Week 2: The wheels start turning
We started off the week with ski-doo (snowmobile) and Gator (small all-terrain utility vehicle) training, followed by tractor and Nodwell (a multi-purpose two-tracked vehicle with a crane attached to the rear) training which is used to lift the boats off the trailor and onto the water and vice versa. Driving the Nodwell was my favourite, it felt like driving a tank.
Wednesday was the unofficial opening of the Dirk Gerritzs Lab. It was supposed to coincide with the first water sample but due to the weather we had to settle for a bucket sample from the end of the wharf. “Don’t break my bucket, it’s my favourite bucket” says Tim the boatman, “Of course not we are only taking a water sample”. The Wharf where the boats are launched from is pretty high up and difficult to get the bucket back with a sample that wasn’t just snow scraped off the side of the Wharf. About an hour later and with one and a half buckets, we returned to the boatman, “you know how you told us not to break your favourite bucket, well….the handle came off”. That was the first but not the only problem of the day! We were finally processing our first ‘sample’ when everything went dead….power cut! So we ended up unofficially opening the Gerritzs lab with our first non-sample! Whilst they were still here, some of the people that that were there from the start of the actual collaboration, namely Corina Brussaard, Liesbeth Noor, Dave Wattam and Dave Ingham, gave informal speeches after which we opened a bottle of champagne, drank a beer/wine whilst eating home-made bitterballen! This tasty Dutch snack went down pretty well at Rothera.
Next was Antarctic camp craft.
We learnt how to light the paraffin stove and a Tilley lamp, without setting the tent on fire or smoking ourselves out of it, and then when the weather finally eased up enough, we headed up the glacier in the Sno-Cat (a fully tracked vehicle designed to move on snow) for our little outdoor camping adventure. We pitched up the tent by digging out corner pole holes and covered the edges with snow to ensure we don’t get blown away (in stronger winds you are supposed to dig the entire tent down into the snow). Once the tent was up it was dinner time. Out in the field, all the “cooking” (putting hot water into your freeze dried man-food bag) is done inside your 2 or 3 man tent, because it is just too damn cold and windy outside. With the Tilley lamp hanging from the top of the tent and the stove burning underneath, we were sitting there just in our t-shirts even though it was around minus 5°C outside. After dinner we tried a bit of cross-country skiing before settling fully dressed into our super warm sleeping bags on top of a wooden board, roll mat, Therm-a-Rest, and a sheep skin.
The next morning the weather was good enough for Zoi and I to get out on the boat, so we packed up early and ski-doo’d down the glacier, but then unfortunately had to wait in radio silence before we could go anywhere because some explosives were being loaded onto an aeroplane which then took off into the field for seismic surveys.
Upon arriving at the lab, we then packed up our 10 litre Niskin (water sampling bottle) and headed out into the bay with the marine assistant and the boatman as we still need further training before we are signed off as competent crew.
Unfortunately we couldn’t get far enough into the ice to reach our sampling station so we took our water sample from the back-up station. The divers who were out in another boat, brought us back a big chunk of sea-ice, the brownest they could find which means it would be full of algae. Whilst hoisting it up into the lab we noticed some cute little Adelie penguins waddling over to see what was going on. After our best penguin calls failed to attract them closer (we need a lot more practise), I tried walking around like a penguin which seemed to do the trick (or were they just curious to see the noisy tractor nearby) and they came over for a better look. Once the penguins had left, we left the mini iceberg to Corina, while Zoi and I started with ‘scrub-out’, i.e. every Friday people help out with cleaning around the base for an hour. Corina followed after she had frantically hacked out part of the untouched centre of the ice containing the algae. We looked at part of the melted sample and left the rest to melt overnight in the dark at 2°C in filtered seawater (to prevent a huge salinity shock). Under the microscope we saw that the nice brown looking piece of ice was mainly populated by large microalgae called diatoms, making us discuss to what extent the ice algae seed the seawater upon melting.
It is really starting to warm up now, the snow is turning slushy, the ground is peeking through the snow and the appearance of the first curious penguins has announced the start of summer on the Western Antarctic Peninsula!
