Andrew Radsch, a good friend on sabbatical from lawyering for a year, and I met up in El Calafate to do some climbing and enjoy life in El Chaltén. He has been blogging about his travels during his sabbatical. He recently put up a post with a description of our recent climbs on Aguja Guillaumet in the Patagonian Andes. He does an excellent job conveying the uncertainty, commitment, and joy of our climbs. Enjoy!
This will be a quickie with something more comprehensive when I return to the land of more stable interwebs. In short, I am back in El Chaltén again after finishing another season at Palmer Station, Antarctica. I jammed here ASAP to meet up with my friend and climbing partner from NYC, Andrew. Because of the slow internet I am not able to upload any photos yet, but we arrived with a 5 day weather window and took full advantage by getting in some serious climbing. Along with our guide Manuel from El Chaltén Mountain Guides we ascended Amy Couloir to summit Aguja Guillaumet. We rested for a day in the mountains before doing an amazing ridge traverse that ended at the beginning of the Fonrouge route up Guillaumet. We then celebrated with a bunch of other American climbers in town for the season with an asado (the Argentine BBQ equivalent). More details later…
After feeling a bit self-conscious about my first radio appearance, I was given another opportunity to talk about life in the Antarctic and our research. This time the venue was an NPR affiliate’s show, Up to Date on KCUR, in Kansas City. I had a great time with the show and talking with the show’s host, Steve Kraske, and catching up with a Kansas City Star reporter, Scott Canon, who visited Palmer on an NSF Artist’s and Writer’s Grant in December. Take a listen to the whole show here. I think Steve did an excellent job asking fun questions and keeping the show lively and moving along.
Happy Holidays from the Rutgers Phytoplankton and AUV Lab at Palmer Station. (L to R, Tina Haskins, Brian Gaas, me. Photo: John Brack)
We don’t take extended holidays while working at Palmer Station in Antarctica. At most we may take a day off here or there, but by and large we work everyday collecting samples, running experiments in the lab, maintaining our equipment and so forth. Christmas Eve and Christmas Day are no different. While the Raytheon support staff may take a couple of days off, we deployed a glider last night in pretty tough conditions and then went out this morning to collect samples. While I was taking some of the samples outside to a special incubator designed to help measure the uptake of atmospheric carbon dioxide by phytoplankton, I kept seeing a couple of bergy bits that looked really close to shore. Plus, today the sun was out, the air temp was in the high 30s and there was little to no wind. So, what better way to celebrate a beautiful holiday other than take a picture of our group soaking up a bit of sun.
Below is the photo essay of the making of the picture. We were fortunate enough to have a world-class photographer, John Brack, nearby and willing to document the entire process – all of the images are his. Perhaps we should treat this blog post a How to manual for setting up a picture on a bergy bit.
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- Sizing up our prey.
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- Flopping onto the bergy bit.
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- Conquering the little beast and getting ready to put in the ice screw.
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- Pointing out the deep water to Tina.
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- Helping Tina up onto the bergy bit.
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- Brian navigating the deep water gap.
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- Brian coming aboard with the seal manuever.
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- Happy lab (B-019) photo op.
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- Relaxed photo, before Photoshop removal of rope.
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- Brian meditating.
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- Tina celebrating the sunny Christmas weather.
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- Hauling the beast back to the rocks.
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- Tina slipping off the berg into the deep water.
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- Enjoying Tina’s unintended polar plunge.
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- Back on the berg for an Antarctic explorer pose.
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- My sunny day celebration.
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- Going for a polar plunge.
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- The final product sans rope.
This past Wednesday, one of the other scientists here at Palmer, Kristen Gorman, received an email request to participate in the BBC’s World Have Your Say. However, because she was already scheduled to participate as an Antarctic expert on NPR’s News Blog The Two Way (similar to this) she passed on my contact info to the producers. The producers contacted me a couple of hours later and within the hour, I was on the radio telling the host and a worldwide audience about the changes we have seen here at Palmer Station as a result of the warming climate.
We’ve had the glacier adjacent to our buildings recede over the past twenty years by about five hundred feet or so…
I have never talked on the radio before, let alone from the Antarctic to a studio in London. The weirdest thing about the call was the horrible echo in the phone. It is because of the echo that I sound so drunk during the the brief Q&A with the host. I also expected the host to interrupt me and ask some sort of follow up questions. But, she apparently wanted to me to have my say and allowed me to ramble – which is why I periodically pause to see if she has anything to say in response to my blabbering. Take a listen (I am introduced at about 19:00 in the broadcast I chopped out the rest of the podcast, it should only be my segement… thanks to Susan for finding the broken link) – just remember it’s my first time and I have a long ways to go before I feel comfortable on the radio.
[This is cross-posted to the LTER Blog]
Yesterday, the Palmer LTER group received, on behalf of Palmer Station, a hyperspectral radiometer supported through Abercrombie & Kent’s “Fighting Climate Change in Antarctica” mission trip. The hyperspectral radiometer will be used to measure light coming from the sun that can be used for photosynthesis (aka Photosynthetically Available Radiation – PAR). The data collected by this instrument will help augment our research into the effects of the rapidly changing climate in the region on the fragile Antarctic ecosystem. Specifically, the data from the hyperspectral radiometer will help us quantify how much energy is entering the ecosystem as the light from the sun drives the conversion of atmospheric CO2 into biomass at the base of the food web.
Unfortunately, the LTER principal investigator, Hugh Ducklow, was unable to make it down to Palmer to accept the gift. As a result, I was given the opportunity to represent Palmer science and accept the radiometer. The whole event was pretty spectacular, especially because the passengers of the A&K mission trip represented 10 countries (Australia, Canada, Finland, Hungary, Israel, Netherlands, South Africa, Switzerland, United Kingdom, & the United States). Jim McClintock (whose work on chemical ecology in the Antarctic is quite renowned) aptly noted during the presentation ceremony aboard the MS Minerva
As such, their gift to you represents a global collective seeking to facilitate a better understanding of a significant global problem – climate change.
This sort of collaboration between responsible tour operators, their passengers, and scientists helping shed insight into issues in the region of tourism, are the sort of thing we need to see more often. This type of interaction brings tourists into the fold of the research and allows them to become a stakeholder in the ongoing work that the scientists are conducting. In the end, increasing the number of people who have a vested interest in seeing the research succeed can only be beneficial to the program as well as help reduce the disconnect often felt between scientists and the general public.
Kudos to Abercrombie & Kent, and the Officers, Crew, and especially to the Passengers of the MS Minerva for their kind support of our research.
Thanks!
Receiving the Radiometer with the international passengers behind us.
[This is cross-posted to the LTER blog]
Chatting on NPR's News Blog, Two-Way
After collecting water samples this morning, fellow scientist Chris Neill and I joined National Public Radio’s Jason Orfanon and Frank James in an online chat on NPR’s news blog, The Two-Way. From last night, here is the post introducing Chris and I for the chat.
Overall the chat was incredibly fun and it was a great opportunity to get a sense for the excitement out there regarding Antarctic and climate science. Although nothing is set in stone yet, there is a decent chance the birders Kristen and Jen may get to have a chat on the same blog which would be awesome as their work would likely generate a ton of interest.
After participating in the chat, I noticed that Josh Marshall wrote an interesting post to his blog Talking Points Memo regarding skepticism and science. Given the number of questions we had about skepticism but were unable to answer too extensively due to time constraints, I found Josh’s points to be quite relevant when trying to deal with climate change policy.
Neil Armstrong visited Palmer Station, Antarctica this past weekend. He came down with Lindblad Expeditions on the National Geographic Explorer. He and his wife, along with all of the other passengers, took a tour of station. I bumped into Neil and Carol being led through the labs by our station manager Bob Farrell. So, Bob took the chance encounter as an opportunity to have Neil get a brief introduction to the science happening on station. Telling Neil and his wife about the work we are doing and how we are collaborating with penguin researchers to define the penguin foraging areas using autonomous underwater vehicles was a unique experience. I definitely felt odd explaining underwater flight characteristics (pitch, roll, yaw) to one of the world’s foremost experts in flight. Oddly enough, the thing he found most intriguing about the gliders were 1) the fact that their wings are flat, and 2) that they were so primitive. He was immediately convinced that they will undergo some serious changes in the coming years as they become more popular and wider range of engineers have a chance to think about their design and fiddle with improvements. At the end of his visit to our lab, he and Carol were kind enough to pose for pictures, first with our lab and then with the station.
left to right: Brian Gaas, Neil Armstrong, Tina Haskins, me, Carol Armstrong
Palmer Station with Neil and Carol Armstrong
I don’t recall it being this cold here last year.
I have been continually thinking these words since our arrival at Palmer Station, Antarctica in October to begin another field season. Yesterday I finally had a chance to look through our log book from last season and indeed our coldest day of sampling last year was -2 C. Over the past week and a half, we haven’t really had temps much warmer than that. In fact it has been pretty stable around -4 C since we arrived. With the cold we have also seen much more stable conditions compared to last season. We’ve had some amazingly calm evenings and days out on the boat. Overall, an excellent introduction for Brian Gaas and Tina Haskins, the other B-019 field crew, to the Antarctic.
Brian Gaas and Tina Haskins, getting a feel for our boat, Bruiser.
Brian and I on a clear, crisp evening on our boat, Bruiser, with Mt. William behind us.
One of the other zodiacs from station, with Mt. William in the background.
A few weeks ago while we were in New Zealand, I found out that I would have to take a detour from our travels to help out with a glider deployment in Svalbard, Norway – the Arctic. Although it’s not ideal to have to cut short my time in China, the combination of my obligation to our lab and the fact that I’ve wanted to get up to the Arctic. Getting to be in both the Antarctic and Arctic in the same year sounds like a cool gig. And, since my flight from Hong Kong to the Arctic would require stops in London and Oslo, I figured I should spend a couple of nights in London visiting Couchsurfers (Tim and Joyce) who had visited us in NYC. Elizabeth and her sister left me at the train station in Guilin before they went on their way to explore more of the Chinese countryside. From Guilin I took the overnight train back to Shenzhen and then on to Hong Kong where I caught my overnight flight to London.
I haven’t spent time in London since I was 19, so I was pretty excited to get to see the city that many people feel has eclipsed NYC as the world’s financial center. Tim and Joyce’s neighborhood did not disappoint. They live on Surry Quay near the Canada Water tube stop.
Overlooking Surrey Quay in London from Tim and Joyce's flat.
As it happens, my 4 days in London coincided with the Wimbledon Tennis tournament. TIm and Joyce are big tennis fans, so they managed to take the afternoon off one day and the three of us went to get into the evening matches on standby. Although we had to wait in a long line for about 3 hours we ended up getting in a watching some tennis.
Line for standby tickets for Wimbledon.
Various courts at Wimbledon
Wimbledon Center court
Being a geography geek I also wanted to get to Greenwich and check out the Royal Observatory and straddle the Prime Meridian. Similar to NYC, 4 days is not nearly enough time to see much of the city. But after having not been to London for some time, it was wonderful to see some friends and spend the days running through various neighborhoods followed up with evenings at local pubs drinking British ales from the cask.
Prime Meridian in Greenwich.
