Science on Ice: What It's Like to Live and Work in Antarctica

The Gerlache Strait looks exactly as I imagined Antarctica would: Snow spills to the edge of the passage from the jagged landscape lining either side. The tops of icebergs rise from the flat, dark water like stiff peaks of beaten egg whites; the ice just beneath the surface glows turquoise. The air hangs soft and gray, and by the time the ARSV Laurence M. Gould rounds the southern tip of Anvers Island and enters Arthur Harbour, a light snow is falling.

Through the thick flakes, a handful of Monopoly-size buildings materialize. Figures in bright orange suits amble to the edge of the dock as the ship pulls in. Some grab the research vessel's towlines; others spot the first snowball flying at the exact moment I do. It comes from the stern, where marine biologist Kim Bernard has dipped into a cardboard-box arsenal. The other side quickly retaliates, and soon the residents of Palmer Station?both current and incoming?are locked in battle.

Palmer is the smallest of the three year-round U.S. research stations in Antarctica and the only one on the West Antarctic Peninsula. It's also the only station without an airstrip. Reaching Palmer requires a four-day voyage from Punta Arenas, Chile, on the Gould. The vessel plunges south through the Drake Passage as the Antarctic Circumpolar Current, the largest current in the world, sweeps through the same narrow channel barreling east.

Just before I left the United States for Chile, Hugh Ducklow, the director of a long-term ecological research project at Palmer, told me that the station's location, chosen in 1965 for its convenience, turned out to be a stroke of great scientific luck. "For decades, nobody had any idea about climate change," he said. "Now we find ourselves at the very spot where it's happening most rapidly."

Over the past 50 years, the average air temperature increased 6 degrees Fahrenheit along the West Antarctic Peninsula, unlike that farther north or south. Scientists have also documented stronger surface winds, cloudier skies, more snowfall, less ice, and warmer ocean water?all adding up to profound changes in the polar ecosystem. Because that ecosystem is relatively uncomplicated, scientists can detect and establish the significance of these changes more easily than, say, in a coral reef or even in a forest in the U.S. By studying climate change at Palmer, Ducklow says, "we can figure out rules of ecosystem response elsewhere."

Thanks to a fellowship from Woods Hole Marine Biological Laboratory, I've come to document something too: station life. I begin my research in the galley with a penguin-shaped sugar cookie, then go on a tour. It doesn't take long. Pretty much everything is located in two buildings sandwiched between a glacier and the Southern Ocean. A lone street sign points toward Denver (7555 miles) and the South Pole (1744 miles). Three weeks here, I think, could go by very slowly. Instead, they fly far too fast.

"Man overboard!" Katharine Coles is pointing at me from a rubber zodiac as I bob in the 32-degree Fahrenheit polar waters. I'm wearing an extra-large neoprene survival suit, which, because I'm only five foot six, bunches in giant folds around my limbs. I feel surprisingly, pleasingly, warm. Lily Glass, Palmer's boating coordinator, tells Coles to drive away from me; I awkwardly swim to a chunk of ice and cling to it for dramatic effect. Then Glass talks Coles through a Williamson turn, a rescue maneuver that brings the zodiac back to the point where I "fell" out.

Glass grew up on the water, pulling lobster pots in New England, and learned her way around an engine after buying a 1971 Volkswagen bus. But mostly it's her unruffled calm, honed while teaching high school science in Massachusetts and Mongolia, that she brings to Boating II?a mandatory class for anyone who wants to pilot a zodiac onto the Southern Ocean. At Palmer, that's pretty much everyone.

"Some of my favorite days are the crappiest out on the water because you have to be that much more focused," Glass says. "And it's those days that really make you appreciate weekends, when you can turn off the engine and not go anywhere." On a Sunday with exceptionally clear blue skies, people pile into zodiacs to chase reports of breeching humpback whales. Coles?who is Utah's poet laureate and, like me, applied for a grant to visit Palmer?doesn't have to go searching for wildlife. Twice a penguin jumps in a zodiac with her.

64?46'S, 64?03'W

1. Biolab with Galley, Offices, Labs, Aquarium, and Dorms
2. GWR Building with Garage, Power Plant, Warehouse, Store, Clinic, Dorms, and Bar
3. Carpentry Shop
4. Earth Station with Satellite Link
5. Fuel Tanks
6. Terra Lab
7. Milivans Containing Hazardous Waste
8. Dock
9. Milivans Containing Frozen Food
10. Boathouse
11. Zodiac Parking Lot

During the Austral Summer, which stretches from roughly November to February, there is no real darkness in Antarctica, just twilight. The sun is still shining brightly at 9:30 on my first Friday night. Behind the BioLab, graduate students are setting up an ocean-acidification experiment in a marine tank; in the tank next to that, six people are soaking in the station hot tub. The sound of Cake floats over from the Terra Lab, where an array of instruments constantly monitors seismic activity, atmospheric radionuclides, and electromagnetic waves generated by lightning strikes around the globe. Brian Nelson, the lab's technician, is leading another suite of instruments in a "Terra Jam": Palmer's band is practicing for open-mike night.

Alice Alpert sits on the edge of Bruiser, the wooden work platform mounted across the zodiac, and dangles her brown XtraTuf boots over the water. Alpert's flotation jacket easily doubles her small size. Despite clumsy insulated rubber gloves, she adroitly cocks the latex band on a gray plastic Niskin bottle so that both ends remain open, and lowers it with a winch 10 meters into the Southern Ocean. Then she fires a weight down the line to snap the ends shut, capturing water.

Researchers have been methodically sampling the ocean here for the past 20 years, and the data reveals changes at the very bottom of the marine food web. As stronger winds churn the water column, for example, phytoplankton are pushed deeper, away from sunlight, so they bloom far less often. These winds also upwell deep, carbon-dioxide-rich water, limiting the amount of CO₂ the ocean can absorb from the atmosphere?a process Alpert's team is trying to understand.

I'm tasked with operating the winch to bring the Niskin bottle to the surface. Only, distracted by the line coiling at my feet, I look away at exactly the wrong moment and the bottle hits the top of the winch with a thud. I click the button to try to lower it. No power. The team takes it in stride, heading back to exchange Bruiser for Wonderbread, which has a hand-cranked winch. Later, someone gives me the blown fuse as a souvenir, saying: "Welcome to science."

The Southern Ocean can be glassy and smooth or whipped by 50-knot winds and roiling with giant swells. Because these conditions change within minutes, safety at Palmer is taken very seriously. Whenever a group of boaters signs out a zodiac, they give themselves a name, which may or may not reflect the purpose of their trip. Like Moe at his tavern on The Simpsons, a communications officer dutifully repeats this name over the two-way radio every time crews check in?which is often. During my stay at Palmer, names included Going Viral, Bromance, Sir Ernest Shackleton, Apollo 25, and Hold My Beer and Watch This.

Sleek and yellow, the Slocum Glider autonomous underwater vehicle resembles a torpedo. When I peer inside, it looks much less ominous. Rows of D batteries line the aft end, and I can see all the way through to a buoyancy pump. The glider is propped up on a counter in the lab while Travis Miles, a graduate student at Rutgers University, dismantles it. He's trying to figure out why the leak-detect sensor went off when the team deployed the vehicle. "Being down here has been a whole new world of beta testing," he says.

Once the problem is fixed, the team plans to send the glider across a deep-sea canyon near Palmer. Such canyons allow warm, salty water at the bottom of the Antarctic Circumpolar Current to flow up onto the continental shelf. Historically, that's been a boon to marine life, delivering heat and nutrients that stimulate food supplies. Only now they appear to be delivering way too much.

The real engine of the Antarctic ecosystem is the Southern Ocean: Water holds a thousand times more heat per unit volume than air does. Over the past 50 years, water along the peninsula has warmed significantly. Ice transfers this heat to the atmosphere: The midwinter air temperature has risen 11 degrees Fahrenheit, five times the average global increase. The winter ice season has lost 83 days, effectively disappearing.

The gliders, scientists hope, will track how greater volumes of this warm, deep water are being swept onto the shelf. Unlike humans, who are limited by weather and their own endurance, gliders can slalom through the Southern Ocean day and night for hundreds of miles. They move by changing buoyancy: pulling a coffee cup's worth of water into the nose, then pushing it back out again.

Miles shows me the air bladder in the glider's tail, a balloon about the size of an airplane pillow. When it inflates, the tail lifts out of the water so an iridium phone can call Rutgers for the glider's next set of instructions. "If we see something interesting," he says, "we can adapt how we fly the glider and hypothesize as we go."

"Birders, this is Dragnet." Silence ensues. Alex Culley, a researcher from the University of Hawaii at Manoa, tries again. He's in a zodiac, sampling for marine viruses. There are a billion in every liter of seawater, and he's trying to tease out their role in the polar ecosystem. Another long pause, then Glass radios from the station: "Dragnet, this is Lily. They have to hike up a hill in order to get reception."

"Thanks, Lily. Actually, maybe you can answer this. We've got a chinstrap [penguin] that's jumped onto our boat. Please advise."b>

Source: http://www.popularmechanics.com/science/environment/climate-change/science-on-ice-what-its-like-to-live-and-work-in-antarctica?src=rss

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