Crary Lab tour

So we did get to sleep in this morning. I was up at about 9am, did some housework, and headed to breakfast. One of the planes must have come in with more freshies this week, because they had slices of watermelon and pineapple for breakfast this morning. Plus there were blueberry muffins and eggs benedict as well. Yum.

After shift, I ran back to throw in some laundry and shower and change, and then went on the Crary Lab tour. I got to hear about some of the projects that are going on. It was a bit disappointing cause I would have liked to see IN the labs, but I can understand not taking a huge group in some of those places.

Some interesting facts I found out today. There is a place down here called the Dry Valleys. These places are drier than the Sahara, and get less than 3 inches of precipitation a year. Evidently, the Dry Valleys are the most basic of ecosystems, with no large predators, so scientists can study an ecosystem at it's most basic level without all the other stuff that large predators and organisms can bring. Anyway, they found a penguin carcass mummified there (anything dead gets mummified because it is so dry), and they carbon-dated it to find out how old it was. Would you believe 50,000 years? I don't blame you if you don't, I hardly did. I wanted to ask if it was a recognizable species, but I didn't get the chance to. I'll ask the next time I go over there.

We also got to talk to one of the guys on the drilling project down here, called ANDRILL. He got us in the lab to show us some of the rock core samples. The ones they were working on when we went in were from about 60-80 meters below the surface of the sea bottom. These are all from glacial movement, so they have a lot of pebbles and granite pieces in them (though one of the other guys in there showed me some pieces of what might be shell or old barnacle), and maybe some fossiles. They are hoping to eventually get deep enough so that they can get stuff like sandstone that might have been around before Antarctica froze.

Because yes, there was a point in time in which Antarctica was a tropical paradise. Of course, that was about 50 million years ago, but still. They have found all kinds of fossiles of tropical kinds of trees and stuff from that time frame. Neat, huh.

Then they did a thing for us with the volcano, Mt Erebus. They have a camera up on the rim of the lava pool, and have some neat video from a few years ago during a couple of small eruptions. Now, when I say eruptions, I don't mean on the scale of Mt St Helens or anything like that. I don't know how big this lava pool is, or how far away it is from the camera, but it looked like it burped and threw up some lava. One of them though, threw a rock up into the snow just in front of the camera, and there was a lot of steam. They had a couple of these 'bombs' as they call them, for show and tell. So I got to hold some Erebus bombs. They were really cool, cause as big as they were, they were so full of air holes (I'm guessing from the rapid cooling from the ice and snow) that they weren't all that heavy. Plus, you could see things that looked like strings, from the lava being liquid and then cooling so fast that the streams got frozen.
Then we went onto the aquarium. They don't have anything bigger than some very young Antarctic Cod, but they were very curious fish. They kept coming up to the surface to see us and blow bubbles at us. The scientists are studying them to find out how they keep from freezing in the sub-freezing water. So far they have found that they have protein anti-freeze with a lot of sugars attached to the protein. It's made in the pancreas, but I didn't hear a lot of what the guy said. Hopefully that group will have a science lecture I can go to soon.

The guy I was talking to at the penguin lecture the other week was there, and I got to see his lab. He's working on deep sea ROV's to go really deep in the water to find old experiments (that were put down there before there were limits on how deep divers could go), and find new sites. It looks like a torpedo, has 2 independent engines (in case one fails), a camera, several LED lights, and a tether with video cord so they can get real-time video from it.
So now I'm back at the firehouse, which was the only place I could find internet hook-up, since most people have Sunday off, and are using just about every internet jack on station, I think. And soon it's time for dinner.