Visiting the University of Waikato in Hamilton, New Zealand

On the way to McMurdo Station in Antarctica, participants in the United States Antarctic Program travel through New Zealand.  This is because New Zealand is the best staging point for a flight down to McMurdo Station.  On my way through New Zealand, I spent some time in Hamilton, which is on the North Island, to visit with some colleagues at the University of Waikato.  Charlie Lee and Craig Cary (pictured below) study microbial ecology (among other things related to microbiology), and they have some really neat projects with the New Zealand Antarctic research program (Antarctica New Zealand).  You can find out more about their research here http://www.ictar.aq/.  Here are some pictures of environmental chambers that Charlie and Craig had custom-built to simulate the cold dry climate of the McMurdo Dry Valleys.  This task is not as simple as you might think.  They painstakingly collected soils from the actual Dry Valleys, keeping track of the depth at which the soil was collected, and brought it back to the lab to put in the chamber.  They had to recreate ice cement mixed with soil (form the ice cement layer in the Dry Valleys), and they layered the soil in the chambers similar to how it was layered in the field.  The chambers also have very dry air (low relative humidity) and very bright photosynthetically active radiation (PAR - daylight that autotrophic microbes can use to fix carbon).  Using mesocosm experimental set-ups such as these will give Charlie and Craig an unprecedented opportunity to experimentally test hypotheses about how soil microbes in Dry Valley soils will react to the changes in the soil habitat. 

Charlie (left) and Craig (right) showing off an environmental chamber

Soils from the McMurdo Dry Valleys in an environmental chamber in the lab at the University of Waikato

A close up of the permafrost layer in the environmental chamber