Antarctica &#8211; News

Part 1: If glaciers could talk, what would they say?

Friedlaender reaches out to people as much as he reaches out to whales — his work has been featured extensively in , , ��Ի��, just to name a few. The reason, he says, is that we’re more inclined to want to protect what we know.

The Researcher

Friedlaender is an associate researcher at the Institute of Marine Scientists at the University of California, Santa Cruz.

In the gloom of a sudden snow squall, Ari Friedlander ’96 searches for minke whales in Andvord Bay in Antarctica. In that moment, “it was calm and smooth and a bit eerie.” (Carolyn Van Houten/National Geographic)

The Research

Friedlaender’s specialty is whales. He’s made a career out of tagging and tracking them in Antarctica, and his team also studies them off California, Cape Cod, and southeast Alaska.

At the moment, he’s focused on minke whales, the smallest of the baleen whales. His team tags them, sometimes attaching video cameras, to figure out how they eat, where they go, and how they interact.

Minke whales “evolved to live in sea ice,” he says. “They’re pretty cryptic, pretty elusive. They’ll be most impacted by climate change, because one of the manifestations of that is that sea ice is decreasing.

“We’re trying to understand how they use the sea ice habitat and to predict what the future holds for them.”

Antarctica on Repeat

Friedlaender has made 32 trips to Antarctica, totaling two to three months a year.

A hexacopter drone documents four members of the 2018 minke expedition team as they look for whales in Charlotte Bay in the Antarctic Peninsula. (Duke Marine Robotics and Remote Sensing Lab)

From Here to There

“I grew up on the coast in New England, and I was always fascinated with the ocean,” Friedlaender says. “From a young age, I was encouraged to go out and observe things in nature — in fact, my mom started me taking notes in a field notebook every time I went to the beach when I was young.

“I did a degree in biology and a minor in anthropology at �ֲ��ý. �ֲ��ý gave me the opportunity to learn to be a scientist and gave me the tools to go into the world and start doing science on my own. [Professor of Biology] Will Ambrose was a really important person for me because he was incredibly encouraging of the things I was interested in.

“He taught me how to think. I think that was the most important lesson I learned at �ֲ��ý — learning how to think like a scientist and how to ask questions.”

Baptism by Ice

After he graduated, Friedlaender went to North Carolina to study stranded whales. One day, as he was dissecting a dolphin on a beach, a researcher approached him and mentioned that the Australian Antarctic Division needed “someone to go to the Antarctic to count marine mammals.”

Friedlaender accepted, flew to Australia, and boarded a ship.

“It takes about six days to get to the ice from Tasmania, and we had horrible seas,” he recalls. “We probably had 30 to 35-foot seas and 50 to 60-knot winds. The ship was rolling all over the place, but as soon as we got into the sea ice, everything calmed down.

A minke whale breaches in Antarctica’s Paradise Bay. (Ari Friedlaender/photo)

“The first month I went down there, the average air temperature was between minus 20 and minus 40, and we didn’t see very many whales at all. But just being in that environment and feeling the cold, you feel absolutely minuscule and unimportant. It’s also such a vibrant place and such an amazing natural wilderness that you can’t help but be overcome by it.

“Getting off the ship, I said to the woman who had hired me, ‘Okay, now you’ve got to deal with me because I’m here and I’ve got to go back.’”

What the Camera Shows

Friedlaender is one of the first scientists to study Antarctic marine mammals extensively — he was at the vanguard of the evolution from simply counting whales to tagging and tracking them, learning a tremendous amount about individual animals.

Putting video cameras on the bodies of minke whales — the process involves to the creatures on an inflatable boat, then using a long pole to suction-cup a video tag to their skin — has led to two important revelations, Friedlaender says.

The first is that minke whales are more social than scientists thought. “You can see five or six whales swimming really quickly to find krill and all feeding at the same time and going really fast in different directions,” he says.

The second is that they’re fast eaters — a “lunge” to swallow a mass of tiny krill takes about 10 seconds. “They accelerate, open their mouths, and take in a huge gulp of water, and the tissue on the other side of their throat can expand to hold a huge amount of water,” Friedlaender ways. “With their tongues they push the water out of their mouths, and the krill get stuck in their baleen.”

Tourists and Science

Friedlaender spends most of his time in Antarctica on boats. Sometimes it’s a government research vessel. Other times it’s a tourist boat, taking visitors to the Antarctic Peninsula for a few weeks at a time.

“We utilize those platforms to do science, but also to engage and communicate with the public while we’re doing our science,” he says.

The Sea Ice Problem

Minke whales live among sea ice, which offers both protection from killer whales and sources of krill, which grow up underneath pieces of sea ice and feed penguins, birds, and seals as well as whales.

Melting ice, therefore, opens minke whales to predation and diminishes an important food source. (It’s actually good in the short term for another whale, the humpback, which does better in the open ocean — though in the long term, it’s bad for everyone.)

Minke whales are social creatures, feeding on krill in relatively large groups. (Ari Friedlaender/photo)

“That lack of sea ice is going to decrease the amount of krill that’s available for all the animals there, and the system is going to change very dramatically,” Friedlaender says.

Total Removal

Living and working in Antarctica “can be the greatest thing in the world, but also extremely challenging,” Friedlander says.

“The physical landscape is unbelievable and beautiful and hostile and very unforgiving. It’s completely void of human elements. To be in a place that’s very wild and truly natural is a real gift, but it’s remote. You’re on a small boat with a small number of people.

“Luckily, we’re able to stay connected with people through phone and internet, but we’re definitely removed from things. You can immerse yourself in this environment.”

Blue Ice

On some glaciers, falling snow gets compressed into the ice and air bubbles , which means that the ice, like the ocean, is blue.

An iceberg near Marguerite Bay. (Ari Friedlaender/photo)

“We get a lot of overcast days down here, and even when it’s overcast, the ice is glowing,” Friedlaender says. “Icebergs have this blue color that doesn’t fade.”

Friendly Critters

“The number of penguins and whales and seals is remarkable,” Friedlander says. “They’re completely curious — they haven’t grown up with humans being a threat to them.

“Seeing wildlife that hasn’t had that interference with people in a negative way is kind of refreshing.”

Making Connections

Much of Friedlaender’s Antarctic work involves outreach. He frequently welcomes media outlets from around the world, he works with museums and educators, and he’s published a book of photography from the continent.

Ari Friedlaender deploys a multi-sensor suction cup tag on a humpback whale in Antarctica’s Wilhelmina Bay. (Courtesy of Ari Friedlaender)

“I’ve honestly grown to be less objective,” Friedlaender says. “I want to see people do better, and I want to see these animals survive and the ecosystems sustain themselves. It doesn’t affect how we do the work because science is science, but the connection that I have to the place and to the animals has grown immensely the more I learn about them.

“People are more likely to want to protect things that they care about. I feel more of a responsibility to communicate and promote what we’re doing and learn about these animals broadly, because that’s what makes people care, and that’s what’s going to help change people’s behavior and allow these animals and ecosystems to survive.”

�ֲ��ý Club of Antarctica: The secrets of the lakes

Emily McConville — Thu, 03 May 2018 19:24:13 +0000

Antarctica’s geography is characterized by its mountains, desert climate, and, of course, all that ice.

But it also has plenty of lakes — some under a few feet of ice in a landscape that resembles Mars, others filling the space between the earth and kilometers-thick glaciers, made liquid by sheer pressure.

The �ֲ��ý Club of Antarctica

This is Part 4 of a series about �ֲ��ý alumni who spent this winter in Antarctica.

Part 2: If you give a seal a camera

Part 1: If glaciers could talk, what would they say?

The lakes are what brought two �ֲ��ý alumni, Carolynn Harris ’11 and Billy Collins ’14, to the southernmost continent. Both graduate students at Montana State University, they participated in separate projects aimed at accessing liquid water beneath the permanent ice cover and studying the microscopic life that might persist there.

Studying what lives in the lakes, they say, can tell us how life persists in the most extreme conditions and gives us clues to what might be living beyond Earth’s orbit.

The people

Harris is a doctoral student in ecology and environmental science at Montana State. At �ֲ��ý, for her senior thesis in biology, she analyzed fish bones from archaeological sites in Penobscot Bay, Maine. She had two thesis advisers: Professor of Geology Bev Johnson and Professor of Biology Will Ambrose.

Carolynn Harris ’11 takes a selfie in “the Labyrinth,” a seven-mile hike through canyons in the McMurdo Dry Valleys. “The topography here is so similar to Mars, NASA brought rovers here for testing,” Harris says. (Courtesy of Carolynn Harris)

Harris continued to work at the intersection of biology and geology as a graduate student in marine science, then back at �ֲ��ý as a research associate to Ambrose, before starting her doctoral program.

“Without getting that interdisciplinary exposure through my senior thesis experience, I wouldn’t be where I am today,” she says.

Collins, meanwhile, is working toward a Master of Fine Arts in science and natural history filmmaking, also at Montana State. A �ֲ��ý psychology major and avid outdoorsman, he explored his interest in filmmaking during a Short Term independent study with Lecturer in English Robert Strong, directing, shooting, and editing a film his friends wrote. Collins realized he could see himself doing this for a living.

Billy Collins ’14 poses for a photo shortly after arriving in Antarctica. (Courtesy of Billy Collins)

“Having the freedom to spend a Short Term on one creative project was an incredible experience and really influenced my decision to pursue filmmaking as a career,” he says.

The places

Last Antarctic summer, which was Maine’s winter, Harris worked in the McMurdo Dry Valleys, “the coldest, driest, and windiest desert on Earth,” she says. Her research was part of the project, which has been working in the Dry Valleys since 1992.

Solar panels, equipment sheds, and a camp hut sit on the shore of Lake Fryxell in the McMurdo Dry Valleys. “We cook our meals in the hut, which is equipped with propane heat and a propane stove,” Carolynn Harris says. “We sleep in tents on the lake shore.” (Courtesy of Carolynn Harris)

Collins, meanwhile, is the education and outreach graduate appointee for the Subglacial Antarctic Lakes Scientific Access Project, a large group of scientists and educators who study the life and ecology of subglacial lakes.

In 2019, SALSA will drill through 1.2 kilometers of ice to study the biology and geology of Lake Mercer, on the Whillans Ice Plain.

Closed, cold, and salty

Harris studies the nutrient dynamics of the lakes in the McMurdo Dry Valleys. These bodies of water, capped with more than 10 feet of ice, are closed systems — water flows in from glacial-melt streams, but it doesn’t flow out, Harris says. The lakes are also very salty and very cold.

But despite those conditions, microbes call the lakes home.

“The driving question is how they survive and persist in such a harsh environment,” she says.

Carolynn Harris, second from left, and her team hoist 12 feet of drill “flights,” used to drill through ice to reach the lakes below. Each flight is three feet long. “Lake Fryxell has the thickest ice of our field sites, almost 15 feet,” Harris says, “so it takes five drill flights to get down to the liquid water.” (Courtesy of Carolynn Harris)

To find out, Harris’ team drilled narrow holes through the ice capping several lakes and took samples of water and sediment. She’s analyzing the samples now.

“The things that we learn about how the microbial part of the food web operates can tell us about other ecosystems, too,” she says.

Documenting the Traverse

Over on the ice plains, SALSA team members towed about a million pounds of equipment 600 miles across Antarctica to the ice above Lake Mercer, so that it will be set up and ready for the 2019 drill.

on Jan 26, 2018 at 1:35pm PST

Collins flew in with cameras and a drone to document 100 of those miles, filming and photographing the group as it used radar to chart a crevice-free path to the lake, made a snow runway for aircraft, and built berms for equipment.

“There were some days where I was able to do a lot of filming and photographing, and other days we were driving and I had short windows where I could go out with the drone,” Collins says.

on Mar 5, 2018 at 2:27pm PST

Understanding what can live in the cold and darkness underneath the glaciers could have an impact beyond Earth’s atmosphere, Collins says.

“They’ll be looking for little microscopic life forms down there,” he says. “It could give clues to where life could exist in our solar system, like on the ice moons of Jupiter and Saturn.”

Antarctic living

Life on the SALSA traverse to Lake Mercer was on modules — “basically trailers on skis,” Collins says. One of them served as a kitchen, and another had bunk beds and windows that could be blacked out to make sleep possible in the 24-hour Antarctic summer sun.

“It was like being in the hull of a ship, but on ice,” Collins says.

Stephen Zellerhoff, supervisor of SALSA Traverse and a colleague of Billy Collins ’13, stands in front of a Living Module. (Courtesy of Billy Collins)

Harris, in the McMurdo Dry Valleys, lived at a series of lakes, most of which had a permanent wooden hut with propane heat and a stove for cooking. Harris and her team slept in tents.

Water was readily available — they could chip lake ice or go to a glacier and collect fallen “glacier berries” — but water conservation was still paramount.

“Once we melted the water and used it for cooking, or for the one shower you can take a week, all that wastewater has to be collected and shipped off the continent,” she says.

The best hikes

Harris says her team’s equipment got around via helicopter, but the team itself often hiked from lake to lake.

And what made blackout curtains a necessity at night made hiking glorious by day. “It was full sunlight all day, every day,” she says.

Three laboratory buildings at Lake Hoare in the McMurdo Dry Valleys serve different purposes: One is used for experiments involving radioactive chemicals, one houses data collection instruments, and one is known as the “‘lab lab,’ where we process water and sediment samples,” says Carolynn Harris. (Courtesy of Carolynn Harris)

“It was around two to four miles from one lake to the other, and it was some of the most beautiful hiking I’ve ever done in my life.”

Beware the static

Antarctica is the world’s largest desert, and its dryness means there’s a lot of static electricity. And static is not good for cameras.

“If you step away from the camera for 10 minutes, you can build up static in your body, and when you touch the camera it can fry the electronics,” Collins says. “When you’re out in the field and dealing with electronics, you’re constantly trying to find metal things to touch” to discharge the electricity.

The day before reaching Lake Mercer, SALSA equipment operator Kevin Williams tends to his tractor. (Courtesy of Billy Collins)

What’s next

Harris, currently analyzing samples, plans to return to Antarctica each year to conduct research for her doctorate.

Collins will be a camera assistant for the actual drilling to Lake Mercer in 2019. In the meantime, he runs SALSA’s ��Ի��, he’s created a documentary about SALSA’s journey to Lake Mercer, and he’s traveling around Montana, presenting his work to schoolchildren.

Billy Collins talks about Antarctica and SALSA to third-graders at Longfellow Elementary School in Bozeman, Mo. (Courtesy of Billy Collins)

“What’s cool about this project is that it’s funded by taxpayer dollars, and the lead scientist believes that the scientists owe it to the public to get out as much information about what they do as possible,” he says.

�ֲ��ý Club of Antarctica: Fossils, and beach volleyball on a glacier

Emily McConville — Fri, 20 Apr 2018 13:40:29 +0000

Antarctica doesn’t have much in the way of life, other than microbes.

Away from the coast, “there are no animals and no trees and vegetation,” says Allie Balter ’14, one of several alumni who conduct research on the southernmost continent. “It feels like you are on Mars.”

That wasn’t always the case.

The �ֲ��ý Club of Antarctica

This is Part 3 of a series about �ֲ��ý alumni who spent this winter in Antarctica.

Part 2: If you give a seal a camera

Part 1: If glaciers could talk, what would they say?

Hank Woolley ’13, a graduate student in paleontology, spent parts of November, December, and January on a glacier near the South Pole. There, he looked for the fossil remnants of the vast forests and large animals that lived and hunted among the trees.

Hank Woolley ’13 excavates a partial skeleton of a Procolophon, a burrowing reptile relative, on an unnamed ridge above the Gillespie Glacier. (Mike Lucibella/USAP, NSF)

His work adds to what’s known about animals who lived hundreds of millions of years ago — even before the dinosaurs — and how they survived one of Earth’s largest extinction events.

Learn more about Woolley’s research, and what you do with your free time on a glacier:

The mission

Find the “refugees” of the Great Permian Extinction.

The people

Woolley is a doctoral student in paleontology at the University of Southern California and a graduate student-in-residence at the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County. For his first trip to Antarctica, he joined a team of paleontologists, geochemists, and a mountaineer.

Different types of history

“I graduated from �ֲ��ý with BAs in history and French,” Woolley says. “After volunteering on a dinosaur dig in southern Utah with the Denver Museum of Nature & Science, I decided to pursue my childhood passion for fossils and paleontology and enrolled at the University of Colorado Boulder to obtain another undergraduate degree, this time in geology.”

Hank Woolley ’13 uses a diamond-bladed rock saw to excavate the pig-sized, mammal-like reptile Lystrosaurus, fossilized in a vertical rock face 1,500 feet above the Shackleton Glacier. (Courtesy of Hank Woolley)

The place

Woolley and his team camped on Shackleton Glacier, about 340 miles from the South Pole.

Antarctic living

“We had running water for handwashing and washing dishes. We had a full kitchen, a cook and a head chef, beautiful meals. We had lobster tail for New Year’s Eve. We had electrical outlets and generators.

“We had a lot of amenities that made being out on a glacier in the middle of nowhere quite easy.”

At the Shackleton Glacier camp, leisure activities might include softball, jogging, or beach volleyball. (Mike Lucibella/USAP, NSF)

The work

Each morning, a helicopter known as the “Shackleton Uber” flew the team to a new site, where they would prospect for fossils.

“We collected over 200 different fossil skeletons and bones and about 4,500 pounds of rocks,” Woolley says.

Hank Woolley ’13, mountaineer Peter Braddock, and paleontologist Akiko Shinya prepare to catch a helicopter ride back to camp after prospecting for fossils in the Cumulus Hills. (Mike Lucibella, USAP/NSF)

Our ancestors’ ancestors

Two hundred fifty-two million years ago, a conifer-like forest covered the continent. Ferns blanketed the forest floor and large animals, precursors to modern-day mammals and reptiles, made the continent their home.

“You have these animals walking around and burrowing,” Woolley says. “Maybe some of them are climbing big trees. At the same time, you have summers where it’s light 24 hours a day and winters where the sun never rises. It’s a completely unique ecosystem that we don’t really have today.”

With a hammer shown for scale, the skeleton of a badger-sized, burrowing early mammal relative called a Thrinaxodon is embedded in a 250 million-year-old red sandstone formation. (Courtesy of Hank Woolley)

Global warming, ancient and current

The end of the Permian geologic period was marked by a huge extinction event that wiped out about 80 percent of all life on Earth. (The dinosaurs emerged during the following Triassic period).

Woolley and his team hypothesize that some species survived the extinction by migrating close to the South Pole.

“They were fleeing from lower latitudes and hotter temperatures,” he says. “It was an extreme global warming event. It’s what we’re scared might happen to our planet today. That’s what’s so great about studying these mass extinctions — we can predict what will happen from past events.”

�ֲ��ý Club of Antarctica: If you give a seal a camera

Emily McConville — Thu, 12 Apr 2018 15:27:32 +0000

Doug Krause ’99 is all about leopard seals. A research biologist, he goes to Antarctica’s South Shetland Islands each year to study those grizzly bear-sized marine mammals (as well as a few other animals).

The �ֲ��ý Club of Antarctica

This is Part 2 of a series about �ֲ��ý alumni who spent this winter in Antarctica.

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The work involves a lot of catching, tagging, and releasing, as well as using drones and even attaching cameras to seals’ backs. What Krause finds can tell us a lot about the ecology of the Antarctic Peninsula, and how climate change affects it.

The question

How do leopard seals get their food?

The researcher

Krause is a research biologist with National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration Fisheries. When he’s not in Antarctica, he’s based in southern California.

Doug Krause ’99 operates a drone to track leopard seals off the Antarctic Peninsula. (Courtesy of Doug Krause)

An Old Hat

Krause has made 12 trips to Antarctica since 2002.

The �ֲ��ý connection

“My degree was in biology,” Krause says. “I had a professor, Will Ambrose, who was doing active research in the Arctic. That was very captivating to me; polar research and polar exploration were on my mind from that stage.

“After graduation, I had the opportunity to take a position as a field biologist in the Antarctic. It was supposed to be only for a couple of years starting in 2002, but I got down there and fell in love with it.”

The place

Cape Shirreff on Livingston Island, about 600 miles south of Chile.

Image via Google Maps

Why leopard seals are just the coolest

As Krause told the , “I can say, being completely unbiased, that leopard seals are the single most interesting marine mammal, or possibly animal, anywhere in the world.”

A leopard seal rests on an ice flow. (Courtesy of Doug Krause)

That’s because they’re at the top of the food chain, and they’re the only seals that eat other seals. They’re torpedo-shaped and streamlined like gray seals and harbor seals, but they’re also maneuverable like sea lions.

Why study leopard seals?

Leopard seals are “indicator species,” meaning you can learn a lot about the ecosystem by studying them.

“Our job is to understand the health of the whole marine ecosystem. Our work is mostly focused on antarctic krill — they are a crucial part near the base of the food web, and many other things depend on them as food: fish, whales, seals, penguins, birds.

“We track the populations of these indicator species, where they go, what they’re eating, and how hard they’re working to get that food. Understanding how hard they have to work and how they’re doing it gives us a better understanding of the krill itself.”

How he does it

Krause and his team use photography, including drone photography, and tagging to track populations and the seals’ diets.

“We track what they’re eating using a few technologies,” he says. “One is stable isotope analysis, where we take a bit of tissue and figure out what they’ve been eating from that. We also sift through their scats, which is really glamorous.”

What they found

Lately, the team has put cameras on the seals’ backs to record how they get their food. The resulting footage, which has been featured on National Geographic TV and , shows for the first time that leopard seals spend much of their time hunting, and they have individual hunting patterns. (In the below, a leopard seal ambushes an Antarctic fur seal pup).

“We learned that individuals have their own hunting strategy, and that is really important when you try to relate this back to ecosystem impact,” Krause says.

Antarctic living

Krause and his team live in cabin-like buildings with a shared kitchen. They take showers once a week using rainwater or melted snow, and communications are limited. An October snowstorm might mean a 35-minute dig to the outhouse.

When he’s in Antarctica, Krause stays at the NOAA field camp on Cape Shirreff. (Courtesy of Doug Krause)

There are some upsides. “Every year, the exact same thing happens about two weeks after I get there,” Krause says. “I will get a bit of chest congestion and have some mucus for about a day, then it disappears. That process is essentially my body shedding the pollution that I’ve taken on a very regular basis in Southern California.”

Climate connection

The temperature in the Antarctic Peninsula has shot up as much as 7 degrees Celsius since the 1950s, leading to receding glaciers and rapid ecological change.

That’s why it’s so important to study leopard seals and what they eat, Krause says. “Watching how these ecosystems and how groups of animals respond to rapid change will provide valuable information for the ecological community on what effects we can expect throughout the rest of the globe.”

Following the Law

The Marine Mammal Protection Act limits capturing, killing, or harassing marine mammals in U.S. waters. It also applies to U.S. citizens working in international waters. Krause, being the latter, took his leopard seal photos and video in accordance with MMPA permit nos. 16472 and 20599.

Learn more

and both featured Krause’s work with leopard seals.

�ֲ��ý Club of Antarctica: If glaciers could talk, what would they say?

Emily McConville — Thu, 05 Apr 2018 15:21:29 +0000

This year, at least seven �ֲ��ý alumni traveled to Antarctica to conduct or document research.

They spent the Antarctic summer, which is Maine’s winter, taking samples, transporting hundreds of tons of gear, or sticking cameras on the backs of seals. In doing so, they hope to uncover the secrets of Antarctica’s glaciers, fossils, and living mammals; what they find might teach us more about our world and beyond.

The �ֲ��ý Club of Antarctica

This is Part 1 of a series about �ֲ��ý alumni who spent this winter in Antarctica.

Part 2: If you give a seal a camera