It's been sunny and warm here the last couple of days! We have just one more day of collecting samples before we spend a couple of days packing up. We anticipate flying back to McMurdo Station over the coming weekend. Here's a little tour to show you Lake Fryxell camp - a little more plush than Lake
In fits and starts, it's warming up here at Lake Fryxell! We have less than a week left of getting as much science done as we can. We go out everyday and drill and collect water samples. Some days have been overcast, windy and frigid. Other days are like today with calm breezes and big blue sky
We celebrate Thanksgiving here in the Dry Valleys, too! Our team took the day off from drilling and sciencing. We hiked over to another remote field camp at Lake Hoare, about 4 miles from here. The hike took us down to the end of Lake Fryxell and around the edge of the mighty Canada Glacier. The
Scientists ask questions about many different complex systems, like lakes with lots of biological and physical characteristics. Here's how scientists use models to understand one of these phenomena:
We've made our move via helicopter from Lake Bonney to Lake Fryxell. I've made a little slideshow with some extra photos of Lake Bonney: Now we are at Lake Fryxell, which is in the same valley but closer to the ocean by 5-10 miles or so. Lake Fryxell is in
We have finished as much science as we can here at Lake Bonney and have been packing up our camp to fly to Lake Fryxell tomorrow. We drilled 6 holes in the ice and took samples from each. This isn't as many as we had hoped, but it has also been colder than we anticipated and that slowed us down
I'd like to introduce you to Rochelle Pereira. Here she is, explaining the salinity experiment that her, Eckhardt Karsten and Brad Krzysiak have been working on while we've been here at Lake Bonney: With Blood Falls dumping iron brine into Lake Bonney, how
Blood Falls is super weird. Just look at it: It turns out that it plays more of a role in our research than I thought. Iron is seeping out of the mighty Taylor Glacier, mixed in with super salty water called a brine. Above the ice, this iron brine is exposed to oxygen in the air and turns rusty
Hello friends! We are making progress on our science, getting some traction against the ever-present ice. I made you a little video so you can see how we do science here. Check it out! P.S./Update: We did NOT get anything stuck in the lake.... today.
We know a lot about microbes already. We know that they produced almost all of the world's free oxygen so that later, complex organism could evolve. They help us digest our food. They break down waste products. But there's still a lot we don't understand about microbes. We can see nutrients going
