A Journey to the Ice Matthew Wood Mar 15

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My last job before heading overseas in mid-2007 (following months of sedimentary grain size analysis on the then recently collected McMurdo Ice Shelf ANDRILL core) was to put together a short film for the Antarctic Research Centre.

As I mentioned in the third episode, the ARC has an annual educational outreach programme aimed at getting local school children enthused about Antarctic science. The project brief was to give an overview of Antarctic field work in a 10-15 minute film aimed at primary to intermediate school-age kids. I decided to structure the narrative around a typical journey to the ice, which, of course, eventually became the film’s title and several years later led to the name of this podcast and blog. In addition to documenting scientific field work on the Victoria Land coastal glaciers and the McMurdo Dry Valleys, the film provides a glimpse of what life at Scott Base is like, and showcases the nearby historic huts and some of the local wildlife.

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The film is cobbled together from footage collected by ARC scientists, Warren Dickinson and Nancy Bertler, and from the 2005/2006 season Project K Youth on Ice expedition. Also making an appearance are the guys from Webster Drilling & Exploration Ltd. who have had a long-standing professional relationship with the ARC. I should say a big thank you to Hayden Saunders for composing the soundtrack, which previous listeners of the podcast may recognise.

The vidcast is optimised for playback on iPhone and iPod Touch, but will play on any video-capable iPod. To download the vidcast for your iPod, simply search and subscribe for free through the iTunes Store. For playback on other portable media devices please download from the Journeys to the Ice homepage. Otherwise you can watch it straight away by clicking on the link below (it may take several minutes to load so please be patient!).

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Photo (c) Matthew Wood 2003

Riders on the Storm Matthew Wood Feb 28

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Turns out there are no reservations about hitchhiking in Antarctica.

On the Victoria Land coast, microscopic particulate matter, from volcanic ash to sea salt, powdered rock to helicopter exhausts, make a habit of snatching free rides on the winds of Ross Sea cyclonic systems or on the gravity-driven katabatic gales that flow off the ice sheets most ferociously during the long dark of the Antarctic winter.

Microscopic View Snow Samples

The Evans Piedmont Glacier is a small ice dome that sits on the coast, snuggled between the McMurdo Dry Valleys and the lofty Transantarctic Mountains to the west, and the Ross Sea to the east. With the McMurdo Volcanic Group to the south and a handful of research stations nearby, it’s the perfect repository for stray aerosols whose chemistries recount a tale of changing local wind patterns. In the summer of 2007, Julia Bull of the Antarctic Research Centre travelled to Evans to read that story for herself.

The study is the first of its kind in the area to analyse the snowpack for a broad suite of major and trace elements. Four to five metre-deep snow pits, burrowed into the glacier surface, reveal a continuous profile of snow accumulation clearly marked out by low-density summer hoar horizons. To descend into such a snow pit is to step back in time well over a decade. The annual snow layers – while outwardly unassuming – are actually a detailed chronicle of climatic change as shown by fluctuations in a range of proxies, including: particulate matter elemental concentrations; stable isotopes of hydrogen and oxygen, which respond to seasonal temperature change; and methanesulphonate, an atmospheric acid that forms in response to primary productivity in the surface layer of the ocean and is indicative of summer accumulation when the Ross Sea is relatively free of sea ice.

Many terrestrial mineral dust element concentrations correlate well with annual maximum wind speed, but with marine aerosol the relationship isn’t as clear. Inter-annual changes are revealed when plotting the ratio between certain terrestrial- and marine-sourced elements, mirroring equivalent shifts in mean summer wind strength at a sub-decadal frequency. Weather station temperature measurements document a similar pattern, which included a cooling of the Victoria Land coast during the 1990s.

Wind Sculpted Snow

Climate change deniers predictably pounce on any climate records that show a cooling trend, but often their ‘interpretations’ will ignore how localised the signal is or fail to consider the effects of natural climate variability superimposed on a human-induced global warming trend. Julia’s findings support the claim that the Ross Sea climate experiences regular forcing by the El Niño-Southern Oscillation, which periodically enhances the inflow of cold continental air masses from the south.

Studies like Julia’s, set within the timescale of instrumental climate records, are extremely important in calibrating the paleo-climate proxy toolbox that can then be applied to the longer-term climate histories provided by ice cores.

To download the podcast for your iPod, simply search and subscribe for free through the iTunes Store. For playback on other portable media devices please download from the Journeys to the Ice homepage. Otherwise you can listen straight away by clicking on the link below.

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Figure (c) Julia Bull 2009. Photo (c) Matthew Wood 2003

The Beagle Missed a Trick Matthew Wood Feb 15

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In the realm of the Earth sciences (within the cramped offices of competitive post-graduate students at least) there has always been a playful antagonism between ‘hard rock’ and ‘soft rock’ geologists. So I was certainly fraternising with the enemy when I recently caught up with a good friend, Jodi Williams, to hear about her travels south during the past summer.

Jodi studied metamorphic petrology at the School of Geography, Environment and Earth Sciences at Victoria University, culminating in a thesis that probed the temperature and pressure histories locked in the geochemistry of the Alpine schist. Following university, work in the Amazon rainforest and travel through East Africa left her hungry for further adventures into the natural world. So when she had the opportunity to head deep into the untamed Southern Ocean, to explore the remote southernmost outposts of the New Zealand biogeographical region, she jumped at the chance.

Heritage Expeditions is a Christchurch-based company that advocates wildlife conservation through responsible travel. The Enderby Trust provides financial aid to young people who have a passion for the natural sciences, allowing them to travel to the sub-Antarctic Islands of New Zealand and Australia with Heritage Expeditions onboard their research vessel Spirit of Enderby.

Macquarie Island Penguins

The early human history of many of the islands is written in the blood of hapless penguins and marine mammals that were brutally harvested and rendered for natural oils. Native flora and fauna also struggled under the pressures placed on them by exotic species, but serious conservation efforts have been hugely successful in restoring the damaged areas to their former glory. The Snares are close to pristine, with more birds nesting on these tiny islands than there are seabirds around the entire British Isles.* The rich biodiversity and geological significance of the New Zealand and Australian sub-Antarctic islands respectively has earned them UNESCO World Heritage status, and Heritage Expeditions appropriately refers to them as the ‘Galapagos of the Southern Ocean’.

Charles Darwin was openly unimpressed with what he saw of mainland New Zealand during his fleeting visit in 1835. Perhaps, if he had been able to venture further south during his long voyage of discovery, he would have found more than enough birds, beasts and other biota to whet his insatiable appetite for natural wonder.

To download the podcast for your iPod, simply search and subscribe for free through the iTunes Store. For playback on other portable media devices please download from the Journeys to the Ice homepage. Otherwise you can listen straight away by clicking on the link below.

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Photo (c) Jodi Williams 2009

*Information from Heritage Expeditions website.

A New Year’s Resolution Matthew Wood Feb 01

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While I was still busy sunning myself on Coromandel beaches during the first few days of 2010, the research vessel JOIDES Resolution was approaching Wellington Harbour after a record-setting drilling leg off the Canterbury coast.

The Resolution’s sole purpose is to carry out the research objectives of the Integrated Ocean Drilling Program (IODP), the world’s largest multinational geoscience initiative. New Zealand became an official member of the IODP in 2009 under the Australia and New Zealand IODP Consortium (ANZIC), allowing our science community to make use of the program’s world-class drilling ships and platforms.

At 1928 m, the IODP record-breaking core drilled off Canterbury effectively represents the upper limit of this ship’s capabilities – an impressive feat, especially considering that the Resolution can theoretically drill and retrieve such cores in water depths of up to 7 km.

The goal of the IODP is to investigate the Earth system throughout the geological past by collecting sedimentary records captured in the world’s ocean basins. Richard Levy, a paleoclimate scientist at GNS Science, suggests that its major success so far has been in producing a 65 million year global climate record of ice volume, sea level, temperature and CO2 levels, going back far beyond the temporal limit of ice cores.

The educational holiday programme, Discover Ancient Worlds Beneath the Ocean Floor, was run by GNS Science in association with Capital E!, taking advantage of having the JOIDES Resolution in port. Dr. Levy and Julian Thomson, who coordinates education outreach at GNS, put together a week-long course with an over-arching theme of paleoclimate earth science. The participants, aged between 12 and 15, were given a full tour of the drilling ship, stepped inside a -37 degree ice core facility in the Hutt Valley, learned about ice sheets and sealevel rise and handled South Island rocks documenting the Cretaceous-Tertiary (K-T) boundary.

Participants sampling their sediment core

After collecting their own core from the seafloor off the end of Petone Wharf (where Richard’s waterproof watch is currently ticking away, being slowly buried by sediment), these kids experienced the visual feast of examining microfossils under the binocular microscope while learning about the power of these organic remains as proxies for environmental change, as tools for relative and absolute dating, and as indicators of evolution through extinction and speciation.

The JOIDES Resolution may now be busy collecting new sedimentary stories off the Wilkes Land coast of Antarctica, but thanks to an exciting holiday programme, and the talented team behind it, none of these promising young geoscientists have missed the boat.

To download the podcast for your iPod, simply search and subscribe for free through the iTunes Store. For playback on other portable media devices please download from the Journeys to the Ice homepage. Otherwise you can listen straight away by clicking on the link below.

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Photo (c) Julian Thomson 2010

O’er the World’s Tempestuous Sea Matthew Wood Jan 25

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Picture 1If you’re bound for Antarctica, and have a starting point as convenient as New Zealand or Patagonia, there is still one rather significant obstacle to overcome.

The Mercator projection maps pinned to the walls of our childhood classrooms have, for many of us, skewed our notions of world geography with a northern hemisphere bias – Antarctica usually being relegated to a thin white band of coastline separated from all points north by a inconspicuous strip of cyan.

But when we consider that to travel from Christchurch to McMurdo Sound is the Southern Hemisphere equivalent of flying from the Pyrenees to Svalbard, suddenly the Southern Ocean doesn’t seem quite so trivial a feature. This new perspective invites us to question whether we in Australia and New Zealand really are that far ‘down under’ after all.

To some, the Southern Ocean simply comprises the southern extensions of the Pacific, Atlantic and Indian Ocean basins and is not an ocean in its own right. There are others however, that recognise the Southern Ocean as a distinct and fundamental element of global ocean circulation. Lionel Carter, Professor of Marine Geology at the Antarctic Research Centre, is among the latter.

I first met Lionel during his time at the National Institute of Water and Atmospheric Research (NIWA), where his work focused on the deep ocean flow and seafloor sediment dynamics of the southwest Pacific region. Now, at the ARC, he is involved with deciphering records of marine environmental change during warm extremes through the ANZICE programme, and applying the results of ANDRILL to see how localised changes in the Ross Sea can affect regional ocean circulation.

In this episode we discuss the attributes that define the Southern Ocean today, how it behaved 20,000 years ago during the last glacial maximum, and whether New Zealand’s visitation by icebergs several years ago could be a sign of things to come…

To download the podcast for your iPod, simply search and subscribe for free through the iTunes Store. For playback on other portable media devices please download from the Journeys to the Ice homepage. Otherwise you can listen straight away by clicking on the link below.

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All Journeys Begin With a First Step Matthew Wood Jan 18

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“Great God! This is an awful place…”Man and Iceberg

So wrote Robert Falcon Scott in January of 1912 upon discovering that the Norwegian, Roald Amundsen, had beaten him to the South Pole.

A rather unfair review you might say, but then again, Scott was about to find out just how unforgiving a place the white continent can be. From the stoic characters of the heroic age of exploration through to the scientists and support staff of modern Antarctic programs, those who seek to work on the ice quickly learn that Antarctica can be a place of both serene beauty and uncompromising harshness.

While Antarctica’s capacity to pitilessly claim the lives of the unfortunate or unprepared has long been understood and respected, it is only recently that we have begun to appreciate the extent to which mankind’s collective actions have put this delicate environment in grave danger of collapse.

The global implications of rapid environmental change at the poles make Antarctic science, in my opinion, one of the most important endeavours of the modern world.

So, why make a podcast? After flirting with work in academia and industry I recently found myself wanting to try my hand at science media and communication. I guess I realised that I had become more comfortable as an ‘armchair’ scientist, fervently enjoying the works of popular science writers like Richard Leakey, Simon Singh, Richard Dawkins and many others. I’m also a big fan of the podcasting format and an avid listener of shows like Philosophy Bites, by David Edmonds and Nigel Warburton, and Science Talk: The Podcast of Scientific American, hosted by Steve Mirsky – shows that I highly recommend and that have clearly influenced the style of Journeys. In order to bring the stories of any specialist discipline to the masses there is a clear challenge to strike a balance between maintaining the interest of both the layman and those with existing knowledge. I hope this podcast will succeed in distilling the essence of each science story, but I would of course recommend any referenced source material to those seeking further information.

I first worked with the Antarctic Research Centre (ARC) as a field assistant on the Victoria Land coastal glaciers in late 2003, following my undergraduate study in geology at Victoria University of Wellington. After this unforgettable experience I maintained a keen interest in what happens on the ice and continued to work closely with colleagues in the ARC through research and teaching.

The man at the helm of the ARC is Professor Tim Naish, a man well known in geological circles for his application of cyclostratigraphic principles, developed in the Wanganui basin and the Canterbury coast of New Zealand, to the ice sheet fluctuations across the continental margin of southern Victoria Land in Antarctica (the Cape Roberts Project and more recently ANDRILL). In this first episode Professor Naish recounts his early impressions of Antarctic fieldwork, outlines the history of the ARC to date and considers the direction in which it is currently heading.

To download the podcast for your iPod, simply search and subscribe for free through the iTunes Store. For playback on other portable media devices please download from the Journeys to the Ice homepage. Otherwise you can listen straight away by clicking on the link below.

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Photo (c) Matthew Wood 2003