Reed's Antarctic images

Robin and Emily doing the WISSARD dance - Basler in the background

Here’s the full length of the percussion core, fixed with a 5m core barrel. This was the very last (and very rushed) day of operations. It was a bitter cold and long night that resulted in a shorter core than hoped, but  core nonetheless. We simply didn’t have the time to fully check on operation of the percussion slide hammer during bottom time. All in all, recovering cores using all of our coring methods (multicore, piston core and percussion core) marks unqualified success in sediment recovery.  The biology work is underway, but the real geology work begins when cores are back in the home labs for analysis.

Here’s Jill and Robin after a plumbing crisis in the sediment lab. Who knew that pipes can freeze and pumps be ruined if the power is turned off in Antarctica with nobody watching? When we arrived in camp we discovered the problem and had to do some “hillbilly plumbing” to get a working system, with the help of John Priscu and Robin.  Much of my time in  the field was actually spent cleaning and brooming water into floor drains - finally, a job I am qualified for!

Alex and Brent trying to free a frozen valve on the water sampler.

Here’s Jill peroxide spraying her CTD (conductivity-temperature-depth recorder) prior to sealing it in plastic. The peroxide kills cells on the device before deploying. The plastic is sliced off as it goes down the hole. 

Here’s Skidz (Mark Skidmore) with the first water sample collected by Niskin bottle and taken to the lab. It was borehole water, not lake water. It was another day before we penetrated into the lake. 

Here’s Tim and the percussion core.

I’ve been bumped from my flight out of McMurdo, which is not at all uncommon (especially, it seems, this year), but always frustrating.  Town is undergoing it’s annual late summer change, as ships begin to come in.  Here is the Russian ice breaker contracted this year by NSF to cut the ship channel. Tomorrow (Saturday 2/10) the research ship N.B. Palmer will be coming in to town.  The helicopter is carrying tourists to McMurdo from a ship that followed the ice breaker in. 

To avoid contaminating either our samples or the lake environment we wore Tyvek clean-room suits and rubber gloves