags in a boat. Some people who wanted to go out boating that evening dropped us off on Jacobs island. The first landing spot we looked at wasn’t protected from the swell enough so we chose a different one. Unfortunately, this one was even worse, and a large swell brought us onto the rocks and high-centered the boat. Standing in the unstable boat with the water surging around me, my heart got going pretty fast. Luckily we were able to get out of the boat safely, and one of the guys helped get the boat unstuck by wading out into the water. We all agreed to seal our lips about this debacle but Oops! I just told you. Can you keep a secret?

We had chosen this island to camp on because it has a flat campsite in an alley between two rock walls. We came upon what we thought was the place, and guess what? A female elephant seal had decided that this was a pretty nice spot too. She stared at us with her big beady eyes and and we got the point. Time to move on. But where? We scrambled over most of the island, getting shouted at by giant – and I really mean giant, over six foot wingspan – petrels and divebombed by territorial skuas. We stopped to watch a mama humpback whale pass by the island with her calf. Their backs rose so regularly that it was like watching a super slow motion carousel. Finally she spouted high into the air and we didn’t see her again. We eventually found a place to camp that was even better than the one occupied by the elephant seal, and set up our tents.

The island was made up of granite, cut by parallel sets of joints, and weathered into rounded lumps. There was no evidence of humans ever having been there before (although we know people have camped there before) and we felt alone with the seals, birds and whales. We climbed up to a high spot and watched the slow polar sunset. Pink washed over the snow banks on the adjacent island and highlighted the perfect peak and snow flutes of Mt Williams, towering over the cove. The waves appeared as wiggling black lines on the surface of a luminous silvery pool. Swallow-like storm petrels swooped around us. We shared a bottle of wine and lots of belly laughs. The sun sank imperceptibly and finally was a line hovering above the horizon that gradually got shorter and shorter until it disappeared.

I lost all track of time, so when we finally got too cold to sit around any longer and Rex said it was 12:40am I was sure he was lying to me. In any event, Amanda and I spent a cold night in our tent. But somehow the pebbles were in all the right places so I actually slept quite comfortably. When I got up to go to the bathroom, an Adelie penguin gave me a talking to on my way back. I was realizing that more than anywhere else, this place really feels like it belongs to the animals and we are just visitors. And in the morning the bossy penguin was gone.

After a tasty meal of breakfast burritos (remember this is like car camping – eat as well as you like!) we wandered over to a tidepool. Unfortunately the tide was too high to see much in the water, but a fur seal was sleeping nearby. I think she was planning to start her day at about the time we came by anyways, because she yawned, stretched and slowly lumbered over to the pool. Once in the water, she stretched her flippers and swam forward while turning her body like a corkscrew. She turned around and came back, doing another lap of corkscrews before finally exiting the pool through a chute filled with roiling water. It felt really special to see this fur seal go through her morning routine, warming her body up for the water like a swimmer might.

The wind had picked up overnight and the sky was overcast when our ride home approached. We threw the boat bags in and jumped after them before the zodiac could get caught on the rocks again. We had a rodeo of a ride back and circled a beautiful iceberg with a window in it, like the seastacks back home in California.

The opportunity to camp like this is unique to Palmer station and I feel incredibly lucky to have been able to experience it. I hope that by my description of this night out in Antarctica I have been able to share with you at least some of my feeling of wonder.