Geophysicists in Antarctica

The International Polar Year is a scientific program focused on the Arctic and Antarctic that runs through March of 2009. One of the projects is studying the Antarctic's remote Gamburtsev Mountains which are buried under several miles of ice. The American team's leader is Columbia University marine geophysicist Robin Bell.

The project has daunting-seeming logistical issues, from extreme cold to complete isolation. As Bell wrote for Scientific American:

To study these hidden mountains, we will work from two camps. The southern camp is almost 800 miles (1,285 kilometers) from McMurdo, the main U.S. station, more than the distance between New York City and Chicago—only there are no highways, rest areas or gas stations along the way, just miles and miles of ice. Our northern camp is 470 miles (755 kilometers) inland and is closer to the Australian and Chinese bases on the northern edge of the ice sheet. Where we're working, there will be no penguins and no tourists, just ice, scientists, engineers, pilots, medics, cooks and mountaineers.

For several years, we have been puzzling over the logistics. How can a multinational team (of more than 25 scientists and engineers with three aircraft) cram an expedition into the very short time that the weather is warm enough for us to work? "Warm enough" means the temperature is warmer than –58 degrees F (–50 degrees C).

Not only is it very very cold, but the elevation is high enough to cause physical problems. Adrienne Block, a graduate student working on the project blogged about it a few days ago:

Part of my jitteriness the last few days is undoubtedly rooted in the fact I’ll be going to the South Pole on Monday. According to our medical briefing, that means I’ll be perpetually short of breath, having trouble sleeping and going to the bathroom about every 20 minutes for 2 days…. The anticipation is almost too much to hold in! I have been to 10,000ft elevation before but that was after living at 6,500ft above sea level for 5 weeks… and that was in Utah. The transition from sea level here in McMurdo to 10,000ft is such a surprise to the system that everyone is prescribed a medication to help our bodies adjust to the lower oxygen levels. On top of that, we all have to fight off the adrenaline brought on by the fact we’re in Antarctica, at The South Pole, at 10,000ft—no offense to Utah, but it doesn’t compare! Just in case we don’t adjust to the elevation, everyone has been learning tasks outside their specialty. Hopefully, if someone gets sick, we’ll be able to keep the science moving forward, even if at a slower pace.

But the scientists aren't completely isolated from the rest of humanity. You can follow Robin Bell on Twitter or join the XTREME South Facebook group for the latest information about the team's progress.

You can also read the blogs of other women scientists currently working in the Antarctic:

• Andrea Balbas, undergraduate in geology at CUNY, who is collecting data about seafloor sediments
• Adrienne Block, a PhD student at Columbia University who is working on Bell's team
• Beth Burton, geophysicist with the US Geologica Survey
  
• Zoe Courville, a PhD in materials science who works as a research mechanical engineer at Cold Regions Research and Engineering Lap in New Hampshire
  
• Saffia Hossainzadeh, undergraduate in physics at the University of Chicaco, who is studying the motion of ice streams
• Jean Pennycook, high school science teacher and penguin researcher
  

More information

• Video webcast with Robin Bell on EXPLO.TV, Dec. 7, 2008 (scroll down to "Hidden Mountains" or click here: Real 256K )
• Robin E. Bell: "Dispatches from the Bottom of the Earth: An Antarctic Expedition in Search of Lost Mountains Encased in Ice" in Scientific American
• Dispatches From the Bottom of the Earth posts at Scientific American 60-Second Science

Tags: Robin Bell, Antarctic, geoscience

Mothers in the Field

Joan Ramage Macdonald is an Assistant Professor in the Earth and Environmental Sciences department at Lehigh University. Maura E. Sullivan is a graduate student in ecology. Both of them do their research in the field, rather than in the lab. And both of them had a baby last year. They wrote about their experiences doing fieldwork with their babies for The Chronicle of Higher Education.

They were happy to bring their babies into the field as long as conditions permitted. And they have what seems like a broad definition of acceptible conditions. For example, Macdonald took her baby Iona while she did her research in the Arctic:

When we got to the Yukon in March, the temperatures were well below freezing (-13ºF, -25ºC) but balmy by northern standards, and our baby was just nine weeks old. On the first day of field work, we snowshoed to the research site with Iona strapped on. We had to outfit her for cold weather and protect her from the sun. We had to carry both Iona and our field gear, and learn when and how to change a wet diaper in the deep snow.

Three Lehigh students came to help me with the fieldwork for three weeks, while my husband took care of our baby. I had to pump breast milk far from electricity or the warmth and power of the car, so I modified my pump to make it battery-powered and portable, and fit it into a backpack with the rest of the gear. I pumped on many a snow bank.

As someone who prefers a climate-controlled environment, I find that hard to imagine. But Joan and her family are obviously of hardier stock than me.

Both Joan and Maura are fortunate to have helpful spouses and other family members who share the child care responsibilities so they can focus on their research. They list the lessons they learned while with their babies in the field, and conclude it's good for everyone:

• Fieldwork is good for babies: It teaches them adaptability and a love of the outdoors. Their exposure to students is mutually stimulating and fun, and they benefit from a strong relationship with their caregiver, whether that is a parent, a grandparent, or a nanny.
• Fieldwork is good for mothers: It helps you maintain a field program and your involvement with students. Outdoor time with your baby blends interests. Exercise at this stage is key for your psyche (and physique).

That sounds great.

(via ScienceWoman, who notes it's trickier with a toddler, and Zuska)

Tags: women in science, geoscience, mothers

Karina Acevedo-Whitehouse: Wildlife Zoologist

Today's post is about a woman scientist doing some cool research.

Karina Acevedo-Whitehouse, a Research Fellow at the Institute of Zoology at the Zoological Society of London, studies resistance to disease in wildlife, including wild boars and sea lions. However, some of her research subjects are much larger: the blue whales, gray whales, and sperm whales that migrate along the Gulf of California. She's trying to understand what diseases wild populations of these whales carry, but taking blood samples - the usual method of analysis - is impossible. Instead she and her research team have devised a novel method of sample collection (picture):

Her new technique involves using a 3.5-foot (about a meter) remote-controlled helicopter with Petri dishes attached to the craft's bottom. When the equipment is ready, Acevedo-Whitehouse and her colleagues work aboard a small boat, scanning the ocean for the whales' blows, which appear as a sprinkler mist shooting from the ocean surface. The mist contains the whale's exhalation of air, water vapor and sometimes mucus. Once the whale is spotted, an operator directs the helicopter directly above and through the mist, which sprays up onto the Petri dishes.

Any microorganisms collected on the Petri dishes are identified by DNA sequence analysis.

I wonder if the members of her research team squabble over who gets to run the mucus-collecting helicopter, which sounds like a lot of fun.

Acevedo-Whitehouse, who is originally from Mexico, chose to pursue her PhD in Europe because there were better opportunities ther for both her and her husband, who is also a scientist. A crude translation into English of what she said in an interview earlier this year:

I decided to come and study in Europe because wanted a place where my husband and I were able to conduct the studies that we are interested. In Mexico there was no chance, not for his area, which is neuroscience, or mine that is the study of diseases with molecular techniques. We're looking at a site where the two could do what we wanted, and found Cambridge.

After earning her doctorate at Cambridge, she joined the Institute of Zoology in London.

Acevedo-Whitehouse's ties to Mexico have been useful in her research. Her whale disease study is in collaboration with colleagues in Mexico, and she currently serves as the European delegate for the Mexican Society of Marine Mastozoology (SOMEMMA).

Tags: Karina Acevedo-Whitehouse, zoology, marine biology

Ice Stories

The Exploratorium has collected a bunch of blogs under the heading "Ice Stores: Dispatches from Polar Scientists", which showcases scientists working at the poles. Not surprisingly the research is seasonal: scientists work in Antarctica during the Northern Hemisphere's winter (so summer at the South Pole), while research in the Arctic is going on now. A number of women scientists are part of the effort.

In the Arctic:

• Anne Jensen "lives and works in Barrow, Alaska. Anne’s field studies have taken her throughout much of Alaska for the past 25 years. Her research in human adaptation in the Arctic includes a long-term project at the prehistoric village site of Nuvuk, where the Beaufort and Chukchi Seas come together. Historic Nuvuk is also the site of a 1,000-year-old burial ground. Hundreds of gravesites are endangered there by erosion, which sometimes removes 50 feet of coastal frontage in a single storm."
• Amy Breen "has studied the impacts of climate change on Arctic plant communities for nearly a decade. She is a PhD candidate in the Institute of Arctic Biology at the University of Alaska, and a member of a team of circumpolar scientists participating in the International Tundra Experiment (ITEX). In July 2008, she’ll begin blogging from the Toolik Field Station, her field site in the northern foothills of the Brooks Range in Alaska."
• Laura Thomas "is an archaeologist and full-time resident of Barrow, Alaska. As the Field and Lab Director for the Nuvuk Archaeology Project, Laura devotes her time to the long-term excavation of a 1,000-year-old burial ground significantly threatened by erosion. Born and raised amongst the rich geological history of Ontario, Canada, Laura has held a lifelong interest in prehistory and how past peoples adapted to their environments. She is a graduate of the University of Toronto, and describes her archaeological work in the Arctic as 'living the dream.'"
• Zoe Courville "studies snow and ice in polar regions. She received her PhD in material science from the Thayer School of Engineering at Dartmouth College in 2007. She is currently employed as a research mechanical engineer at the Cold Regions Research and Engineering Lab in Hanover, New Hampshire. She loves working in the polar ice caps and sharing her experiences with others."

In the Antarctic:

• Cassandra Brooks "is a graduate student in Marine Science at Moss Landing Marine Laboratories (MLML) in California who has studied Antarctic marine resources for the last four years both at MLML and with the Antarctic Marine Living Resources Program (AMLR). Cassandra’s work focuses on life history and population structure of Antarctic toothfish. Her goal is to provide information on their age, growth, and spatial distribution in order to facilitate sustainable management of this important Antarctic species."
• Christina Riesselman "has traveled to Antarctica three times in pursuit of fossil diatoms that can unlock the secrets of past climate change. She's a Ph.D. student at Stanford University's Department of Geological and Environmental Sciences and a member of the international team of scientists working on the ANDRILL sediment coring project."
• Nadine Quintana Krupinski "studies the dynamics of ice sheets and the waterways that exist under glaciers. She's a glaciology Ph.D. student at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and enjoys working on isolated glaciers in the world's polar regions."
• Maria Vernet "has been a primary investigator on thirteen research cruises off the Western Antarctic Peninsula, exploring one of the coldest marine ecosystems on earth. She's a marine biologist from Scripps Institution of Oceanography in San Diego, California. During winter 2008, she studied the ecology of phytoplankton and its role within the marine ecosystem at the Palmer Station Long-Term Ecological Research Network (LTER). From May 31 to June 20, 2008, Maria is on board the Nathaniel B. Palmer icebreaker in the northwest Weddell Sea, collecting plankton samples from under and around large free-floating icebergs that have broken off from the Antarctic Ice shelf."
• Kathryn Schaffer Miknaitis "dreamed of becoming an artist but fell in love with physics in graduate school. She is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Chicago's Kavli Institute for Cosmological Physics and pursues questions about the origin and history of the universe on the South Pole Telescope team. She arrived at the South Pole in November 2007 and blogged about her work on the telescope until she left in February 2008."

If you click on the scientists' names, you'll not only get to their blogs, but you can learn more information about the projects they are working on. It's an interesting glimpse into doing scientific research under extreme environmental conditions.

Tags: women in science, Arctic research, Antarctic research, blogs

Margaret Amsler: Antarctic Biologist

Today's video is an interview with Margaret Amsler, Research Assistant Member of the University of Alabama at Birmingham in Antarctica Team. In fact, she has been doing research in the Antarctic since the 1980s, when she was a student of the late Dr. Mary Alice McWhinnie. Amsler talks about how she became interested in research:

As a young girl I knew I wanted to be a marine biologist. I went to college at DePaul University and my advisor was a marine biologist. Guess where she worked? Yes - Antarctica! Her name was Dr. Mary Alice McWhinnie. She was one of the first females scientists to work in the Antarctic. She and another woman scientist share the distinction of of being the first female researchers to spend a winter in Antarctica at the largest U.S base called McMurdo Station. Dr. Mary Alice also worked many years at Palmer Station. She would often take her students as assistants. I feel so privledged to have been one of those lucky students. The Palmer biology lab is named for Dr. McWhinnie in recognition of all her contributions to Antarctic marine biology. The dedication plaque hangs in a busy hallway and serves to remind me how fortunate I am to have had Dr. Mary Alice in my life. [. . .]

In this video she talks about research and women in the Antarctic .

Last October an island in Antarctica was named after Margaret and her husband Charles Amsler, a UAB faculty member. For more first hand accounts of Antarctic research, check out the team's blog about last year's field work.

Tags: Margaret Amsler, antarctica, biology

Field Museum's Women in Science

The Field Natural History Museum in Chicago has interviews with thirteen women scientists in their employ, who work in fields ranging from the biological sciences to geology. They share their thoughts on both their own research and their experiences as women in science.

The site also profiles two pioneers from the museum's past, explorer Delia Akeley (1875-1970) who discovered new African animal species, and botanist Margery Carlson (1892-1985) who collected plant samples in South America and Europe and was a professor of botany at Northwestern. They both had their share of adventures.

From the Field Museum profile of Delia Akeley, on collecting an elephant specimen:

"Scarcely breathing, and with legs trembling so I could hardly stand, I waited for the elephant to move forward," she wrote in her book "All True!" "Dimly through the mist the dark shape came slowly from behind the bush, exposing a splendid pair of tusks and a great flapping ear which was my target. With nerves keyed to the point of action I fired, and the first elephant I shot at fell lifeless among the dew-wet ferns . . . He was a splendid elephant, standing ten feet ten inches tall at the shoulders and carrying 180 pounds of ivory. In his back was a great festering wound caused by a poisonous spear. The iron blade had worked its way into his flesh to his rib and he must have suffered agonies."

I'm not particularly fond of this method of "collecting" animals, but there is no doubt Akeley did her job well.

From the GWIS profile of Margery Carlson:

An energetic and adventurous woman, Dr. Carlson’s primary interaction with Field Museum was through her plant collecting program in Mexico and Central America in the late 1940s and early 1950s. Using a station wagon or truck-camper as both vehicle and motel, Margery, together with her companion Kate Staley, was able to reach remote areas in southern Mexico, El Salvador, Honduras, and Costa Rica. Each expedition took several months and came close to or exceeded 10,000 miles of travel.

What was especially remarkable about Margery’s field trips was that both she and her companion were gray-haired ladies embarking on trips that would challenge someone half their age. The trips were not without adventures and minor mishaps. One expedition ended with the truck smashed at the bottom of a canyon but with the two women only slightly injured. Another adventure Margery loved to recount was the time she and Kate were eating lunch along the side of the road in northern Mexico, when they found themselves face-to-face with two men brandishing machetes and demanding money. Sizing up the situation quickly (these were two poor farmers and not dangerous bandits), Margery proceeded to admonish them in Spanish: "Don’t you realize you could have scared us to death? And if that had happened you could never go to heaven!", whereupon she invited them to have some lunch — which they did.

Two amazing women!

Tags: Field Museum, Delia Akeley, Margery Carlson

Susan Soloman

Susan Solomon is a senior scientist at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration who first hypothesized that chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) were destroying the Antarctic ozone layer. She lead two expeditions to the South Pole, in 1986 and 1987, to collect the data that eventually confirmed her hypothesis. She received the National Medal of Science in 1999 and has two Antarctic geographical features named after her: Solomon Glacier and Solomon Saddle. According to her recent profile in California Monthly:

Solomon's discovery blew the whistle on CFCs and resulted in substantial amendments of the Montreal Protocol, an unprecedented international agreement established in the mid-1980s to protect the ozone layer. CFCs were banned in the 1990s and their concentration in the atmosphere recently has started to decline.

Solomon has also written a book, The Coldest March about Captain Robert Falcon Scott's 1911 fatal expedition to Antarctica.

For more information:

• NOAA Top Ten History Makers: Susan Solomon: Pioneering Atmospheric Scientist
  
• The National Academies: InterView with Susan Solomon (requires RealPlayer for audio)
• ScienceWatch interview: Lofty Achievement: NOAA's Susan Solomon on Atmospheric Chemistry
• Chemistry Historical Foundation - Her Lab in Your Life profile: "What's Up With Ozone?"
• Profiles of the 2004 Blue Planet Prize Recipients

Illustration: NOAA
Tags: Susan Solomon, CFCs, ozone hole