Montclair State University in Antarctica

Students research Antarctic Climate Change

2011-11-01T12:09:00.000-07:00

As part of your student research experience: think about studying Antarctic climate change. The following projects are available under the supervision of Dr. Passchier; required coursework is listed below each project title:

Project title

INDEPENDENT STUDIES (advanced B.A./B.S., M.A. Env. Sci., M.S. Geoscience)

History of East Antarctic ice rafting and climate change
Vegetation history of Antarctica from greenhouse to icehouse climate
Did Byrd Glacier retreat during the Miocene climatic optimum?

THESIS PROJECT (MA Env. Sci. conc., M.S. Geoscience, Ph.D.)

Impact of southern ocean warming on East Antarctic Ice Sheet dynamics: snowgun or melt scenario?

Getting ready for sampling and documentary

2010-06-03T05:56:00.000-07:00

The science team is getting ready to sample cores at the IODP core repository in College Station, Texas. We have been working on finalizing our sampling plans over the past few weeks. Check back here in two weeks, as I will be showing you how we continue our work.

In the mean time you can watch a documentary of our expedition here on YouTube in two 10-minute parts: Part One and Part Two

Transit to Hobart

2010-03-07T00:53:00.000-08:00

We are having a very smooth transit, very unusual actually: the seas are flat. We are now approaching the coast of Tasmania, but unfortunately it is foggy. Still, it is nice and warm now outside, so I spent some more time on deck today. The ropes are already out: we will arrive in Hobart tomorrow morning, one day early. It was a successful cruise in many aspects: from a personal perspective and from a scientific perspective.
So what will happen now? In a couple of months time we will get together again at the IODP core repository in College Station, Texas to sample the cores for laboratory analyses. This will mark the second phase of the project and it will be exciting as well, but in a different way.
So that is it for now: I hope you enjoyed the ride!

Dropping a free-fall funnel, logging and leaving

2010-03-02T04:44:00.000-08:00

The last couple of days were busy and eventful. Even out here in further from Antarctica, icebergs were approaching the ship and at one point we had to pull out of the hole and get out of the way. Luckily we were able to drop a free-fall funnel, which is a several meters wide fennel that can be assembled to fit around the drill string and drop to the sea floor through more than 3 km of water. When we got back on site we were able to find the funnel and get back into the hole. We were able to watch the reentry into the hole on the monitors in the labs: amazing thing to see them trying to put a 3km pipe long into a 30 cm hole, imagine that.

Logging was successful and after that we got a couple more cores. And then around 11 AM this morning the last core came on deck. After getting all the more than 3 km of pipe back on board we are leaving Antarctic as we speak. It is time: we have ran out of napkins (toilet paper, neatly folded up is used instead) and we are craving for some fruit and crisp salad!

Off in deep water with ice-rafted debris

2010-02-26T19:29:00.000-08:00

We are approaching the end of the drilling operations. We need to leave here four days from now to make it to Hobart on time. We are drilling in the distal end of a fan now in nearly 4000 m water depth and find laminated silts and clays and occasional rock clasts. These rock clasts are most likely ice-rafted debris, rock eroded by glaciers, that then calved and produced icebergs. The debris then gets carried off-shore by icebergs, which melt and release the rock debris so that it can fall to the sea floor. For a decent recent calving event see for example this website from NASA. It shows a series of images documenting the recent calving of the Mertz Glacier Tongue near to where we are drilling. You may have heard about it on the news, it is going on right now.

However, not all icebergs in this area originate at the Wilkes Land coast. Here in this core section is a piece of volcanic rock that may have come from the Ross Sea. I was there two years ago with the Antarctic Geological Drilling program (ANDRILL). There are several volcanic islands there that are composed of volcanic rocks like this one. (See the posts on this blog from 15-16 Oct. 2007.) A glacier may have eroded it there and icebergs may have carried it out here.

Happy down-hole loggers

2010-02-24T06:54:00.000-08:00

This is Annick, one of the two down-hole loggers. Here she was getting ready to start her work. The down-hole loggers were very happy the last couple of days, because they finally had a chance to collect some data. Poor drillhole conditions and bad weather did not make it possible to log any previous boreholes. The down-hole logging is very important for our studies. It is the only way to collect an almost continous record of the formations in the subsurface. During drilling there are always core breaks or sections that are not recovered, e.g. because the beds in the subsurface have too many large stones in them, or because the material is too soft or too loose. The down-hole logging provides a means to collect data on these missed sections. The loggers use several sets of tool, or instruments that are lowered into the borehole. One of them is the formation microscanner (FMS), which provides an image of the borehole wall. You can even see rock clasts in the borehole wall with this. Another tool is the gamma-ray tool. This tool is able to detect potassium-bearing minerals by exciting the potassium atoms with a radioactive source. In many cases the potassium-bearing phases are clay minerals, so it can be used to pick up fine-grained beds that were missed when coring. Other tools measure the resistivity of beds by sending a current trough the formation. Sands usually have high resistivity, so it is very useful to pick up coarse-grained beds. You can see some of the tools in the box on the photo to the right. These tools are lowered into the borehole on a wire, after the hole has been prepared for logging.

Last bit of core through the lab?

2010-02-22T05:33:00.001-08:00

Today was like many days on the cruise. Core was coming up and we were processing it through the lab. In the afternoon we stopped drilling and the hole was prepared for down-hole logging. More on that tomorrow. This may have been the last bit of core that we describe on our shift, so it is a good time to explain what goes on with these cores before we get them on the table. Here you can see Erik and John splitting a core for us. The core is hard, like rock, so they use a rock saw to cut it into two equal halves. One half is the Archive half: we get to describe that one and it is kept in pristine condition as much as possible. The other half is the Working half: that half gets sampled, so small pieces are cut out for laboratory analyses. After the split, we describe the features visible on the cut face of the Archive half. Today most of the rocks were laminated and some had nice microfaults (see photo). After core description the cores are photographed using a line-scan imager and fed through a logging track for measurements of color reflectance and magnetic susceptibility. After we have finished the measurements the section halves are wrapped in cling wrap and then fed into a D-tube for storage. Here you can see the D-tubes: those with the red caps are for Archive halves and those with the black caps for the Working halves.

LIVE from Antarctica

2010-02-20T20:29:00.000-08:00

We are drilling in deep water again, off-shore Antarctica. We were unable to reach our coastal site, but we are getting great core from where we are right now. We are now drilling back into the Late Miocene and I hope we are going to reach the Middle Miocene climatic optimum. This is a time when the Earth was slightly warmer than today and it may give us a window into understanding what is up for the future. Let's hope we can get that far.. We are currently at a depth of more than 400 mbsf and we are still drilling.

Another crossing of the Antarctic Circle

2010-02-19T00:00:00.000-08:00

For the past days we have done our best to reach the drillsites 9B and 8A near the coastline (see ice image in previous post). We did drill there for a while with great success before the storm, but after the storm the ice had shifted and we were not able to get back into the area. There are too many icebergs and pieces of multi-year sea ice. We did see some more of the coast of Antarctica and more penguins, Adelie penguins this time, on icebergs. The penguins have big bellies and look very well fed at the end of the summer. They are ready to face winter, which you can tell, is now coming soon.

The break in drilling gave us a chance to catch up with report writing, and in the chemistry lab almost all samples are processed now. For you science nerds (like me) out there see this video made by chemist Tina about how high precision balances work on a ship:
If you are interested in what else goes on in the chemistry lab, watch this video, made by Dan Brinkhuis, the shipboard videographer:

Storm breaks off large piece of an ice tongue in our research area

2010-02-17T06:10:00.000-08:00

We had very stormy weather over the past three days. The waves were up to 25 feet (8 m). For some reason the motion of the ship was very irregular and we were rolling around in our beds and not sleeping very much. Today the storm had died down and we tried to get back to our site near the coast, but poor visibility because of snow and the ice conditions made us turn back. The storm has broken some icebergs into numerous small pieces and has shifted some larger ones around. We also received a warning from the Naval Ice Center that a large piece of the Mertz Ice Tongue near our drill site has broken off, presumably due to the storm. You can see the crack in the image. The piece of ice that broke off has now been labeled as iceberg C-28, with a size of 43 by 18 nautical miles (80 x 33 km): try to imagine how big that is!

Tomorrow we are trying to get back to our drill site 9B between the icebergs again. Let's hope we can make it!

Penguins!

2010-02-14T07:01:00.000-08:00

When I got up this morning there were penguins on the icebergs. I saw four of them on a tiny piece of ice. They were black and white and very small, probably chinstrap penguins. I didn't have my camera with me, but Stephanie saw some as well and took a picture. Here it is. These penguins like to hang out on icebergs during the summer. You can find more information about the chinstrap penguin here.

Icebergs at night

2010-02-13T15:36:00.000-08:00

First of all: Happy Chinese New Year! Our Chinese colleagues here on board are celebrating a year of the Tiger. It is also Valentine's Day, and some others were scrambling to have flowers sent remotely. It is fabulous to experience the cultural diversity here on the ship.

It was a difficult night with decisions. We were getting great core and were advancing down through the formation to our drilling target, but two icebergs came closer and closer. The ship had its bow turned towards them and the bow lights were shining on them in the darkness. After waiting and hoping that the icebergs would make a turn away from the ship, we had to trip out of the drillhole and the ship had to be moved to get out of their way. Another problem is that a large storm with up to 65 knot winds will arrive here tomorrow, so we temporarily need to move away to the shelf edge to wait out the weather. We will have to return to this coastal site later. It is simply to dangerous to stay here in a storm amidst the icebergs.

Another challenge is that now that we get closer to March the hours of darkness are lengthening. On 21 March the day and the night will be of equal length (12 hours) around this area, near the Antarctic Circle, whereas there were 24 hours of daylight here in late December. In late June there will be 24 hours of darkness.

Between the icebergs

2010-02-12T07:49:00.000-08:00

This afternoon we arrived at one of the shelf sites where we are going to drill for more Eocene: a time when it is believed there was no ice on Antarctica. On arrival we found that there is plenty of ice now. To reach the site we had to move around a cluster of icebergs. You could follow our curvy route on the monitors that are hanging around the ship that show the transit track. You can see the coastline of Antarctica as a white line below. I was in the galley eating my breakfast this morning when we went around a curve and the ship was leaning quite steeply. When we finally reached the site this afternoon, there was an iceberg sitting almost on top of it. We are now waiting for ice to move out of the way so we can drill. The icebergs were beautiful with nice blue ice. But: let's hope that they will be out of sight tomorrow when I wake up, so we can drill. It is getting colder already, now that autumn is setting in here. When we go outside we have to dress in warm clothes and even then the wind is very cold. We do not have much time left on the shelf before winter is setting in: the Antarctic summer is very short.

Triple core and back to Antarctica

2010-02-11T18:20:00.000-08:00

We are in transit back tot he Antarctic coast to reach a site closer to the continent. We are navigating bergy waters so our route is curvy to get around these obstacles. We are still processing cores from the previous site, which was triple cored. Triple coring is sometimes done to fill gaps in the record caused by core breaks and cores that were not entirely recovered due to the heave associated with large waves. Filling these gaps allows for complete high-resolution climate records, and that is what we are after.

The weather hasn't been great lately with lots of rain and snow giving poor visibility. Nevertheless we did see some humpback whales, who were checking out the ship. They were so close that you could see the texture of the wet skin. The weather is reasonable now and I just got outside to watch us passing a huge tabular iceberg. My colleague Kota got sprayed by a wave, because we are still in rough waters. More later once we arrive at our next site, near Antarctica.

What's on the table today?

2010-02-09T02:13:00.000-08:00

Core barrels are pulled up from more than 3000 m water depth and are filled with delicious green mud. It is busy in the smear slide corner, because the composition of these fine-grained sediments needs to be determined by microscope: the particles are too small to be seen with the naked eye or a hand lens. Kota Katsuki is the day shift smear slide King. On the night shift Masako Yamane is doing a great job (see photo with Kota and Masako). When a new core is split and is brought to the description table, Kota takes smears of the mud with tooth picks and smears the mud on a glass microscope slide. Under the microscope he can identify the different components and determine how many diatoms are in the sediment. Today we were seeing silty clays and diatom-bearing silty clays in different shades of green. There were were also nice laminations of silt.

Coring is going well, but we are pulling out of the hole to get some double cores to fill gaps. A weather window is opening up near the Antarctic coast over the weekend and we are going to move there tomorrow evening. This is our last chance to get close to Antarctica before autumn storms and developing ice prevent us from going there. We will most likely return to our present site later to finish coring further back in time. The frequent transits and pull-ups due to weather is taking a bit of a toll on the science team. This is also a difficult period in the cruise: it is still long before we return and it has been long enough that people miss their family and friends. We are also getting a bit tired. The nice core that we are getting, the new friends we are making here on board, and the science, however, is making all good!

Good old diamictite and another transit

2010-02-07T07:16:00.000-08:00

The drilling started out very well yesterday, but unfortunately about 30 meters into the sea floor the drillstring broke off and it had to be left behind in the hole. It was then just time to move out of the shelf area, because of the approaching big storm. We did get diamictites with quite good recovery before the incident. There were big boulders in them that we drilled through as well. These diamictites likely originate from the erosional and grinding action of glaciers, which released their debris upon melting in the ocean, or by sedimentation from icebergs, which are plenty at this site along coastal Antarctica today. Notice the big pink granite clast: quite amazing to find that in a core!
After the drilling terminated the beacon was floated from the seafloor to the surface and was pulled in. We received an update on the plans for the next site in the core lab, as usual. Co-chief Carlota (seen on the back) here is explaining what is happening. We are in transit so often these days, that when you get up the first question is: where are we, and what is happening? We actually just arrived on our next site in just over 3000 m of water. The weather here is still not too bad, so we may get some coring done before the storm. In the mean time, so many good data sets have come out of some of our previous sites that we are having a science meeting tomorrow to discuss the implications.

Across the Antarctic Circle

2010-02-06T07:30:00.001-08:00

Today, as I got up, we passed the Antarctic Circle in transit to the next drill site. We were all taking pictures and watching the ice. When we arrived at the innermost shelf site we were surrounded by so many icebergs that it was too dangerous to stay. A whale came to check us out, but left quickly.

We moved to a site further out on the shelf so that we would have the opportunity to move away to the North out of the icy waters if visibility would deteriorate. From here we can still see the pack ice (sea ice) in the distance. It has gotten colder during the day. This evening it was the first time I put all my cold weather gear on with all the hats and gloves. Bad weather is coming in this evening: we will be hit by 60 knot winds and snow. It is very likely that drilling operations will have to be shut down, but for the moment we have the drillstring in the sea floor and are moving ahead. I just saw the first core coming up and it had mud with gravel in it. The second one is about to come up soon.

Seasonal algal blooms recorded in an Antarctic sediment core

2010-02-04T06:49:00.000-08:00

For the past two days we have been working on collecting a very unique set of cores. We are currently coring into the Adelie Drift, in a small basin on the Antarctic shelf with a water depth of about 1000 m. The basin is filled with organic sediments composed of more than 90 % diatoms, other microscopic algae and zooplankton. That type of sediment is called diatom ooze. In the photo, you can see a part of a core that we processed today. Each light-colored layer represents the cysts left by a spring bloom of microscopic algae, predominantly diatoms. These diatoms bloom when daylight lengthens and when the sea ice starts to break up in the spring, so that nutrients are released into the surface waters. The dark layers in the core are created in the autumn and winter, when the days shorten, the sea freezes over, and eventually the polar night takes over. Besides diatoms, we also found fish bones in the dark layers in the cores, predominantly vertebrae. Each light and dark layer forms a couplet representing one year. Like tree rings, changes in the surface climate conditions affect the thickness and composition of each layer. The Adelie Drift probably contains about 10,000 of these laminae (layers) going back 10,000 years. This is a very valuable record documenting short-term climate change in a very remote place on our planet.

The coring of these sediments is a bit different from the drilling we were doing at the previous site. We are using an APC piston coring system now (see drilling equipment class in an earlier post). It works like a giant syringe where watery mud is extracted out of the sea floor. The first couple of cores were very soupy and accompanied by a very powerful smell of rotten eggs (H2S). We also had some issues with exploding cores from all the gases that were released out of the sediment: there is a huge pressure difference between atmospheric pressure here on deck and the weight of 1000 m of water pressing on the sediment there below. Here is a photo of what is left of a core liner after the core exploded. Luckily no one got hurt, because everyone is wearing protective safety gear.

We were treated with another beautiful day today as well. It is almost unreal: we are in Antarctica and it is supposed to be very cold and windy, but it was just around freezing and in the sun it felt quite pleasant. We did feel the catabatic wind come down from the ice-sheet when the sun was setting, but it wasn't too bad at all. The catabatic wind, is a typical wind of the polar regions, and it develops when air cools over the surface of an ice sheet, becomes dense, and flows out to the coast. The sun is setting at around 11 PM. It does not get completely dark because the sun is only a few degrees below the horizon and the sunset becomes a sunrise within 2 hours. In the photo below the surface above the iceberg is the top of the ice sheet. It is odd to see the sun set above an ice sheet, but it is a magnificent experience!

Whales, the sun, core, and a view on the Adelie Coast, Antarctica

2010-02-03T06:17:00.000-08:00

Today was a perfect day. When I got up this morning there was no wind, the sun was out, whales were checking out the ship, and we had a view on the coast of Antarctica. That is a lot! A few hours later the first cores came on deck. You can imagine that the whole science team was in a very good mood. The Adelie Coast is one of the windiest places on Earth. The area is usually very foggy with low visibility. None of that seemed true this morning. We were all relaxing a bit before the first cores came up: enjoying the views with the numerous icebergs.
Most icebergs are grounded on the shelf, but a few smaller ones were on the move. We are actually moving out of the way of one now. This evening a few cores were split, and we got to describe them. I will show you some more of that tomorrow. Our internet is going to be down in a few moments. Enjoy the view on the Adelie Coast below. The white above the horizon is the East Antarctic ice sheet, not a cloud. Talk to you later!

In transit to the Adelie coast

2010-02-02T08:01:00.000-08:00

We are in transit to the Adelie coast, where our next drill site is located. Unfortunately, bad weather and poor hole conditions prevented down-hole logging at our previous site: I will explain what that is later. In transit to the Adelie coast we expected to encounter icebergs. This afternoon the ship passed a large tabular iceberg. It was first spotted on the radar. Diego, the ice observer then got onto his post (see photo). These large icebergs may calve and produce small ones that are not visible on the radar. They are called growlers and Diego is very good at spotting them. His job is to advise the Captain and first mate so that the ship does not run into them. Visibility was very good this afternoon, so we were doing more than 10 knots despite the ice.

Later John, the first mate came out and measured the dimensions of the iceberg with a sextant (see photo left). It turned out to be about 3000 feet (1000 m) long: you wouldn't say that, huh? Later that night when I came off shift I had the opportunity to watch the sunset. In the photo, the sun has already set, but it is just below the horizon. In a way it is a sunset and sunrise in one: during this time of the year that is as dark as it gets. Although it got quite cold (1-2 degrees C) a bunch of us were enjoying this view. You can see the people near the bridge to the left, and the dark bump on the horizon is another iceberg. We could see small bits of ice near the ship as well.

I am already excited about tomorrow, when we will arrive on the Adelie coast, only 18 miles from the Antarctic continent. There will be a lot of ice, but hopefully not too much, so we can get some more cores, this time spanning the past ca. 10,000 years.

In the Eocene at 1000 meters below sea floor

2010-02-01T06:19:00.000-08:00

We made it! After 1000 meters of drilling the microfossils indicate we are in the Eocene (more than 34 million years ago). Today the last bit of core was split and in the photo you can see the finger pointing at the piece that came from exactly 1000 meters below the seafloor. From the core we can tell that the sediment, which is very fine-grained clay, had been deposited quite gently particle by particle. It became a rock when cement had precipitated in the pores. Numerous burrows in the claystone tell us that the sea floor was once a lively place. The types of burrows, and the microfossils, tell us it was likely a deep marine environment, and that it was a greenhouse world. How much warmer it was here so close to Antarctica and how it got so cold as it is today is what we need to find out next through analyzing samples. Most of this work will be done when we get home. But the important part is done: get the rocks of the right age.

But it is not time to go home yet! Instead over the next few days we will move closer to Antarctica. The ice conditions have improved and one of the shelf drill sites on the Wilkes Land coast is free of ice. Now the drillers are pulling up all the drillpipe. We are in more than 4000 m of water, so that is 4000+1000=5000 m (15,000 ft) of pipe that is currently hanging below the ship, imagine that! The pipe is only several inches across, so it behaves like a string of cooked spaghetti. We are currently having high seas with waves up to 20ft (6m), so it is a real challenge for the drillers to pull it in.

I am really excited to wake up tomorrow and perhaps to see the icebergs and the sea ice. We may have to move slowly though because of the bad weather. After this one that we are currently in, a second storm is predicted to hit us. We have had snow today as well, and due to the strong wind and high seas it wasn't pleasant outside. Let's hope it will improve soon.

The bugs and the paleomagician

2010-01-29T03:58:00.000-08:00

We are still on site and drilling. A few icebergs have been sited on the horizon and the Captain and the ice observer are watching their movements. This is important, because we are stuck 800 m into the sea floor with a drill pipe and it takes some time to pull all that pipe and to be able to move out of the way. These icebergs are big: they can be several hundreds of meters to miles long and the ship is dwarfed by such a size. In the mean time we are busy with our science.
This is the Paleontology Lab. Three paleontologists are busy looking for microfossils who can give us an age for the cores we are recovering. In Antarctica, the diatoms (microscopic algae) are the most important group for the shallower depths in the core. They evolve fast and there are many different species, so overlapping age ranges produce good time resolution. Unfortunately at greater depth below the sea floor it doesn't work as well. Upon burial below sediment layers several hundreds of meters below the sea floor where the temperature and pressure is greater, the skeletons of these organisms (called frustules) dissolve. The frustules are made of opal, a type of silica, and have characteristic shapes, which are lost through dissolution at burial. Fortunately we have other microfossil groups that we can work with to provide an age and then there is the paleomagician!
The paleomagnetists measure the magnetic properties of the sediments. The sediments acquire the magnetic properties through the workings of the Earth's magnetic field. Through time the Earth's magnetic field has been shifting from pointing into the Earth at the North Pole (normal polarity, like today), to pointing into the Earth at the South Pole (reverse polarity). Minerals in the sediments align themselves with the Earth's magnetic field during deposition and so a polarity record becomes entombed into the sediment layers below the sea floor. The record of the Earth's polarity reversals is known from areas of seafloor spreading, where volcanic rocks can be dated through radiometric dating (using radioactive decay of elements in minerals). This record is known as the geomagnetic polarity time scale. Paleomagnetists can count magnetic reversals in the cores back in time and try to match the cores to the geomagnetic polarity time scale to provide an age.

One interesting aspect of our current location is that we are almost right on top of the magnetic South Pole. It means that if compass needles were freely suspended they would point straight up. The magnetic North and South Pole do not coincide with the geographic North and South Pole. In fact the magnetic poles are always on the move. The magnetic South Pole is now located off-shore Wilkes Land in our area, but about a century ago it was further inland in Antarctica. Douglas Mawson, an Australian Antarctic explorer tried to find it back then, but he barely survived the trip. He almost died of vitamin A poisoning because his sled fell down a crevasse and he and his pals only had the sled dogs to eat, with their livers rich in vitamin A. His two pals (Ninnis and Mertz) died. His journal is a great read, but I am glad our tip is so much more convenient!

Green mud with burrows and no ice rafted debris

2010-01-25T06:12:00.000-08:00

Todays core logging provided some nice animal burrows that were made more than 10 million years ago. As the creature was crawling through the mud, the burrow backfilled, which produced these nice structures. Drilling is continuing at a fast pace and the drill string extends to hundreds of meters below the sea floor. We are now not seeing many large stones or ice-rafted debris, so we may have traveled back into a warmer period already. These rocks show us that the Antarctic climate was changing in the past: from iceberg environments to an environment with no icebergs and a strongly burrowed sea floor. Pretty interesting huh? Let's see what tomorrow will bring...
Also: the video of our second week on the ship can now be viewed here.

Olive green mud

2010-01-23T06:58:00.000-08:00

A core is coming up every hour now and everyone is busy in their labs. Today we logged green mud with diatoms and gravel. Diatoms are microscopic single-celled algae and the gravel indicates the presence of ice bergs. Sedimentologists make visual observations on the cut face of the core and record these on logging sheets and in the database. We also use a microscope to examine smearslides: smears of mud on glass microscope slides. These smears provide an estimate of how much of the sediment is made up of diatoms and other fossil fragments, and how much is made up of minerals, such as quartz and feldspar (see below). The proportions of each component are changing throughout the core and are caused by changes in the paleoenvironment and paleoclimate of Antarctica. Our target at this site is to drill deep into the sea floor and recover rocks from a time when Antarctica was ice-free with forests on its coasts. So far we have seen evidence of ice rafting in the form of pebbles, so we haven't yet traveled far enough in time to reach our goal.

Photomicrograph of a smearslide with abundant diatom fragments.

On to the next site

2010-01-22T05:53:00.000-08:00

Unfortunately we had to abandon the first hole (Site WLRIS-6A in the map) after only 31 m of drilling. It was all composed of coarse sand and gravel (see photo) with just a little bit of mud. Coarse-grained sediments are very difficult to drill, because they are not coherent. The drillhole becomes unstable and is caving in, which can cause the drill bit to get stuck in the sea floor. To prevent this, we had to abandon the hole and go to a different site to reach our objectives. The sand and gravel was an unexpected discovery and we are still trying to explain how it got there, although we know it came from Antarctica. Because we are exploring a part of the Antarctic margin where no one has ever drilled before, such surprises are expected. Our next site is to the northwest of WLRIS-6A. We are there now, and drilling has just started. When I wake up tomorrow morning there will be more core and there will be more discoveries. Stay tuned, it will get even better.

Core on the floor!

2010-01-20T18:49:00.000-08:00

After some problems with APC coring (see drilling equipment class a few posts ago), we have our first core on deck as of this morning. I woke up with the message "core on the floor" on the PA system at 11 AM. Yesterday two attempts were made to launch the piston corer, but one shoe broke off, and the other bent so severely that the drillers couldn't pull it up through the drill pipe. The only solution was to pull all the pipe out and to try again with a rotary core barrel. It was pretty obvious that there was something very hard out there near the sea floor and this morning we found out what it was: gravel. The first core was cut into sections and is currently sitting in the core lab to equilibrate, so that the physical properties will not change while these are measured on the core. After the physical properties have been measured, the core will be split into two halves, and we, the sedimentologists, get to describe the cut face of one half. The other half will be sampled.
The core comes out of the core barrel in a 9 m long plastic tube (see photo taken on "the catwalk"). There the length of the core is measured and it is cut into 1.5 m long sections by the curator and his team. In the photo, you can see co-chief scientist Carlota Escutia (in front) and the core techs placing the second core in the holders. This happened just now. The core feels quite cold when it comes up. This is the main reason that it is necessary to hold the core in a rack in the core lab for a while so that it can get to room temperature first. Temperature effects physical properties, such as density. You may know that most materials expand when they heat up, and this reduces their density.

P.S. For all you teachers and professors out there: feel free to use anything from this blog for your classes. This is for you and your students, so that you can take part in the experience! Feel free to ask questions via the comments as well. I will try to answer them as well as I can or get an expert from the rest of the science team to do it if I can't. Additional resources can be found on joidesresolution.org.

On site!

2010-01-19T01:07:00.001-08:00

When I woke up this morning I was just in time to witness the deployment of the beacon (see photo) to mark our first drill site. We are at 63° 50.48’S, 138º 49.40’E in 3773 m of water. The beacon is a very important piece of equipment because it plays a role in keeping the ship on site. An automated dynamic positioning system drives a series of thrusters that can move the ship sideways, backward and ahead. The beacon will descend to the sea floor, produce a signal, which is received by the ship. If the ship drifts too far off the site the dynamic positioning will respond and thrusters will automatically turn on to move the ship back into position.

During the deployment of the beacon the drillers were already busy putting together the bottom-hole-assembly (BHA-see the blog a few days ago). A lot of weight was added to the BHA to keep the drill string straight in the deep water that we are in. We are going to start with advanced (hydraulic) piston coring (APC) to refusal and will then continue with the extended core barrel (XCB) in the more compacted sediments at depth beneath the sea floor. The drillers are currently tripping pipe, which can take a while in deep water. They first have to give out 3773 m of pipe to reach the sea floor!

Below are some movies illustrating the drilling preparation activities. If all is well we will have some core tomorrow! It will mean we cannot post to our blogs so much, but I will try to post as much as I can.

Bergy water

2010-01-18T02:11:00.000-08:00

The forecasters at the National Snow and Ice Data Center were right: we encountered bergy water (icebergs) in our transit to the coastal drill sites. There were different types of icebergs, as our on board ice observer, Diego Mello, explained to us earlier: tabular, pinnacled, dry-dock, blocky, domed, and wedge icebergs. You can see a large tabular iceberg in the image above. The part that is sticking out above water (only 10% of the iceberg) is 195 ft (~60m) high. Smaller icebergs are present as well and the ones that are smaller than 5 m across are called "growlers". You can see a few growlers in the photos below. They can have very irregular shapes and we can see them come close to the ship.

These icebergs are pieces of glaciers that have broken off where they reached the sea. This is called "calving". Glaciers are "rivers" of ice that flow relatively slowly, usually on the order of 1 to 1000 m per year. When ice flows over the rocky landscape it picks up debris, which become partially embedded in the ice. When a glacier reaches the coastline it thins and begins to float, and eventually it calves to produce icebergs. These icebergs will carry the debris that is embedded in the ice out to sea, where it will fall to the sea
floor as the iceberg melts. This debris is commonly called IRD by geologists (short for ice-rafted debris).

The albatrosses are long gone: they prefer to stay further north, and have been replaced with other birds including penguins, which were sited by others on board. Three of us on top of the bridge and the people on the bridge itself saw one or a few small whales yesterday. We are likely going to see more.

We proceeded to the coast of Wilkes Land until one of the radars broke, the wind started picking up, and it began to snow. These conditions were not safe for drilling so close to the coast, where we need good visibility with all those icebergs around. So we proceeded to one of our off-shore sites, where we will arrive tomorrow. The seas are getting a bit rough now as well. Wave heights have been increasing through the day. Once we made our way north far enough, the snow turned to rain, so it is no longer pleasant to be outside.

It will now not be long until we have core. That will be a good thing, because we are as ready as one can be and cabin fever is kicking in. The movie below is a nice illustration of this (not my creation, but I thought, as many others on board that it was incredible funny):

Life boat drill at the polar front

2010-01-17T03:33:00.000-08:00

We had one of our weekly life boat drills today. What you do is you put your life vest, hard hat, and safety glasses on and proceed to your preassigned life boat after the "abandon ship" alarm goes off. You also take your survival suit with you. These suits have floatation cushions and will keep you warm for a while. There are four lifeboats with more seats than we have people on board. This time we were required to sit in the life boats (see photo) and learn how to start the engine. It was not very complicated and it worked quite well. The life boats have a beacon that sets of an emergency signal so response teams can find the boat. Let's hope we never need to use it!

We have crossed the polar front: yesterday the surface water temperatures dropped from 7 to 0 degrees C (32 F) in 24 hours (sea water freezes at below 0 temperatures, below 32 F). There were two iceberg sitings, but I missed them, one because I was sleeping. There was another one on the radar an hour ago, but the fog is too dense and we didn't see it. We are scheduled to arrive on the Wilkes Land coast tomorrow. The Captain needs to check out the area of the first drill site and see if it is safe. The satellite images show bergy water and some thick sea ice floating around. So: we will certainly see some ice tomorrow. Stay tuned for the pictures and explanations.

Our videographer has made a weekly video report, which you can watch here. It is composed around an interview with our staff scientist, Adam Klaus. Enjoy!

Drilling equipment class

2010-01-16T05:34:00.000-08:00

Staff scientist Adam Klaus took us on a tour of the ship today to introduce us to the drilling operations and equipment. We had to wear hard hats and safety glasses, because of all the moving parts on and around the rig floor. The derrick (right) holds the drill string and once we are on site it will hold the bottom hole assembly composed of the drill bit and core barrel. Pipe will be tripped behind/above the bottom hole assembly enough to reach the sea floor and then to drill into the sea floor. Depending on the types of rocks or sediments cored, different coring equipment will be used. For soft sediments, the advanced piston (APC) corer is used. It is composed of a cutting shoe that is pushed into the sea floor and then takes out 9 m lengths of core. It operates a bit like a syringe. You can see the APC cutting shoe in the image to the left. The APC extends forward through the hole in the center of a drill bit, similar to the one indicated in the photo below. The core will come up through the center of the hole and a core catcher will keep it in place. The core catchers are the small cylinders with the petals in the center in the lower right of the photo. When the sediments are too hard, an extended core barrel (XCB) is used, which will rotate and drill into the sediment. In lithified sedimentary rock, only rotary coring is possible, and most of the work will then be done by the drill bit below with a core barrel behind it (RCB). We will need to learn these terms and abbreviations, because it will affect the preservation of the sediment cores we see.

A nice day with low seas

2010-01-15T03:45:00.000-08:00

Today we had nice weather and relatively low seas. I was pleased to see a smile come back on the faces of some of my colleagues who had been sea sick for the last couple of days. We are now slowly drifting towards our work shifts from midnight to noon or noon to midnight (my shift). Once we are on site, expected for Monday evening January 18th, we are going to work around the clock and in two teams we will continuously process core.
The night-shift sedimentologists had a practice run today (see photo above). The two sedimentology teams will take care of visual core description, imaging, and color scanning. All information will be entered in a database. We, the day-shift team, had a practice run yesterday and we are now well-prepared for the first core on deck.
The palynologists are ready too: Joerg Pross and Peter Bijl. They are after the organic-walled cysts of fossil algae called dinoflagellates. These are microscopic photosynthesizing organisms that live in the surface of the ocean. Because these organisms evolved relatively fast, they are good biostratigraphic markers and give us an indication of the age of the rocks we are drilling. Joerg and Peter are working in a special fume hood in the chemistry lab, because they need to use a very strong acid (Hydrofluoric acid) to dissolve the rocks. This is the only way to obtain these microfossils that are so crucial to our studies.

This is really a time of getting everything ready: three more days and we will be on site. Today, I also saw a few people working on the drill rig. You could watch them work from the top of the bridge. The seas were too rough for work on the rig in the previous days. It is easy to forget how big the derrick is that we are carrying on top of the ship! Seeing the man out there puts it all in perspective.
The ice observer Diego Mello is expecting icebergs any time now, so he is watching the radar and the surface of the ocean. We are between 58 and 59 degrees South, which is where icebergs are rare, but easy to miss.

Besides the icebergs there is another interesting geological feature to talk about: we are crossing the boundary between the Indian-Australian plate and the Antarctic plate. The Indian-Australian plate carries part of New Zealand, Australia and India and the Antarctic plate carries the Antarctic continent. The plate boundary is called a divergent plate boundary, because the plates are spreading apart and new ocean crust is formed.
The plate boundary is expressed as a mid-oceanic ridge (indicated in green tints) and has multiple transform faults that intersect the plate margin at high angles. Due to the process of seafloor spreading, India and Australia are moving northward away from Antarctica. This process has been going on for some time. At our first drill, we are going to drill into rocks that are quite old and may date from the Eocene. During this time Antarctica and Australia were much closer than they are today, and if we go even further back in time both continents were part of a supercontinent called Gondwana.

Antarctic Circumpolar Current

2010-01-14T02:02:00.000-08:00

Winds and wave heights have decreased and we are now back on track at 55 degrees South, with the ship pointing southwestward at 8 knots. We are now entering the realm of the Antarctic Circumpolar Current, a strong westward flowing current, driven by the westerlies. The westerlies are winds caused by air flowing from the subtropical highs to the low pressure cells at the Polar Frontal Zone. The winds are diverted westward by the Coriolis force. In contrast, cold katabatic winds that descend northward from the high pressure cells centered above the Antarctic ice sheet are diverted eastward, and drive the polar current near the coastline of Antarctica (large blue arrows). Here in the Antarctic Polar Frontal Zone the surface water temperatures decrease rapidly: we should be seeing icebergs soon....

Video showing us rocking and rolling

2010-01-13T02:13:00.000-08:00

High waves are slowing us down

2010-01-12T14:48:00.000-08:00

Yesterday in the evening a strong low pressure system suddenly developed in our transit track. We are at the polar front zone near 50 degrees south latitude where cold polar air clashes with warm air from the north and this is where these low pressure systems develop. Last night wave heights were increasing rapidly to more than 10 m (30 ft) and the Captain had to steer the ship away from the developing storm. During the night and morning we were staying in the same location with the bow of the ship heading northwestward at about 4 knots. As of 9:30 AM we are back on track and heading south again. The seas are very rough and wave heights are still approaching 10 m (30 ft) and some people are in their cabins feeling sick, whereas others have taken medication. We also had to tie down the equipment in the labs because the waves come in from the side now and make the ship roll sideways. In the wave height map above you can see where we are heading (see the arrow). Red colors are high waves. The storm will move eastward and the forecast for tomorrow is looking good. Let's hope we can make it through the "screaming 50s" before the next storm arrives....

The roaring 40s

2010-01-11T00:05:00.000-08:00

Here we are in the roaring 40s: strong winds and rain. The roaring 40s refers to the latitude at which low pressure systems circle the globe eastward in the Southern Ocean. We are in a storm to the south of New Zealand. We are no longer sheltered by the South Island of New Zealand, because we are too far south, so we feel the full impact of the winds and ocean swell.

Some of my colleagues had to lie down because the ship is suddenly moving a lot more than it did yesterday. I am still not feeling much of a difference; I have never been seasick before, so let's hope I can keep that up.

Outside the weather is mainly miserable. When I was on deck for 10 minutes I saw an albatros or two flying next to the ship and I saw water shooting up through the moonpool: the hole in the center of the ship through which the drillpipe will be lowered when we are on site. You can see the location of the moonpool indicated in the image below. It also shows you where I work, sleep and eat. My cabin is on the Upper Tween Deck, two floors up from the thrusters (more on those later). I share the cabin with Mitsu, a Japanese scientist, who will be on the opposite shift. For more information about the interior of the ship see: http://ship.iodp.tamu.edu/ship.html.

I work in the core lab with the team of sedimentologists and the sedimentology technician. We represent 8 countries: U.S., Japan, New Zealand, Australia, Korea, India, United Kingdom and China (see image below). Today we were instructed on the core flow by the staff scientist and the core curator, so that we know what will happen once core comes up. We also had a lecture from the ice observer and the weather forecaster, two very important people who work with the Captain to ensure our safety in the icy waters around Antarctica. The sea ice conditions at the drillsites on the shelf are looking good based on recent satellite imagery, although we may have to navigate a few decent icebergs of more than a couple of miles long.

We are on our way!

2010-01-09T00:59:00.001-08:00

The ropes were pulled in at 11 AM this morning. The weather was extremely nice and we had a very enjoyable morning sitting on deck watching the preparations for departure. Two small boats were pulling the ship from the quay out to sea. We are now making our way south along the east coast of New Zealand. The seas are still relatively calm, only with some white caps. Fortunately we are still in the shelter of the South Island, but it may be different when we wake up tomorrow morning. The ropes were stored below deck: we will not need them for two months until we return to land in March (to Hobart, Australia).

Antarctica more than 35 million years ago?

2010-01-08T12:55:00.001-08:00

This is what Antarctica was like more than 35 million years ago in the Eocene: no ice sheet and a vegetation of tree ferns, Nothofagus trees and shrubs. This is the image that emerges from previous Antarctic drill holes and samples that recovered pollen and spores from the Eocene. Our mission is to find out when and why it changed.

This is a photo from the Wellington botanical garden. New Zealand and Antarctica were once side by side within a supercontinent called Gondwana before tectonic processes sent New Zealand further North. New Zealand has been isolated as a set of islands for a long time and still carries some of that Gondwana flora and fauna.

The science party had the afternoon off yesterday to spend the last couple of hours on shore before departure. We are departing in half an hour as the tide rises. We are so full of fuel that the ship is deep in the water and the Captain did not want to take any chances getting out of port. The weather forecast is still projecting bad weather with up to 45 knot wind gusts for tomorrow as we follow the coast of New Zealand's South Island southward.

A day with Zenon

2010-01-06T21:48:00.000-08:00

I am part of a science team called the sedimentologists. There are 10 of us and we will work in two shifts: noon to midnight and midnight to noon. We are not on shift yet, because we are still in port. Today we were receiving instruction on the lab equiment and database software from the sedimentology tech, Zenon Matteo (see photo). We also had a meeting to discuss how we are going to operate as a team. I think we are almost ready for the first core now. The Captain told us today that we are still scheduled to depart on the morning of Saturday the 9th (on the 8th in the US and Europe). The weather forecast warns of 40-50 knot winds, so we get to test our sea legs right away!

On board the Joides Resolution

2010-01-05T11:01:00.000-08:00

After a 29 hour plane travel, I have arrived in Wellington New Zealand. The ship, the Joides Resolution, came into port the day before yesterday and yesterday (January 5th) we were able to move on board. In a few minutes we will have our first meeting with the entire science party (> 30 people), now that everyone has arrived. We are still scheduled to leave Wellington on the 9th, so we will spend a few more days in port. It is nice for us to get over jet lag before heading into the ocean swells. You will notice that the ship has a tower on it called the "derrick". This is where the drill rig is located. If all goes well we are going to drill 5 holes up to more than a kilometer deep on the Antarctic continental margin. We are all getting excited, but it is still a bit unreal: it is Summer here with temperatures in the 70s (20 degrees C), and we are heading for the coldest place on Earth. More later!

View the expedition trailer

2009-12-21T06:12:00.000-08:00

A videographer, Dan Brinkhuis, will join us on our expedition. He made the following trailer, which is about one of the objectives of our expedition:

Enjoy!

Follow the annual retreat of the sea ice

2009-12-12T08:23:00.000-08:00

In preparation for our cruise to the Wilkes Land margin of Antarctica, we are watching the sea ice closely. Sea ice forms in the Antarctic every austral Winter (March through September) by freezing of the surface of the ocean. The sea ice melts back from October through February (the Antarctic Summer). For our cruise it is important that the sea ice melts back enough so that the ship can reach the continental shelf, which is the area of the ocean adjacent to land, where the water depths are relatively shallow. In the image you can see the the sea ice map for December 11, 2009 with the Wilkes Land margin indicated with an arrow. The movie here shows the retreat of the sea ice over the past 21 days. It is looking quite good: the sea ice has receded from the shelf area there. You can go to the following web site and keep an eye on the sea ice on a daily basis: http://www.iup.uni-bremen.de:8084/amsr/amsre.html. Just scroll down the page to the Antarctic.

Dr. Passchier prepares for another trip to Antarctica

2009-11-22T07:34:00.000-08:00

On January 2, 2010, Dr. Passchier will head south again for another trip to Antarctica. This time she will board a ship in Wellington, New Zealand, which will sail to the Wilkes Land margin of Antarctica (WL on the map). The objective of the cruise is to collect another set of drill cores on the Antarctic continental margin to reconstruct Antarctica's climate and ice-sheet history.

Antarctica is an important component of the Earth system. 1) Its white surface of ice and snow reflects sunlight and keeps the Earth cool. 2) The seasonal formation of sea ice produces cold salty waters that sink and flow northward to cool the lower latitudes of our globe. 3) The Antarctic ice sheets store 70 m in sea level equivalents, meaning that the Statue of Liberty would be in water up to her armpits when all that would melt. Although that is unlikely to happen, keeping an eye on what is going on with all the ice is a good idea!

Credits: map from Barker et al. Leg 178 Scientific Results; image from Ken Miller, Rutgers University

Presentation of scientific results at conference in Granada, Spain

2009-11-22T07:28:00.000-08:00

Dr. Passchier is presenting the results of the ANDRILL SMS studies on behalf of the sedimentology team at an international science conference in Granada, Spain, September 2009. For more photos and information about the symposium see the symposium website here.

Radio Interview with NJN News

2008-08-14T10:09:00.000-07:00

Click on the link below to listen to a radio interview in the Series "Sounds of Science" with Partick Regan of NJN News. Hit the Podcast icon and find "Antarctic Perspectives" if you scroll down the list.

http://www.njn.net/radio/programs/soundsofscience.html

Article in Christian Science Monitor

2008-02-26T11:09:00.000-08:00

See below for a link to an article about our work in McMurdo Station last Fall 2007 in the Christian Science Monitor of February 20, 2008.
"Scientists read Antarctic mud for climate change insight."

Antarctic science lecture January 31, 2008

2008-01-14T12:11:00.000-08:00

Within the framework of the Focus the Nation climate awareness event I am going to give a science lecture for a general audience at Montclair State University. The lecture will be about the Antarctic environment in general and about the responses of the region to climate change. Details on time and place can be found at Our Program Site.

Made it back home!

2007-12-15T09:54:00.000-08:00

After a long journey I have made it back home. The C-17 came in and brought us back to New Zealand. It was quite cold and windy when we were waiting on the sea ice to board the aircraft, but we were enjoying our last minutes on the ice. The cold is part of the experience and we certainly got used to it! While we were waiting our luggage was loaded onto the aircraft. Note the sea-ice firetruck, a track vehicle. It was a full flight with around 80 people coming back from the ice. After we took off, we were able to move around within the aircraft. It has 4 windows and I spent most of the first two hours looking at the icy landscapes below. First we traveled above the sea ice of the Ross Sea. One could see that it is Summer now and it is starting to break up. The Antarctic sea ice forms every Winter and breaks up every Summer. Later, we were flying across the front of the Transantarctic Mountains and one could see glaciers flowing through valleys and merging with the sea ice of the Ross Sea. Ice flows very slowly and it can flow uphill as well, but it eventually flows out to sea, where it breaks up into icebergs that are carried North by the ocean currents.
Now that the science team has made it home, we will all work in our labs in collaboration with students to analyze the core further. You can check this site for science updates. I will post pictures and information of our lab work once the samples have come in. They have been shipped from the ice and will arrive in the next few weeks. Happy holidays everyone!

Greetings from Miers Valley

2007-12-06T14:07:00.000-08:00

The last few days have been extremely busy with wrapping up reports and packing up our gear. Then at the last moment yesterday, after being on hold for three days, we were put in the field by helo. Still, the weather wasn't too good, because a low pressure system kept hanging around the Ross Sea area, but the helo pilot managed to slip us in and out between snow storms. We headed for Miers Valley, a small dry valley south of McMurdo Station off Blue Glacier in the Transantarctic Mountains. The rocks in Miers Valley are basement rocks composed of metasediments, cut by mafic dykes. Granitoid intrusions also occur. Many fragments of these types of rocks were found in the ANDRILL SMS core. We landed next to the calving front of Miers Glacier, a nice example of a polar cold-based glacier. These types of glaciers only melt at the surface as you can see by the meltwater rills on the calving front behind the helo. We also found huge ventifacts: rocks that have been sculpted and blasted by wind carrying sand and gravel particles. We also made a stop at some volcanic islands to pick up scoria samples for comparison to the ones we found in the core. Finally we made a kind of emergency stop on a moraine in white-out conditions and waited out the weather a bit before heading back to McMurdo.

Last night was "Bag Drag" which is basicly checking in for the flight on the C-17 back to Christchurch, New Zealand. We will be leaving tonight, a little later than normally, because the C-17 had mechanical problems. I have been told they have been solved, but we will see. The weather is looking fine today, so the plane should be able to land. So, I will be hopeful and say: this was my last blog from Antarctica, see you back home in a few days!

Almost ready to go home

2007-12-03T23:50:00.000-08:00

A helo trip to the Mount Discovery volcanic area has been arranged for tomorrow and I am scheduled to be on it. We are going to examine some of the source rocks that we find in the core. All depends on weather, but the forecast is looking okay at the moment. We are further getting ready to leave the ice in a few days. We are finishing up our scientific reports and are giving final presentations to the science team. We will leave from an area that is further from McMurdo Station. Last weekend the sea ice runway was moved to Pegasus and Willy Field on the ice shelf. You can see the train of vehicles pulling the buildings in the photo. The sea ice is getting too thin and too soft to land planes on it. It is no longer safe, so the runway had to be moved to thicker glacial ice. The sea ice edge with open water has progressed further south and the sea ice is breaking out. The recent satellite image at the top shows that the open water has come quite close to the station. The drill rig is also being dismantled as we speak. Although it is on multi-year thick sea ice, the ice is becoming to weak to support the weight of the rig.

Brunch at Scott Base and a walk through the pressure ridges

2007-12-01T19:24:00.001-08:00

Yesterday we finished logging the last pile of cores down to 1038.54 meters below sea floor. Today, Sunday, we had a chance to finally take a couple of hours off and we were invited to have brunch at Scott Base. Scott Base is the New Zealand base and the green buildings of the base are just a few miles from McMurdo Station (see photo above). Behind the base you can see the pressure ridges in the sea ice. One of the mountaineers offered us a trip through the area. He had drilled several holes to estimate the ice thickness and found a save route through the area. The pressure ridges are exceptionally high now (much higher than when I first saw them 10 years ago) because the sea ice has not broken out since 1991. The floating glaciers (ice shelves) keep pushing against the sea ice and it buckles and cracks. Seals come up through the cracks to rest on the ice, and our way was blocked by one of them, so we had to return the way we came. The Antarctic Treaty does not allow people to disturb wild life, so we watched the seal from a distance. One of my Italian colleagues on the night shift, Franco Talarico, is visible here to the left. This is a project with scientists of 4 nations: the U.S., New Zealand, Italy and Germany.
We now have to finish writing our on-ice research reports and we are still making attempts to survey the Dry Valleys upstream from the drill site by helicopter drop-off in small groups. So far the weather hasn't been cooperating. It just started snowing, again... I am scheduled to leave here on Dec. 7, so time is running out. I am currently shipping over 300 samples for analysis in the lab at Montclair State University's Department of Earth and Environmental Studies. It is an exciting core and we will have a long way to go to fully understand it, but it is by far the most interesting core I have ever worked on.

Antarctic marine life and the origin of fossils

2007-11-29T19:34:00.000-08:00

In the basement of the Crary lab where we work are several large tanks filled with water. In the water are animals that were collected by biologists from the sea floor and the waters of the McMurdo Sound. The temperature of the ocean here is only 28 F (-2 C) , which means it is below the freezing mark of fresh water. Nevertheless the ocean is teeming with life and has a quite elaborate food chain, with top predators, such as killer whales, and leopard seals and the Antarctic krill at the bottom. All these life forms have special adaptations to the cold. For example, fish, such as the Antarctic Cod, have a type of natural antifreeze in their blood which keeps it from freezing. In the photos you can see several strange-looking arthropods, star fish, bivalves and sponges.

There is a marked difference between the fossils we find in the cores and the biota of the modern McMurdo Sound. The difference is primarily caused by the fact that only skeletal body parts are preserved in the rock record. When animals die, their soft tissue decays, and only skeletal parts accumulate on the sea floor. A fossil assemblage therefore only represents a small portions of the actual fauna of the sea floor in the past. Paleontologists are aware of that and are specialists at knowing what is missing.

The last sampling party

2007-11-28T00:51:00.000-08:00

Yesterday was the day of the last sampling party. Drilling is still progressing with a narrower bit and we do get to log it during the day, but the sampling will be done off-ice during a workshop in Florida next year. Note the little flags: they look quite used after more than a 1000 meters of core. I have collected ca. 300 samples, which will be processed in the lab at Montclair State University and measured on the laser particle sizer.
Peter Webb, my former PhD advisor is here too and you can see him in the picture below. He is being interviewed for a NOVA documentary and serves as a general advisor and guide to the project. You can watch a video about his early research in this area in the late 1950s on the website of ANDRILL. More videos about Antarctica today and Antarctic Geology can be found there as well. The link is here....

Logged 1011 m of core on the night shift!

2007-11-25T10:53:00.000-08:00

A few hours ago we finished logging the first batch of core down to 1011 meters below sea floor. We have been logging for 5 weeks now, 12 hours a day, 7 days a week, so that is why we look so tired. The photo was taking soon after we finished logging and Chris is holding the last core section. The picture was taken by a radio journalist, who joined us this night. The core of last night was magnificent! The last part of it consisted of ripple-laminated sandstones. The ripples are made by currents and the dark mud layers between the ripples indicate that currents were periodically going faster and slower. This is very typical of a tidal environment. You can also see a bit of pyrite ("fools gold") at 85 cm and 93 cm, that formed as crystals in the sand after it was deposited. The minute we finished logging the message came in from the drill site that drilling had started again and that core had come up. We are going to have a one day break now, however, because we are transitioning to day shift.

The Turkey Trot

2007-11-24T08:16:00.000-08:00

Yesterday was the day of the traditional McMurdo Turkey Trot. It takes place on the morning of the Thanksgiving meal and it is a 5 km running event on the sea ice. I participated 9 years ago, but this time I didn't feel up to it, but that gave me an opportunity to cheer my colleagues on and take some pictures. Here you see my nightshift buddies Phill, Josh and Chris at the start of the race. (Never mind Phill's outfit.) There was a mean cold wind coming across the peninsula, but it took them less than half hour to get back in: great job guys!

Later that night after we tried to sleep (it was very noisy in the dorm) we had our Thanksgiving dinner at midnight. The food was superb: of course with Turkey, stuffing, fresh fruit, salad, and desert. We also logged 36 meters of core. We have one more night of core logging to go and then we will revert back to the dayshift.

Happy Thanksgiving from Antarctica!

2007-11-23T10:43:00.000-08:00

Happy Thankgiving from Antarctica. We will have our Thanksgiving dinner tonight at midnight with the nightshift from the drill site. They will come in from their little camp on the sea ice to celebrate with us: we have a lot to give thanks for with such a great core! We also need to work tonight, so perhaps a glass of wine will be okay, but not too much. Drilling will start again on Sunday. Our drill hole is now the second deepest on the continent (the deepest is the other ANDRILL drill hole of last year) and since we still have time in our schedule, an attempt is going to be made to go deeper than the 1011 m we have now. For us it means we have to keep logging.

After long sequences of mudstones, with very little evidence of ice close to this area, we saw evidence of ice sheets in the core last night. Once again: we see the ice-sheets come and go and the core tells us it continues back in time for more than 17 million years!

No helo trip, but core with calcite veins

2007-11-22T12:09:00.000-08:00

The weather turned bad with snow across the sound so we did not get out on our helo trip. Instead, we logged more core (we still have 111 m to go to complete the 1011 m that were drilled). The core had multiple fractures and faults last night, evidence of brittle deformation associated with tectonics. The Earth's crust is spreading apart in this area: we call this a rift and that causes the fracturing and faulting in the rock, as well as the volcanism in this area. One calcite vein fill was truely spectacular: so here is the photograph. Calcite precipitates from the fluids that circulate through the rock.

Helo trip to the Dry Valleys scheduled

2007-11-21T08:29:00.000-08:00

This is 08H or zero-eight-hotel. We received the helo schedule last night and a few of the night shift scientists are signed up for a trip with 08H to Taylor Valley in the Transantarctic Mountains this evening. The purpose of the trip is to survey the regional geology so we get a better understanding of the composition of the sediments in the core we are investigating. The plan is to be dropped off at a high point in the Dry Valleys and then walk down the valley walls of Taylor Valley to the valley floor. We will then pass through several rock units, which were eroded by outlet glaciers of the East Antarctic ice sheet. It is likely that some of that eroded rock material is what makes up the sediments in the ANDRILL SMS core. All is scheduled, of course as always weather permitting. Right now it is not looking great with more snow in the forecast.....we will have to wait and see if they let us go out.

A 1000 meters below the sea floor on the night shift!

2007-11-20T12:06:00.000-08:00

Last night the night shift at the drill site reached 1000 meters below sea floor, our target depth. We, the core loggers in McMurdo are also on night shift and we celebrated a little bit with them. It is quite hard work, from 10 pm until 10 am every night, 12 hours a day, 7 days a week, but now with the celebrations of the project and the end in sight we are getting new energy. Last night was amazing because we logged meters and meters of core without any evidence for large ice sheets at all. There were a few rocks (clasts) that probably fell out of icebergs, but really only few. That was quite unexpected, but I like surprises better than getting what is predicted: it is the exploring that makes doing this type of research so enjoyable. We also found some fossil scallops, such as these here in the photo: the original fossil is still there, but also a mold, an imprint of the shell. These discoveries make the work worthwhile and interesting. What you see here is the half core: so the drill bit drilled partially through the scallop and then the drill core was split in half.Drilling at the drillsite has stopped and now a new team will step into action. After the drillstring has been removed from the hole, the down-hole logging team will bring their tools to the bottom of the hole and then pull them up slowly. While the tools are pulled up, they will measure the physical properties of the layers of rock and also take images of the walls of the borehole. In the mean time we will continue to describe the core until we have gone through all 1011 meters of it. There will be another phase of drilling with a narrower drillbit after the down-hole logging is completed, but we will describe that core on the dayshift towards the end of the season. The plan is that we will also take a helo trip to the Transantarctic Mountains to survey the geology there, because many of the sediments in the core are eroded by glaciers from that region. Stay tuned for a report of that trip.

Back in time and almost where we would like to be: 1000 meters below the sea floor!

2007-11-19T10:35:00.000-08:00

This is an interesting phase of our project. The drill bit is more than 940 meters below the seafloor. The rock is getting really hard and the sediment is impregnated with hard, sometimes black, cement. So deep below the surface the pressure and the temperature are much higher than at the surface and that turns sediment (like beach sand) into rock. We are drilling such a deep hole because we would like to take a journey back in time and observe what Antarctica looked like in the past. We are also trying to find out when and how Antarctica got so cold and whether it is likely to stay that way in times of future global warming. Today, Antarctica is a frigid place, as you may have seen on this blog , but we know from previous drilling that it was not always like that. The arrow points to where I am on the image made by NASA. More than 90% of the continent is covered in ice, with only some mountain ranges sticking out above the ice surface. The photo to the right is of a biodiversity study here close to the station, but as you can see there are no plants growing here now. Previous drillholes have indicated that plants were once present in Antarctica. We are finding coaly plant debris in the core for some time now. We have been sending samples to scientists off the ice in New Zealand and the U.S. who are trying to find out what type of plant the material represents. Today we found some more coaly bits in the dark grey rock to the right. The question now is whether this material represents the vegetation on the Antarctic coast at the time of the deposition of the sediments or some older coal material. We will find out later! We know that aprox. 35 million years ago Antarctica looked very much like the coast of New Zealand (see image by I. Woodward), but when did it change? That is what we are trying to find out.

On the sea ice of the Southern McMurdo

2007-11-18T10:04:00.000-08:00

The drill rig is situated on multi-year ice (shore-fast ice) adjacent to the Transantarctic Mountains. In the image you can just make out the drill rig in the distance. Those blue ice areas in the front are frozen meltwater pools, which developed during the last summer season and froze again during the winter (remember that the seasons are opposite here to those of the Northern Hemisphere). The surface of the sea ice can be dirty from dust and rock particles blown onto it by storms or material carried by small meltwater streams. Fresh snow gives the surface a bright and white color, but the sea ice surface is never smooth: the wind sculpts and erodes the snow into sastrugi. Most of the sea ice travel is on flagged routes, where the sastrugi have been plained off.

The sea ice is the habitat of penguins and seals. I didn't see any penguins this year, only footprints so far. I did see a seal flapping around in the distance. Most of the seals we see here are Weddell seals, who are endemic to the Antarctic region. Weddell seals primarily feed on fish. There is also a predatory seal here: the Leopard seal. Divers and biologists studying the seal and fish populations are always on the lookout for Leopard seals. They are solitary hunters and can follow their prey for a long distance without being noticed. Some close encounters have occurred, but no major injuries have been reported.

A visit to the drill site out on the sea ice

2007-11-17T09:42:00.000-08:00

Last night we had a day off and we had a chance to visit the drill site. We were picked up by the staff scientist and he drove us per Mattrack vehicle out on the sea ice. We followed the procedures for sea ice travel: checked out with Macops by radio and delivered our estimated time of arrival at drill camp, picked up an extra survival bag, because we had one person more in the vehicle than normally, and off we went. After about two hours we arrived at the drillsite. The drillrig is covered in a white fabric to keep the rig and the people on it away from the wind. The rig is situated on 7-8 m thick multi-year sea ice (frozen ocean) and there are around 380 meters of water below it until the drill pipe reaches the sea floor. The small blue building attached to the rig is the mud room. In the mud room the drilling fluid is prepared and recovered. Drilling fluid keeps the drill hole open and lubricates the drill string. The drillers on the rig floor keep and eye on the pressure of the drill bit on the formation it is drillling. Once a core section of 6 meters is completed, the core comes up from the drill hole and is further processed and cut into one-meter long sections at the drillsite lab. The fractures and physical properties of the cores are studied and measured there too. The whole-round core sections are transported to McMurdo Station by helicopter. There the core sections get split and imaged, before we get to describe the core. Check back later for a blog on the core process here in McMurdo. Lastly: some penguin feet we discovered out on the sea ice, but unfortunately the penguins had left. There was a group of them at the drillsite not long ago and the people there enjoyed the entertainment. They have very little entertainment there so I am glad they had a chance to enjoy themselves.

A busy week for the science team and 800 meters down!

2007-11-16T10:13:00.000-08:00

The current depth of drilling is at more than 800 meters below the sea floor. The sedimentology team has logged and decribed more than 700 meters of core and we are starting to feel a bit worn down. We are getting beautiful rocks though, like the ones in the photos below. We still see diamictites but the last few days they alternate with mudstones that are laminated or layered. In the photo the layers are at an angle, tilting, which is a sign of disturbance of the original beds. Sediments are always laid down horizontally, so if we see these tilted layers, we know that something happened to the layers after deposition. Details like these are recorded by us, the sedimentologists, in the core descriptions. We also found very flat-laminated rocks. You can see us at work in the photo above (photo by Tracy Frank). These mudstones are important to the science team because they potentially indicate conditions away from an ice sheet, although some mudstones may accumulate very close to a glacier. We will find out by analyzing their composition and the microfossils they enclose. For example: if there was vegetation on land with formation of soils, we would find pollen of plants and clay particles indicative of chemical weathering in soils in the mudstones. The pollen and soil materials were washed into the ocean from land and the particles accumulated as mudstones. So: we can analyze the composition of the mudstones and reconstruct what the environment was like on land in the past.

Yesterday I took some time to take a walk around the peninsula. The weather was very calm and I enjoyed the view across the sound and the presence of Mount Erebus, the active volcano. I also encountered two skuas, who totally ignored me so I decided to take a picture of one of them.

A forest of wormtubes and the UNDRILL 500

2007-11-13T10:05:00.000-08:00

Last night we logged another 30 m of core and a large proportion of it consisted of mudstones with abundant fossil worm tubes made of carbonate. We are having a unique view here on an Antarctic seafloor more than 15 million years back in time. Between the worm tubes we found fragments of moss animals (bryozoa), and foraminifera, microscopic single-celled organisms that live either at the surface or at the bottom of the ocean. Serpulate worms and bryozoa make up part of the present Antarctic benthic community and were recently discovered to be living underneath a floating glacier or ice shelf (see link here). Paleontologists will now investigate the specific species and try to determine in what type of an environment these organisms were living: in open water without ice or near the ice.

The presence of foraminifera, these microscopic creatures, is good news. Diatoms (see a few blogs earlier) are apparently not really flourishing in this environment, so instead of the diatoms, the foraminifera may help us to obtain an age for these rocks. Different species of foraminifera are characterized by different shell or test morphologies and through evolution one species followed another in the past. In other words: different shell morphologies are characteristic of different times in the past. So, these microfossils can help us to find out how old these rocks are.

Yesterday we celebrated the fact that we reached 500 meters below sea floor with the UNDRILL 500. The drillbit is currently already more than 700 meters below seafloor, but we didn't have time to celebrate earlier. The traditional Antarctic way of celebration (going back to Scott's and Shackleton's times) is that you dress up with elements of underwear (or sometimes men wear womens clothes and make-up, yeah really!). We were marching around the station dressed up, with the national flags of the team, a tuba and a trombone, good fun!

The Hut of the Discovery expedition 1902-1903

2007-11-12T09:01:00.000-08:00

Yesterday one of my New Zealand colleagues, Greg Browne, gave a presentation about the early expeditions in the Ross Sea area. The first one with a ship called the Discovery went as far South as the sea ice would let it and laid anchor at what is now Hut Point peninsula. It is about 0.5 mile outside McMurdo Station and last week our janitor invited us to accompany him to the hut to take a look inside (he has access to a key). The Discovery expedition in 1902-1903 was lead by british navy captain Robert Falcon Scott. Their accomplishment was that the team made it to 82 degrees South, a place no man had gone before. Later the Nimrod expedition, led by Shackleton, in 1907-1908, made it to within 180 miles of the South Pole. You probably know about the tragic story of 1911, when the Norwegian Roald Amundson, beat Scott and his men in the race for the South Pole. None of the 1911 team members made it home alive. Here they are at South Pole after they discovered the Norwegian flag was already there.

The Discovery Hut was built in 1902 on what is now Hut Point peninsula. It is a prefab Australian outback hut, and it is actually not very suitable for Antarctic conditions. The field party stayed here for 2 winters. In the hut you can still find the fur mittens and the wool sweaters they wore and there is still food on the stove in the kitchen. The clothes are lying near the stove, presumably left there to dry. Boxes of food are scattered through the hut. It is interesting to see that Cocoa is in one of them; it is still a favorite drink here today! Besides a kitchen area, there is a food storage area, a meat storage area and there are stables for the ponies they used. Some seal carcases are lying near the entrance.

Several other expeditions have used this hut after the Scott party, but it is now off limits, unless you are accompanied by a hut guide (there are several on station, such as our dorm janitor). The huts are valuable part of the Antarctic exploration history and we are all trying to keep it that way. I have been in the Discovery hut twice now (the first time 10 years ago), but the second time was as good as the first.

Skies are clearing and more core

2007-11-10T13:26:00.000-08:00

The skies are clearing and the weather is improving. Two planes came in in the past 24 hours. One brought our Italian co-chief scientist and a large supply of drilling mud. The decision has been made that we will continue drilling now that it is going so well and skip geophysical logging of the hole until later: that is when logging scientists send instrumentation and a camera down the borehole to make measurements and images of the formations. We are working 12 hours a night now and are describing 30-40 meters of core per shift. We are still about 100 meters behind the drill bit which is currently sitting at 635 mbsf. Today we saw mudstones with hundreds of Serpulid worm tubes and another possible piece of plant debris. We also encountered a beautiful dropstone: a rock which fell out of an iceberg into te ocean and depressed the laminated (or layered) sediments. It is a Ferrar Dolerite clast, which is a group of igneous rocks cropping out in the Transantarctic Mountains. They form hundreds of meters thick sills (the chocolat brown layers in the photo), which are eroded by outlet glaciers feeding from the ice sheet behind the mountains. We are finding many clasts of this type in the core lately. Overall we can see the ice sheets come and go and they leave their signature in the rocks we log. It is a pretty nice job we have!

More than 500 meters below sea floor!

2007-11-09T08:53:00.000-08:00

Drilling is proceeding very well at the moment. We are already at 600 meters below seafloor, before we had time to celebrate that we have passed the landmark depth of 500 meters below sea floor. We don't know exactly where we are in time, because the paleontologists are behind in analyzing their samples due to the speed of drilling and the flow of samples coming in. We sedimentologists have seen some very interesting changes in the core over the past 2 days. We encountered several meter thick intervals of what we call mudstones. These are rocks made of very small rock particles. They often appear laminated with distinct layering. The rocks are now also more cemented and they dry out quickly, so we spray water on the surfaces to observe the textures. Also important is the absence of large rock fragments or clasts in the mudstones: it indicates there was not much ice around during the time of deposition. Interestingly, between the mudstones are beds with very large clasts: the record clast so far we found today is at least 42 cm in diameter, which means I am out of the competition .... my entry was 38 cm for the biggest clast contest.

While drilling is going well, the weather is not entirely cooperating. We haven't seen a plane come in from Chrischurch for the past 5 days as a large depression has the Ross Sea area in its grip. We have had a couple of snow storms and travel is permitted only in the very short pauzes between storms. The helo with core has come in from the drillsite, but the windows of fair weather are too short for trips further away, or trips that require sea ice travel. We haven't gotten any fresh fruit or vegetables for a while now and people and cargo are backed-up in Christchurch. Ha: the new weather forecast just got posted and it says inprovement will come in the next two days. Despite the snow and wind, it is actually quite warm. The -12C/+10F minimum windchill is nothing compared to what we had previously and it feels extremely pleasant now that we can expose our faces to the wind. Also: the first Skuas have arrived (Photo: C.B. Gunn). They typically arrive in early November. Skuas are scavenger birds that feed on anything from penguin eggs, dead penguin chicks, afterbirths of seals, and unfortunately the trash cans at McMurdo Station. They are also known to snatch food from peoples hands if they carry it outside. Still: it is quite nice to see some birds flying around. It is a sign of spring after all!
Another great experience was that the janitor in our dorm took us to the Discovery Hut and let us take a look inside yesterday. He is part of a select group of people with access to the keys of the huts. I have no time to post pictures now, but I promise to do that later. The Discovery Hut is in the picture posted previously here.. Check back in a few days for photos from inside the hut.

Another snow storm and more to come

2007-11-07T08:52:00.000-08:00

The weather forecast that was just posted reads: "The region continues to be under the influence of a large low pressure system to the east-northeast. Intermittent gusty winds, snow and blowing snow will impact the station until the full brunt of the system moves in." We had a "Condition 1" situation last night, which was lifted just before Midrats. Condition 1 means you cannot leave the building you are in. It is more severe than Condition 2, which means you have to stay on station, or Condition 3, which means that all travel is permitted. Our Midrats meal was in another building, so we were glad to hear that Condition 1 was lifted just before midnight. Here in the picture are some people walking to Midrats, like us. It was still pretty gusty with a lot of blowing snow. It is looking fine now (see picture to the right), but there is more to come. Snow is plastered on the walls of the buildings and the windows. There is a large cloud on Minna Bluf in the distance, which is a bad sign. Luckily a helicopter was able to make a trip to the drillsite before the storm to get us some core, so we can work. Another perhaps comicle fact is that Ann Curry of the Today Show is now stuck here with us. Her Live broadcast was yesterday in front of the Chalet with the flags. Last night at Midrats she was in the lobby and was talking very loudly and came obviously out of one of the bars. She seems to have a good time here. We have not seen the show, so we can only hope that the science we do here was featured to some extent. She called off a trip to our drillsite...

So, yes what about the science? It is becoming increasingly more interesting. We are finding fossils every day now: yesterday a possible plant fossil, today a couple of shell beds with what look like large clam shells. There is still the intermittent presence of glaciers, so it looks like ice ages came and went, but there were some intervals of time with balmier climate conditions than today.

Fossils in the core

2007-11-05T07:17:00.000-08:00

The drill bit is now more than 400 meters below sea floor and we are logging core from deeper and deeper layers. It has also been confirmed by the diatom paleontologists that we are currently in middle Miocene rocks. The middle Miocene is the geological period around 15 million years ago, when Antarctica may have experienced extensive ice expansion and cooling, and may have progressed into its current deep freeze state. That hypothesis is debated, however, because of evidence that certain plants and animals survived in Antarctica through this transition. The middle Miocene is also the time of a climate optimum with balmier conditions than today. We are trying to understand what big changes were taking place in Antarctica around 15 million years ago. Before the present drilling program we had no complete rock record of these changes in Antarctica, but we did see the effects on the climate in the rest of the world.

The siginificant find of the last couple of days is that we are encountering more fossil beds in the core. The fossils represent the remains of worms, snails and barnacles that were living on the ancient sea floor at the site where we are drilling. The macropaleontologists are busy to uncover exactly what these fossils can tell us about the water depth and the temperatures of the sea water. Some organisms prefer a certain set of conditions, so when we find them we can use them to reconstruct the environment during that time. In the photo you can see some light-colored circular rings, which are cross-sections of worm tubes and a nice conical shell of a snail. Notice also that there are some rock fragments in the sediment. We can only explain the latter with the presence of icebergs or sea ice. So apparently these snails and worms were living in relatively cold conditions, but perhaps not as cold as today: we will find that out through further research, which will continue when we get back to our home institutions.

More than 300 mbsf and in uncharted territory?

2007-11-02T07:19:00.000-07:00

We are now describing core from below 300 meters below the seafloor. If we have interpreted the seismic data correctly, we are now in uncharted territory, never drilled in Antarctica before. (We are still waiting for confirmation from the paleontologists). The core is providing surprises every day. Last night we logged sections that were composed of layered (stratified) diamictites with rock clasts (stones), but also very delicately laminated rocks without clasts (see photos). Yesterday we found a diatomite (diatom-ite = rock made of diatoms) and the paleontologists are busy investigating samples. Brad Field is the sedimentologist currently responsible for making smear slides to investigate the rock composition under the microscope. A smear slide is made from rock scrapings and it is used for a quick and dirty initial investigation.
After we describe it, samples are taken from the half core for further study. Scientists on the day shift have a "flagging" party where they put little flags in the core at the locations where they would like to have a small piece of the core. The curatorial team then later cuts the samples out of the core.

The ANDRILL website is now also Live. Science reports are updated weekly and the next one will give an overview of the findings of the whole team. Check it out at http://www.andrill.org/

The Transantarctic Mountains at 3 AM

2007-10-30T11:39:00.000-07:00

I took this picture this morning at around 3 AM when I took a short break from logging. The Royal Society Range of the Transantarctic Mountains is reflected by the morning sun, a row of snow mobiles is visible on the sea ice on the left, and the buildings of the air strip further away. I have seen this landscape hundreds of times now, but it never gets old. The light and the weather are different every day.

Last night we had a small breakthrough: we had drilled through a major unconformity (erosion surface) and found larger quantities of diatoms in the sediments. Diatoms are tiny single-celled algae made of silica that are particularly abundant in the polar regions. The paleontologists can use them to provide ages for the rocks we core (biostratigraphy), because through evolution they have changed their morphology frequently through time (image of diatom to the right from Reed Scherer). The paleontologists will now sample the rocks we described and identify different species using a microscope (diatoms are much less than a millimeter in size).

Other news is that Ann Curry of the Today Show arrived in McMurdo Station yesterday and she is going to report on the projects related to "Climate Change" in a series of broadcasts. The date of a Live broadcast I heard is Nov. 5th. There is a small chance some of the people in our project will appear in the program. See the link here for more information...

A sundog at Halloween

2007-10-28T05:46:00.000-07:00

I imagine the pumpkins stacking up at home and all is ready for Trick or Treat? Here no pumpkins, but the Halloween party here was interesting (it is held the Saturday before Halloween in the old helikopter hangar, which is now a Gym). Unfortunately we could not participate in the festivities, because we had 32 m of core to log at night, but we were served with some interesting entertainment at our Midrats meal from people coming back from the party to grab an after midnight meal: various Zombies, Jokers, Hippies, and a guy with a Cow costume that you could milk??? Anyway, when we got back to work, the American co-chief scientist was dressed like Eddy van Halen (the acting Italian co-chief is standing next to him in the photo, not knowing what to think of it).

That night there was a Sundog: it looks like there is more than one Sun with a halo and it is caused by ice crystals in the atmosphere. It is a peculiar polar phenomenon, which I witnessed before when doing research in Greenland. We did get some ice fog later on. Instead of very moist air composed of water droptlets, the fog is frozen into ice crystals that precipitate on all exposed surfaces. You had to be careful that your gloves did not freeze onto the handle bars of the stairs.

The biggest clast contest

2007-10-26T12:44:00.000-07:00

Last night we described another 27 meters of core down to 198 meters below the seafloor. We are seeing large rocks (clasts), such as the migmatite in the photograph. These rock clasts have been eroded from the basement of the Trantantarctic Mountains. Antarctica was involved in a number of tectonic plate collisions and was once the center of Gondwanaland. Antarctica is for 98% covered by ice, so the igneous and metamorphic rocks we find in our cores are important in telling that story. Last night we found a granite clast of 28 cm in cross section and we have started a "biggest clast contest". We all put in our entries, and they range from 29 cm to 5 m. I entered 38 cm. Do you think it will be enough? We will see what we will find in the journey towards 1000 meters of core!

Meet the McMurdo ANDRILL-SMS Science Team

2007-10-24T10:00:00.000-07:00

The Antarctic Drilling Program (ANDRILL) is an international research program supported by four nations: the United States, New Zealand, Italy, and Germany. Scientists from these four nations are present here on the ice. A small group is stationed at the drillsite, but the majority is working in the Crary Laboratory at McMurdo Station on various aspects of the science. Our goal is to answer a question that has been debated for more than 20 years now: has the East Antarctic ice sheet, the largest on Earth, been a stable polar ice sheet for the past 14 million years, or did it become more dynamic more recently in response to climate warming. We are interested in learning how the ice sheet responded during well-documented intervals of warming in the past, comparable to what is predicted for the future. Currently, drilling has progressed to almost 200 meters below the seafloor and we have seen changes in the influence of glacial ice through time.

Next sunset February 20, 2008

2007-10-23T09:19:00.000-07:00

Last night the sun set for the last time this season. It is nice that now when we walk to our mid-rats meal at midnight we can see the sun's reflection on the buildings and the Transantarctic Mountains across the McMurdo Sound. The polar summer has begun and the temperatures are rising as well. The snow storm passed and a Hercules plane had landed while I was sleeping: new people came into the station, and we had fresh salad for lunch! Helicopters were also flying and we had more than 20 meters of core to describe. Most of it was composed of coastal sediments with very few dropstones from icebergs or sea ice, very different from yesterday. To the right is an example of sediments made by currents (ripples in cross section) overlain by sediments made by waves (the flat layers at the top). After we describe the core, the data is entered in a database system with software called PSICAT. The software also generates a graphic log of the different rocks down the hole. The photo shows Larry Krissek who is entering the data into the PSICAT program.

Snow and core

2007-10-21T11:54:00.000-07:00

Last night snow fall and wind were keeping us inside. Right now all travel is suspended, because of low visibility and wind. We were planning on visiting the drillsite to talk to our colleagues there, but these plans had to be postponed, because it requires travel on the sea ice. We also don't know when they will be able to fly the core in from the drillsite, because all helicopter flights are suspended as well. So maybe we will get a little break. Saturday night we were logging core through diamictites and it seemed there was no end to them. But then last night we went through cycles of sandstones, mudstones, and diamictites, which is interesting because it shows that glaciers were sometimes close (diamictites with big stones) and sometimes far away from the drillsite (mudstones). Some of the sandstones had dropstones in them, dropped by icebergs floating above the location of the drillsite in the past. Other sandstones and mudstones showed faults, indicating instability, like in the photo to the right. Do you see how the horizontal layers are displaced along the vertical fault plane?

Cutting whole core samples

2007-10-19T12:01:00.000-07:00

I started the day by giving a lecture on glaciers to a group of educators who are part of the ANDRILL project. During the night we logged more diamictites, but there was some variety in the rock units as well. I also got a note from one of the co-chiefs to take a sample for off-ice scientist Francesco Fasano. Two drillsite scientists are producing physical property logs that we use to pick a good spot to check for evidence of ice loading onto the seabed. In the photos you can see the whole core (before it is split), marking the location of the sample and the core curators, Simon and

Davide, cutting out the section with a rock saw. We usually only get to see the cut face of the core after it is split into to equal halves, so for us it was interesting to see the whole core. As you can see: we are drilling into lithified sedimentary rock now at more than 70 meters below the sea floor.

Diamictites and midnight skies

2007-10-18T09:00:00.000-07:00

Today was a very good night. We drilled through the volcanic sequence into all too familiar rocks for this part of the world: diamictites. These rocks are produced by glaciers and ice sheets. Diamictites are composed of debris scraped off the landscape by moving ice, which is then incorporated into the base of the ice when it flows. At the terminus or end of the glacier where melting and iceberg calving takes place, the debris is released and it accumulates in thick layers. We are drilling into those types of layers now. See how sedimentologists describe the core in the video here. We have no idea how old these rocks are, and we hope the paleontologists can give us a clue soon. We found some marine microfossils in a smearslide today that may be useful in providing an age. The paleontologists will probably be working on that today. Watch a video on what paleontologists do here.

On a more casual note: I would like to draw your attention to the increasing hours of daylight in the far South. Coming back from our mid-rats meals we can see the midnight skies changing every day. We have seen the most beautiful sunsets I have ever seen in my life. At this time of the year the sun just dips below the horizon, so it does not get really dark any more. The sky turns almost pink and purple, such as above Mt. Morning (a volcano) here in the photo.

Core delivery!

2007-10-17T11:17:00.000-07:00

Meet Phil (left), ANDRILL curator, and Josh, computer wiz. What would we do without them... They certainly keep us out of trouble and busy in the core lab! The curatorial team takes care of the conditions of the core, sampling, and high resolution images, which are processed by Josh and made available to us. Today they brought us some very interesting sections of core with much variety, including these laminated beds in the photo below. Interestingly: we are only 25-35 m below the seabed and we see no sign of glaciers, although we can't say how significant that is right now. There is still quite a lot of volcanic material.
Yesterday I climbed Observation Hill for the first time. From the hill you have a 360 degree view and you can see the active volcano Mt. Erebus, Scott base (the Kiwi base) and the Transantarctic Mountains. On the summit is a cross in memory of Scott and his party who died on their way back from the South Pole in 1911. While I was on a summit, I heard a strange sound, like thunder, and I saw a larger cloud coming off Mt. Erebus: a possible small eruption? It is possible according to Kurt and he notified his colleague from the volcano observatory in the U.S. who will come down here shortly.

Meet the nightshift core logging team

2007-10-16T02:04:00.000-07:00

We have now converted to nightshift and will be describing core for at least the next few days (or nights). The people I work with in the photo are (from left to right) Brad Field from GNS, New Zealand, Chris Fielding from Univ. of Nebraska, Sonia Sondroni from Univ. of Siena, Italy, Kurt Panter from Bowling Green State University, and Larry Krissek from the Ohio State University. Yesterday we had just 3 meters, but it was enough, because we still need to tune in to each others logging habits and streamline the process. The core we got was very interesting with abundant volcanic material. It looks like we are currently drilling through the remnant of a lava flow: a volcanic breccia composed of vesicular basalt.

Arrival of the first core to describe

2007-10-15T05:44:00.000-07:00

Last night the first boxes of core were brought in from the drill site by helicopter. We are starting our core descriptions one hour from now. The core is now being split in two halves and the cut surface is scanned, so that we have a digital image for later as well. It is now almost 2AM and we will work until the morning and then sleep during the day. I am very excited about starting our task of providing detailed core descriptions to the whole team. On the nightshift, we will work with a group of 5 sedimentologists, 2 petrologists, 3 core curators, and 1 computer specialist who maintains the software for the database of core images and logs.

Volcanoes

2007-10-15T01:02:00.000-07:00

The science lecture this morning was by my colleague Kurt Panter, a volcanologist from Bowling Green State University. He gave us a review of the volcanic history of the McMurdo area going back more than 20 million years. We expect to see volcanic sediments from numerous eruptions in the cores. These volcanic beds are important because they give us an absolute age for the rock layers based on radiometric dating. Mount Erebus is a 3900 m/12000 ft high active volcano on Ross Island and during our Snowcraft course we had a good view of it. As always it was slowly puffing away. The station is based on volcanic rock such as these basalt fragments with vesicles (imprints of gas bubbles) here in the photograph.

The other news is that we are now converting to nighshift and we expect to see core at midnight tonight, so I will have a loooong day ahead of me.

The science behind the drilling

2007-10-14T01:48:00.000-07:00

We spent the last two days getting ready for core and getting our lab set up. In addition: most of us are working on a series of lectures that we are going to present to a group of teachers who are here on ice for the public outreach component of our project. Tomorrow night the first core is expected. The sea riser (the outer pipe of the drill system) is cemented in the sea floor and the PQ drill string (the inner pipe) is now drilling into the sea floor. We use a similar type of drilling as in the middle example of the figure to the right. The drill rig is mounted on the sea ice (~ 7 m thick), and drills into the sea floor in a water depth of ~ 400 m. We are drilling at this location, because we have a unique geological setting here with a rift basin which is filled up with sediment and preserves a record of glaciation back in time. Over the past millions of years layers of sediment have been piling up in the graben. By drilling into those sediments we can reconstruct the climate and glacial conditions in this area back in time. The layers have a different character depending on whether they were supplied by glaciers, or rivers, for example. Our drillsite in the diagram to the left is located at the red triangle closest to the volcano Mt. Morning (M). We hope to drill ~17 million years back in time.

A walk to the hut point

2007-10-12T12:49:00.000-07:00

The weather has warmed up due to a warm front and we have seen clear skyes in the past 24 hours. Conditions are really calm and the temperatures are a "balmy" -14C/+7F. The satellite image for yesterday shows a clear map view of the area. Click the image on the right to get a larger view with the location of McMurdo Station and the SMS (Southern McMurdo Sound drill site). The station is on Hut Point Peninsula. It is called "Hut Point" because Scott's hut is there, where he and his party stayed in 1902-1904 (2 winters!). I took a short walk out to the hut last night. There is still a frozen seal lying next to it. Scott and his men used blubber as fuel for their stoves.

Yesterday we also attended a sea ice lecture, because we will be traveling out to the drill site later on by Hagglund or Piston Bully (more on those vehicles later). There are numerous cracks in the sea ice due to tidal action and pressure from glaciers pushing against the sea ice and we learned what is still safe to cross (ice thickness > 30"). The sea ice surface can be quite rough and can be buckling up in places due to pressure, such as in the photo here.

Every year the sea ice will break out and melt so there could be open water closer to McMurdo later in the season. The SMS drillsite is on multi-year sea ice that hardly ever breaks out. The ice is about 7-8 m thick with 400 m of water below it.
Yesterday I was reminded of the previous cold conditions when we were camping on the ice shelf by a blister on my finger, that I had since then. I confirmed with the doctor here that it is frostbite, but a mild form, which will heal completely. One of my colleagues had worse forms on his toes. Very typical injury around here...

First sample from ANDRILL SMS

2007-10-11T23:17:00.000-07:00

Yesterday afternoon the first sample of the project came in. It was a greenish looking piece of compacted sediment with a hint of cross-bedding (formed by currents on the sea floor?). The material looked volcanic. Volcanoes are very common around this area. Ross Island on which McMurdo Station lies is a volcanic island with 3 volcanoes: Mt. Erebus, Mt. Terror, and Mt. Byrd. Across the McMurdo sound are two more: Mt. Discovery (in the photograph) and Mt. Morning. It is very likely that we will find more material of volcanic origin in the core that will come later.

The science team is now almost complete, because during the time we were at Snowcraft course a Hercules and a C17 came in. The planes also brought salad and fresh vegetables, a real treat when you are here. Tomorrow we will probably learn to use the technology involved in describing the drill cores that come up. More later....

Snowcraft I course

2007-10-10T14:18:00.000-07:00

I returned back to McMurdo Station yesterday after two days out on the McMurdo Iceshelf. To be able to fly in helicopters around here we were required to take a Snowcraft I survival course. What you learn is to survive for some days after a helicopter crash (or if you get stuck with some other snowcraft) using the standard survival gear that is present on every snowcraft. We were camping on the McMurdo iceshelf with a group of 18 people and were left by the instructors for the night. We manhauled our equipment to the site on sledges. We built a snow wall to stay out of the wind, pitched tents, got the burners going and made hot water. At night the temperature dipped to -22F/-30C and we were all cold. Some got up to walk around to stay warm in the middle of the night. We used our skills that we just learned to get through the night (it never got really dark). I ate a lot of candy bars and cookies, drank my water that I had taken into my sleeping bag and closed my sleeping bag so that only my nose was sticking out. I slept a few hours, but not much: I would wake up shivering and then I had to eat and drink some more. Hydration improves circulation in extremities (hands and feet) and eating gives the body energy to burn (=heat). All was far from comfortable, but in the end we all did survive and that was the point!

To the right a picture of the cold weather clothing I used on the trip: several layers of insulation, two layers of underwear, one midlayer and an outer windtight shell (Big Red and windpants), three hats, neck gator, several types of gloves and mittens (including large sledge mittens), goggles and mucklucks (big blue boots).

On the science front things are gearing up: core is expected this Sunday and we need to convert to night shift soon. We have a lot of meetings at the moment to discuss procedures and data storage. Some of us are also involved in teaching. More on that soon.

The photo at the top is by Diane Winter (my camera did not work properly, unfortunately).

Wind and snow

2007-10-07T14:58:00.000-07:00

Yeah, that's me in the picture. It is starting to warm up a bit after a snowy morning, but we still have to wear our Big Reds (the big red down coats). Tracy and I went to the Berg Field Center to exchange some clothing for a better size. I got new windpants that are long enough (I got my Grandma's long arms and legs). I will need fitting wind pants when I get out on snow survival camp in the next two days. We will be camping overnight on the ice shelf.

The Hercules plane that should have brought the last batch of scientists is not coming (the C17 has a mechanical problem: things break down easily in these conditions). Wind and snow are the greatest enemies of operations, because the combination of the two has a bad effect on visibility. Notice in this picture here how everything on base is tied down with big concrete blocks to keep it from blowing away. Hopefully the weather will improve shortly and we can continue preparations for our work ahead.

Adjusting to the cold

2007-10-06T14:39:00.000-07:00

The temperature will stay below -15F/-26C today. My colleagues and I are still adjusting to the cold. It means you feel a bit more tired than usual. Coming from Summer in the northern hemisphere to this is quite a shock to the body. It is also very dry here, a polar desert with low humidity, so we have to drink a lot of water. Fortunately the station is heated, but it is still not comfortable with drafts coming off the windows. After a week or so, we will not notice it any more, but now we still do. Here is a picture of some of the people I will be working with on nightshift later on: Sonia Sandroni, a petrologist from the University of Siena, Italy, Tracy Frank, geochemist, and Chris Fielding, sedimentologist, from the University of Nebraska. Some of the ANDRILL core curaters (who make sure the core stays in good condition) are visible in the background. The picture was taken on the plane.

No Boomerang: in Antarctica!

2007-10-05T18:22:00.000-07:00

We arrived yesterday after a 5 and a half hour flight. We landed smoothly and were greeted by a howling 30 knot wind. When I took this picture this morning out of the window of the Crary Lab in McMurdo Station the wind was still there. The Transantarctic Mountains are visible in the background. We landed on an airstrip on the sea ice beyond those huts in the foreground. Now a depression has moved in and snow is blowing horizontally, blocking the view. Some of my colleaugues are currently on a sea ice training course. I hope they stay warm. I will have training somewhere next week too. This afternoon we had our first science briefing. All is well at the drillsite and on schedule with the first core arriving in a week or so. We are currently setting up our labs and sorting out our computer issues. The weather forecast for tomorrow is not looking good: it has cooled off and wind is blowing from the ice sheet, so those who can stay indoors.
More information on McMurdo Station can be found here

Packing the Boomerang Bag

2007-10-03T17:49:00.000-07:00

Clothing issue of Extreme Cold Weather gear (ECW) was as usual this morning: hectic and I almost had to exchange everything for a larger size (The ladies helping us out said everything shrunk in the laundry: they are so nice!). I am now packing my "Boomerang Bag". That is the bag we will get for the night in case we don't make it to Antarctica tomorrow. What will happen then is that they will leave all our gear on the plane for the next try, the next day and we are only allowed to take off the Boomerang Bag. We need to report to the airport at 6 AM tomorrow and will fly by C17 to McMurdo at 9 AM. We saw the plane this morning when returning from clothing. We need to put on some of our ECW gear on, on the flight tomorrow. For info on the C-17 see the link here.

In Christchurch New Zealand

2007-10-03T16:56:00.000-07:00

Some of my ANDRILL (Antarctic Drilling Program) colleagues and I have arrived in Christchurch New Zealand this morning with a large group of science support personnel. This afternoon I took a walk along the river Avon and took another look at Scott's statue. He lost the race for the South Pole to Roald Amundson, but he is a British hero. He passed through Christchurch many times on his way to Antarctica, which was then a far more dangerous journey than it is today.
Tomorrow we will be issued our Extreme Cold Weather gear (ECW) and Friday we will try to get to McMurdo in the Ross Sea region by military aircraft. Landing on the airstrip on the sea ice requires visibility (no radars present) and the weather can change rapidly so close to the icesheet, forcing pilots to return to Christchurch when they can't land. Let's keep our fingers crossed! More soon..

Recent activities in Antarctica

2007-09-08T18:57:00.000-07:00

Dr. Passchier is now weeks away from deployment to Antarctica to participate in the Antarctic Drilling Program as an on-ice sedimentologist.
Last week good news was received from the co-chiefs:
"A team of 9 individuals is working now to prepare the SMS drillsite, drilling rig, and camp. This team deployed to Antarctica on the 20th and 25th of August. All of the expected freight was delivered. The drilling equipment and camp structures were successfully broken free of the winter snow build-up. The sea-ice route to the drillsite was first traversed 24th August and found to be in good and safe condition. The sea-ice at the drillsite has a good, solid surface, with minimal snow cover, and is more than 7 meters thick. The first delivery of buildings to the site occurred on 27th August. "

Image: Drillrig used 1997-1999. Credit: Sandra Passchier courtesy NSF

MSU at the International Symposium of Antarctic Earth Sciences

2007-09-02T18:35:00.000-07:00

Last week two faculty members of Montclair State University, Stefanie Brachfeld and Sandra Passchier, presented their research in posters and as oral presentations at the International Symposium on Antarctic Earth Sciences in Santa Barbara CA. Montclair State has made its mark on the map in Antarctic Geociences and we can look forward to more research in years to come. More information on the Symposium can be found here.

Via New Zealand to Antarctica

2007-08-23T13:45:00.000-07:00

Dr. Sandra Passchier of Montclair State University's Department of Earth and Environmental studies will join the science team of the Antarctic Drilling Program for a 2-month field season in Antarctica this Fall.
This week the deployment dates for science party members were listed. Dr. Passchier is on the list for October 5th and will fly by military plane from Christchurch on the South Island of New Zealand to McMurdo Station, Antarctica. On the image the green islands of New Zealand are visible in the upper left corner and Antarctica in the center (click the image for a larger version). Note all the depressions: the atmosphere is very active here. It is currently winter in McMurdo, -45 F (-43 C) and dark most of the time, but by the time we get there it will be Spring and much warmer (or less cold is probably more accurate).