Answers for Kristin Renda

Dear Dr. Sokol,
Reading your blog, as well as other questions students like me have asked you has been very interesting. Like other students have posted before me, I am from Maplewood, NJ and it was my AP Enviro teacher who got me interested in the work you are doing. I just have a couple of questions about what life is like for you in Antarctica and how your research is being used.
1. Does the intense weather conditions ever interfere with you research?

Hi Kristin,
Weather does often interfere with our research. The 8 and a half hour flights from New Zealand to McMurdo, Antarctica are often influenced by weather. There is no control tower for the ice runway at McMurdo, so planes can only land if the weather is clear. If there is ice fog or visibility is low, then flights often have to turn around and go back to New Zealand.

LC130 plane on Ross Ice Shelf near McMurdo Station.

Because the landscape is so extreme, and because we don't want to build roads everywhere, the only practical way to get from McMurdo to our field research sites is by helicopter. The helicopters can't fly if visibility is low or of if it is too windy. Wind storms originating over the polar plateau are not uncommon, so we can have very clear, very windy days.

Helicopter landing at one of our field sites in Taylor Valley, Antarctica

2. What do you do for leisure?

At McMurdo Station, there are hiking trails around the station. A fun, short hike is to follow a trail to the top of Ob Hill, where you can get a view of the Ross Ice Shelf and McMurdo Station. If it's cold outside, I like to stay in and play music. The are guitars and other stringed instruments available for us to borrow. We also play board games and watch movies.

In the field, we can hike or play board games for fun. All in all, we usually don't have very much down time, unless we get stranded because of bad weather.

3. How do you think your research will benefit science?

That's a good question! The goal of my research is to understand the ecological processes that determine biodiversity. Two of the major drivers are (1) how well organisms move about the landscape, and (2) whether local habitat conditions favor some species over others. My research in general is to create computer models to understand how these processes influence diversity for different types of organisms (e.g., bacteria, nematodes, diatoms, etc.). In the Dry Valleys, we are trying to understand exactly which soil chemical properties are linked to soil bacterial diversity, and if the same rules apply everywhere in the Dry Valleys. We are using the data we collect to validate computer models that predict biodiversity. If our models work, we will be able to use computer models to predict how biodiversity will change in the future as the Dry Valley habitat changes for bacteria and other organisms (e.g., nematodes, diatoms, etc.).

Specific to Antarctic ecology, I hope that this work will help us determine the best way to measure biodiversity so that we can have some confidence that we will actually detect changes in the ecosystem when those changes happen.

More generally, I am comparing our biodiversity models for Antarctica against models we use in other ecosystems (e.g., the Everglades, temperate forests, urban ponds in Baltimore, etc.). I think it will be really interesting to find ecological processes that work the same way in ecosystems in Antarctica and Baltimore.

4. You said in your blog that ten years ago the glaciers were at a level that they melted to in just weeks. Do you think the lake levels will return to what they were before this recent melt, or do you think they can freeze back just as quickly as they melted?

In that post I was referring to the lakes. The lake levels in Taylor Valley dropped during a period of cooling in the 1990s. Then in one season (2001-2002), there was a lot of glacial melt. In that one season, the lake levels rose back to their previous level (recovered all the water that was lost over the previous 10 years). I think the lakes are dynamic, and rise and fall periodically. There is evidence that over the past century, the lakes have been rising. There are pictures from historic expeditions that show the lake levels were much lower in the 1910s. So the lake level decrease observed in the 1990s was an anomaly for the past century. The lake levels have been rising since I've been going to Antarctica (the past 4 years).

5. Will this recent melt affect your research in any way?

Yes. It will affect the logistics because we have semi-permanent field camps near the lakes that will need to be moved as the lakes rise. The US Antarctic Program has already had to move some huts and helicopter landing pads to uphill sites as the lakes have risen.

The lake level rise may affect some of our soil research plots, but most of the plots are quite far from the lake edge, for now. However, we anticipate that more water in the landscape will affect the Dry Valley ecosystem in general. We anticipate that with increased melt, streams will become wider, and there may be new or larger water tracks in the landscape. More wet soil will probably mean more active microbial life in the soils.

Thanks for the questions!