In The Field

Antarctica 2010: Arrival in Christchurch

Posted on behalf of Chaz Firestone

Greetings from Christchurch, the “garden city” of New Zealand, home to the United States Antarctic Program’s nearest base to the Antarctic ice sheet. chazfirestone_sm.JPG

Along with six other journalists, I will be escorted around Antarctica from 5-12 January by the US National Science Foundation, to report on the goings-on of the Seventh Continent. After today’s fitting for extreme cold weather gear, the week-long trip will take us to McMurdo Station (Antarctica’s largest community, at about 5,000 2,000 [Editor’s note: see comment below] researchers and staff), the Amundsen-Scott South Pole Research Station, the windswept West Antarctica Ice Sheet (WAIS) Divide and the hyperarid McMurdo Dry Valleys.

On the ice, there is a veritable treasure trove of exotic research projects. At the South Pole, astronomers search the sky for cosmic microwave background radiation from the Big Bang while physicists search the ground for evidence of neutrino collisions, visible to detectors in the pellucid ice as a faint blue glow from muons, the byproducts of the collisions. At the WAIS Divide, geologists and paleoclimatologists dig through deep ice into the climate history of the planet, pulling up ice cores that have trapped bubbles of air from ancient atmospheres. And in the Dry Valleys, perhaps the closest approximation on Earth of the Martian surface, planetary geologists study our own planet to learn about its nearest neighbor.

Far more goes on in Antarctica than there is time to report, but I will do my best to post daily updates on the trip, including photos of pristine landscapes, highly specialized scientific equipment and the inhabitants of the continent — including the “charismatic megafauna” (penguins, elephant seals and walruses), which we plan to see midway through the trip.

That’s it for now! The next post will be from the ice.

Image: Chaz in his new extreme cold weather gear

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