17 November 2016 So What Kind of Science is Happening Down There?

Supported by over 2,000 civilian contract employees and U.S. military personnel, researchers and special participants (like me) work at each of the U.S. Antarctic stations (McMurdo, Amundsen–Scott South Pole, and Palmer). They also work at remote field camps and in the waters of the Southern Ocean aboard the U.S. Antarctic Program's research ships, the Nathaniel B. Palmer and the Laurence M. Gould.

These projects are funded and managed by the National Science Foundation. These programs are supported because many of them can only be performed in Antarctica. The NSF doesn't work alone though. Polar science is an international effort and many researchers also work with other national antarctic programs. For example, I will be working with people from the South Korean Jang Bogo Station. This is the one of two stations operated by South Korea. But many other nations also maintain research stations in the antarctic including Russia, Ukraine, China, Germany, Finland, Chile, and Argentina (to name only a few!).

The programs come from a variety of fields. There are studies in glaciology and ice sheet dynamics. For example, currently there is a study going on to understand the behavior of the McMurdo Shear Zone in Antarctica through a four year integrated study involving field observation, satellite remote sensing, and numerical modeling. There are life science and medical studies like the McMurdo Dry Valleys Long-Term Ecological Research (MCM(abbreviation) McMurdo Station LTER) Program which is an interdisciplinary study of the aquatic and terrestrial ecosystems in an ice-free region of Antarctica. There are also geology and geophysics studies that can only be done in Antarctica. Geologists have studied old buried ice in Antarctica. Antarctica has had persistent ice for millions of years, but the ice shelf itself is not that old (most of it arrives as snow and leaves as icebergs within a few hundred thousand years.) But the buried ice in the McMurdo Dry Valleys is far older and can provide a rare archive of atmosphere and climate data extending back millions of years! And, of course, there are astronomy and physics studies like the neutron monitors and IceCube that I will be working with. I think that one of the things that surprised me the most was the variety of scientific disciplines that find it vital to do work and that Earth’s poles!