Cape Evans cont.

I got interrupted last night by a group going out to celebrate Mario's last night. He has to get back to Italy to compete for a promotion to associate professor. Apparently all of the assistant professors there compete for a certain number of promotions, regardless of the university, which is different from our system.

Anyway, so while we were helping the divers out of the water after their first dive, this Adelie walked right past me up onto the ice and hung out with us.


The divers did another dive, and meanwhile the ice had blown offshore so we watched little pieces of ice float by.










Shawn found a huge dead octopus on the second dive that he brought up. We brought it back to the lab to show people (who doesn't want to see a huge dead octopus?!?!).

We put the octopus in one of the tanks so people could come by and look at it. One of the nemerteans started eating the arm of the octopus, which was really cool. Here's Dennis, looking delighted while putting more nemerteans and seastars on top of the octopus. Nemerteans are predators/scavengers and here, as for many other invertebrates, the nemerteans are huge. We've put them (smaller ones) in jell-o in Friday Harbor and they can change their body shape a lot and make pretty dramatic peristaltic movements. Apparently this comes in handy if you want to ingest an octopus arm that is several times your diameter. Dennis is pointing at the nemertean that's trying to ingest the octopus arm and there's another (darker colored) nemertean in the lower left of that picture.

another trip to Cape Evans

Today I went to Cape Evans to help Jim and Shawn dive for algae. I was kind of jealous watching the divers go through the hole off of McMurdo and dive under the ice, but today I was glad to be a spectator/tender rather than a diver. Here's Shawn walking out to push chunks of ice out of the way so they could get in the water. We helped them haul their tanks and weights (over 40 lbs!) over to the shore and get geared up (it's hard to get gloves on, at least the 2nd one) and even harder to get them off with numb fingers.
We watched the divers go out and hung out on the shore watching penguins. Connor was going to go diving but decided to skip out when she saw all the ice... probably a smart decision. More soon...

[Random sidenote: Warren just told Dennis, "you've got the best microfluidics expert in the world in San Francisco - Steven Quake" and I said, "That's my best friend's cousin!"]

more anchor ice

I've been putting animals in big tanks and putting them in the -20 cold room and seeing where the ice forms on them. We're interested in whether ice nucleates off the tissue, just gets stuck to the organism, and whether it falls off. It doesn't seem to nucleate off the seastars very quickly but if I leave them in the tank for awhile, they get ice crystals all over the tips of their arms and a few that come up off their backs. Dennis wrote a great blog entry for the course on our project.

I've been making ice in still water and in mixed water, and when you mix the water, little ice crystals called frazil ice form in the water and then get stuck on animals, lots of sponges, quite a bit on urchins, but very little on seastars. It seems to fall off the urchins pretty easily though, and they move their spines around to knock it off, which is pretty cool to watch.

I get to go back to Cape Evans tomorrow (weather permitting) to be a dive tender for Jim and Connor who are going to collect some algae.

more Cape Evans pics

The hut from up on the hill.















Dennis and the emperor penguin.
















Adelies hanging out near the sea ice edge.

"sledding" at Cape Evans

More pictures from Cape Evans... can you tell I don't have much time to blog? This is on the side of this glacier that Annaliese and I spent about an hour rolling/sliding down. We didn't have sleds but our jackets worked pretty well. We got Warren and Mark to join in too. We discussed the difference between static and kinetic friction. If you sit down, you don't slide at all, but if you start rolling down the hill, you build up enough speed that you can then roll onto your back and slide down the hill. Annaliese is demonstrating perfect technique here.

Last night we had a class party and we showed the awesome movie that Dennis took of Mark.

Inside Scott's hut at Cape Evans

One of the coolest parts of our trip to Cape Evans was going inside the hut built by the 1910 Scott expedition. This is the bed where Scott slept and the only one with a mattress - the rest of the men slept on boards. They had reindeer skin sleeping bags that they used in the field although in the hut they used blankets.






Here's the table looking toward the door and the kitchen and area where the men (not officers) slept. It's all dirty inside because Shackleton's Ross Sea party stayed there in 1913 and their boat, the Aurora, was anchored to the land near the hut. The line broke and the boat floated away and they lost all of their provisions including their coal. So they managed to not only survive on seals and penguins and what the Scott party left behind but they also placed caches of food for Shackleton's party, which unfortunately never made it because their ship got caught in ice. Back to the dirtiness... the Ross Sea party burned seal blubber instead of coal, which is why everything is sort of black-ish inside the hut. They also cobbled together clothes out of whatever they could find, like these pants hanging from the bunk in this picture. Meanwhile the guys who were on the boat couldn't get back to Cape Evans and got stuck in the ice for the winter.

penguin

hopefully this video will work...