Field work in the Dry Valleys, Antarctica

Our team of scientists setting up a plot for sampling soil at a pond in the Dry Valleys

We finally made it out to our field site to start setting up our research.  We camped in Taylor Valley (a Dry Valley) for 2 nights while we were doing our work.  The picture above shows the team of scientists I work with.  One of the major goals of our work is to understand the biology of Antarctic soils.  The point of the experiment we are setting up in the picture is to understand how life in the soils will respond to climate change.

The Dry Valleys are one of the few places in Antarctica where the land is not covered by ice.  The types of animals we find in the Dry Valleys are very small organisms that live in the soil.  You need a microscope to see most of them, and they include round worms (nematodes), spring tails (collembola), water bears (tardigrades), rotifers, and mites.  We also study the bacteria that live in the soils.

In our experiment, we will add water from the pond that you see in the picture above to large plots of soil.  We are doing this because we expect more ice will melt in Antarctica in the coming years, and we want to know what this added water will do to the animals and the soils.