Von Guerard Stream

I wanted to take a little time to tell you about the streams here in the McMurdo Dry Valleys. I should start by saying that they are not your typical streams. They originate from glaciers that heat up from the sun and melt during the short, austral summers. The streams drain into lakes which are frozen year-round.



Even though the air temperatures are often below freezing, there is plenty of energy from the sun to melt the glaciers. Most of the time the streamflow is little more than a trickle, but during warm summers they can really rip! By tracking the amount of water flowing through the streams we can determine how much the glaciers are melting.


Lost Seal Stream, above, starts at the Commonwealth Glacier and ends at Lake Fryxell.


Many of the streams have a peak stream flow every day, what I refer to as a "flood pulse" or diurnal flow pattern. Here's a video of a diurnal flow event at Von Guerard stream, just outside of camp:
http://picasaweb.google.com/lh/photo/4Dh86LphsLwfmXpm5OEX_A?feat=directlink

Garwood Stream, located in Garwood Valley, has changed a lot recently. A few years ago an unusually warm summer generated really high flows. The stream banks are sandy and very unstable and collapsed from the high flows:A section of the Garwood River now flows below ground, and you can see giant boulders frozen into the exposed permafrost.

Dry Valley streams are dynamic and unpredictable, which make them interesting places to study ecosystems. I'm constantly amazed by the ability of life to exist in such harsh places (humans excluded, of course).

F6: home sweet home

The team (me, Jeff, Ian, Kallin, Loren, and Susan) arrived at F6 on December 31, just in time for New Year's Eve!





F6 camp, home sweet home









At first we had some trouble making "comms" with McMurdo Station. Of the 4 potential modes of communication - radio phone, VHF radio, iridium phone, and HF radio - only the iridium phone was working. The US Antarctic Program has a well-oiled search and rescue program in place: if we don't contact the station a rescue party is established right away to come find us. That's great if we actually need help, but bad if all is well.




Maybe if I hold the radio high up in the air....










The Stream Team (Seth, Mike, and Barb) finally returned to F6 after a long day at work, and we greeted them with a delicious curry dinner and some champagne to ring in the New Year.

The weather has been excellent, right around 32F and sunny. The K-12 outreach and education group are getting their bearings and we are getting used to sleeping with the lights on.




And now... back to work! My research goal this season is to collect some temperature and soil moisture measurements at the streams in order to see how temperature and moisture content affect stream ecosystems. This involves setting up equipment at the streams to record data continuously. With help from some very nice people I am learning how to program and wire dataloggers. So far I figured out how to wire the temperature probes to a datalogger. The next step is to get the program running. To me, this is the scary part and I am procrastinating...



While procrastinating, we took a little hike to Commonwealth Glacier just a couple miles northeast of camp.

Now it's time to focus on programming!