April 27 - Glacier Climb

I have been good about walking on the treadmill everyday for 45 minutes but the weather was nice enough today that I decided to substitute that with a `power' walk up the glacier. It turns out that I overestimated my conditioning!  It was less a power walk and more of a brisk walk interrupted by many stops to regain my breath. Very enjoyable though. I was the only one on the glacier for a while and the weather stayed quiet good.

 

Panoramic shot looking down the glacier towards the station. The flags you see are used to mark off dangerous parts of the glacier that are near the crevasses.

Arthur harbor showing the new island that has appeared after the glacier connecting it to Anvers melted away. The new island has yet to be named. Apparently, one of the station managers who has been coming here for the last 20 years has first dibs on it being named after him!

They keep a couple of snowmobiles on the glacier. This is both to rescue someone who gets trapped on the glacier. as well as (and more importantly),  to MediVac somebody from the station. The plan is that the Chileans would fly in from their Antarctica base and land on top of the glacier (yep!). The patient would then be taken by snowmobile to the plane and Medivac'ed.

Met my LMG buddies on top of the glacier. Awesome group of people who helped us with our towing on the LMG. The LMG is docked at the station so these guys are out and about having a good time.

The fog rolls in! Time to head back to the station.

Here is what the walk down the glacier looks and sounds like.

April 25 - Cove of Eden; Right in our Backyard

April 25 - We woke up today to find that the winds had subsided and the sun was peeking our of the clouds. I came to the lab around 10 AM and convinced everybody that we should abandon work for the day and head out to explore Bonaparte Point.

Just to give you and idea of what the hike is like, take a look at the picture below. From the station you have to trek over rock (about 400m) to the foot of the glacier then climb about 600ft up and turn right and then come down. Takes about 45 min if you just go as fast as you can.

Route to Bonaparte Point.

 While the sun was out, it was quite cold and windy. Below you see us on our way up.

Up the glacier.

Jeannette is a yoga enthusiast and here she is doing a headstand on the glacier. I was telling her that yogis of ancient India used to climb up mountains to practice (and develop) yoga so this was quite appropriate. 

Unlike the previous time we went up the glacier, the wind had stripped off all the snow from the glacier leave the ice exposed. All you see in this picture is glacier ice with lots of cracks etc.

In order to climb on the glacier, you need to put on micro-spikes. These provide traction on the icy surface otherwise it would be nearly impossible to traverse the glacier. 

Jeannette, Deepak and me on the way up the glacier Hero's inlet and Bonaparted point in the background

So we finally got to the other side and started making our way to the tip of Bonaparte Point but then we came across this little cove and what a sight we saw.. a bunch of juvenile elephant seals just playing and fussing and having fun in the water. It was amazing and just sat down there and watched them for over an hour. Felt privileged to be able to witness such an incredibly unadulterated disaplce of Nature's beauty!  Check it out.

This was the cove. You can see about 3 seals there but there were about 12 of them in total.

Looks at this cutey! Was curious about us so kind of drifted towards us in this adorable pose.

These two are probably juvenile males. They were continuously mock fighting with each other

Same guys..

Probably a juve female. She was trying her best to keep away from her rambunctious cousins.

While the cove and the juve elephant seals was the best part of our hike, we also saw some other great sights.

A lonely Gentoo Penguin. She was having a classic approach-avoidance conflict with us. Wanted to check us out (I think because she was lonely) but then did not want to get too close to us!

Came across a couple of Giant Petrel nests with these chicks.

Also saw a small pod of male adult elephant seals.

 

He's got his eyes on me!

When we left the station on the hike we thought we would be back in about 2 hours. Not a chance! We were pretty much gone for about 4 hours! Enjoyed every minute of it. Hope to go there again if/when the weather clears up.

April 24 -- Old Man Winter Shows Up

The last two days have given us a little taste of what winter here is going to be like.

Last night, the wind really picked up -  from about 10 PM to 4 PM, it was howling and shrieking non-stop.  Below is a trace of the wind-speed measurement around the station.  As you can see  we had gusts up to 50+ knots ( ~57 mph ), with sustained wind speeds ranging from 50 to 40 knots between 1 and 5 AM!

Wind speed measurements around the Station from 2100 April 23 to 0900 April 24

To get some perspective, here is the Beaufort Wind Scale that relates wind speed to what is observed on land/sea

So according to this, we are experiencing level 9 and 10 winds here. I am glad there are no trees here, and I am extremely happy that the buildings do not have slate roofs!  Apparently, if the winds go beyond 80 mph, it is no longer safe to even go outside.

For those curious about the temperatures here, check out the plot of temperature and wind-chill below. So, not exactly a picnic here!

 

April 23 - Hello! Spongiobranchaea australis

Like I said in the earlier post, we did catch some organisms other than krill and copepods in our two night of towing. Among these other organisms were about a dozen little creatures that looked very much like Clione (also called 'sea angels' because of the way they look). These are pteropods that have lost their shells (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sea_angel). These little `angles', despite how they look, are voracious predators and in fact, their favorite food is Limacina Helicina, the very species that we came here to study.

Sea Angel (from Wikipedia)

Clione have very interesting wing-like structures (called parapodia) that they flap to move in water and their locomotion has been the subject of many past studies. As such, it seemed like there was little new we could discover about them. However, as we looked closely at the animals we had in our lab, it became clear these were not Clione; apart from their body color (black and not red) and body shape (not conical but cylindrical with a little bulbous end), their wing planform and (most importantly!) their wing kinematics were very different from Clione.

 

S. Australis -- image captured in Bio lab of Palmer Station by Jeannette, Deepak and Zane.

So the Jeannette and I started an internet search to try and identify this organism -- guess who figured it out first - the biologist or the mechanical engineer? No surprises there, Jeannette figured out that the what we had swimming in our little tank were in fact Spongiobranchaea australis.
(see description at  http://species-identification.org/species.php?species_group=Pelagic_molluscs&id=182) and not Clione.

So here is what is so interesting to me as a fluid dynamicist about the swimming of Spongiobranchaea australis: while there are many animals (wasps, pigeons and even Limacina helicina) that  employ a 'clap-and-fling' type kinematics (see below), S. australis

Drawings describing clap-and-fling (from the classic paper of Weis-Fogh)

seems to go way past clapping into overlapping. Specifically,  it employs a wing stroke where the two wings overlap each other (and do so significantly) at both ends of the stroke. This seems to be particularly true for the smaller specimens that we have collected. I have yet to come across a flapping animal that does this.  Is there a hydrodynamic advantage to overlapping wings? What kind of flow field is created by this kind of kinematics? These would be interesting questions to answer.

Flapping stroke of S. Australis.

The plan then is to take as many measurements/videos of these animals that we can before they die (actually, many of them are already dead after one week)  so we can eventually develop computational fluid dynamics (CFD) models of these swimming animals. We will also preserve these animals and bring them back with us to our labs so we can make other measurement back home.

So it looks like we have an organism with interesting and unique locomotory kinematics, and one that does not seem to have been studied before!!! This is what is so exciting about research. You look for gold and sometimes you find... diamonds!

April 22 - Picture Perfect

Last couple of days have been somewhat uneventful. The weather has been exceptionally good  - no wind and relatively clear skies, and this has allowed us to get out for hikes around the station . 

Yesterday, Zane and I went for hike in the backyard right after lunch. Clambered on rocks and snow for about an hour and a half. Heard a large crack from the glacier and thought for sure that we were going to see a gonzo calving event -- but it was not to be. 

Oh well, it was gorgeous anyway and we captured a few nice pics.

Found this lonely cormorant. There are lots of cormorants all around the station. Amazing range for these animals since I have seen them in Florida and even India.

This was taken along the side wall of the glacier. Can clearly see the various striations in the ice which represent the age of the glacier (likes rings in a tree trunk). It is amazing to think that this ice I am standing next to, fell as as snow over 100,000 years ago. 

Perfect Reflection -- this was taken in the Hero's inlet. As you can see, no wind!

Pulled out one more picture of the gorgeous sunset on April 21. Breathtaking!

April 20 -- Just Another Day in Paradise!

Happy Birthday Didi

 (This post is a birthday gift for Didi!)

 This is one last picture from our climb to the top of the glacier on April 19.

This is taken from the top of the glacier. If you brush away the thin layer of snow, its all ice underneath. So basically, the glacier is one big ice-cube. no wonder we were slipping and sliding all the way!

Ok, now on to April 20-- Went out boating again  -- went back to where the elephant seal colony was and this time I made sure that my camera had enough juice. Here is what we saw

A lonely looking female elephant seal.

A colony of large male elephants. All they so is snort, fart, snore and grunt at each other. And they smell.. Pheeeew! The smell is so bad that it make you want to throw up.

A cantankerous male.

An adolescent elephant seal. Had some kind of bite mark on its neck.

Found this fur seal just playing around in water. It was in and out so fast that it was difficult to take a shot. This is all I got

Went out boating today. This was to do some small plankton net towing in the area around Palmer. That said we saw a couple of amazing sights.

An ice cave in Hero's inlet. Reminds me of the Amarnath cave in Kashmir.

Another beautiful sunset.

Sun reflecting off the water of Arthur Bay

Earth, wind, water and fire.. all in one shot!

April 19 - Calving; Antarctica Style

It was looking like another uneventful day - all I had till about 10 AM was a gorgeous sunrise over the mountains with a layer of clouds covering the peaks.

But then magic happened and I just happened to have my camera to capture it. (I made it a rule that I would never go out without my camera with me).

So these glaciers that are in our backyard (and glaciers everywhere) are constantly breaking at their leading edges (a process called "calving") and falling into the water.  While this process happens constantly (probably once a day) for the glacier in our backyard, one has to be lucky to be there to see it, because it lasts all of 5 minutes. Well, I got lucky and here is what I saw:

It started with an "icefall" - a stream of ice and snow starting to trickle down the edge of the glacier. I knew that something was going to happen after that.

The next shots show shots of the calving.

The ice debris field after the calving event was over.