Of Hearts and Red

Antarctica

by Katherine Glenday

Our thoughts form us

And like the forams

And the caddis creatures

We live in our

Patterned habits

I can run with this

And do

Away from text and fact

And the common herded wayfare

Of thought and learned behaviour

It is too dense for me

I am overwhelmed already

And the truth of it

Scampers off somewhere

And snarls in the brambles

Beneath the woods

Of a forest of trees

I would rather drop my sounding bells

Below a frozen sea

And watch with my long distance heart

As my friends swim them down

To sing an angelus

On the ocean bed

Here all things are weighed

In the company of creatures

Who build their hearts on the sleeves

Of their houses.

Dreaming of ice

Winter at last! Besides the snow and cold, there's lots of ice. With proper footwear and care, ice is a lovely substrate. I spent many years walking on sea ice with Yaktrax on my sneakers, or CCM Tacks on bare feet playing ice hockey. (Aside: The former got me much further in life than the latter.)

While walking in the parking lot at work, I noticed dozens of curiously-shaped ovals, circles, and irregular ellipses of white adorning the pavement. They were crusts of salt that outlined the location of briny puddles from motorists driving on salted roads.



A dried salty puddle (left); Explorers Cove shoreline (right)



Close inspection of these white lines brought back memories of the Explorers Cove shoreline as seen from a helicopter. Even in a parking lot one can find unexpected dreamscapes.

A few blinks, though, snapped me back to reality. The underground parking lot with surprising outlines of white now feels dank and ugly. Sadly, looking at these salty shapes now ignites images of respiratory linings discolored by tar and other products of tobacco smoke.

Sometimes an eye for detail is a damnation.

The sheer joy of Antarctic Subaquatic Garbage Collecting

Sometimes things fall into holes and are presumed lost forever. Over the years, people working at Explorers Cove have dropped coins (for luck?), hand tools, cameras, nails, screws -- all sorts of things -- into dive holes. As divers, we enjoy discovering and recovering these "lost" items. It gives us a sense of satisfaction being Antarctic Subaquatic Garbage Collectors.

One time I found a penny on the seafloor (it was heads up) and gleefully handed it to Werner Herzog upon surfacing. Another time, Doug Coons and I recovered a 15-ft Jiffy Drill flight. (See this post on how they sometimes get hopelessly stuck in the ice and ultimately drop to the seafloor.)

Nothing can express the joy of Antarctic Subaquatic Garbage Collecting more than this picture of Cecil recovering a "lost" shovel. We used it for the rest of the field season, too!

Seeing Red

One of the tents we use in Antarctica, called a "Polarhaven," is large enough to serve as a dive locker for about four aquanauts.

The Polarhaven at Cape Bernacchi

Because it is heated by a catalytic propane unit, it's also a comfy refuge for sleeping and eating in subzero temperatures. There's only one problem: the walls are red, so the interior is also red.

Laura Von Rosk cinching down the Polarhaven blanket to its wooden floor. The propane heater is seen behind her.

While setting up the Polarhaven at Cape Bernacchi, Laura and I had a brief opportunity to discuss "color" and "composition" (she is a master of both). I've never understood how to use color effectively, and my compositions always feel like run-of-the-mill, "rule of thirds," ho-hum. What could Laura teach me about this during our breaks from work?

A sketch of Astrammina triangularis using watercolor pencils. My drawings seem "cartoon-like" and not very realistic. I always follow the "rules," too. For example, light comes from the upper right, shadow to the lower left. The result just doesn't "feel" interesting to me :-(

Detail of an Astrammina triangularis "arm" that I sketched in normal daylight. I try to do a lot of "deep looking" when studying a subject, but that doesn't always translate into an appealing composition.

Drawing an agglutinated foram inside the tent was an interesting experience. Seeing everything in red light is not too alien, since I spent decades in a darkroom back when photography meant working under a safelight. I never tried to manipulate color in a monochrome setting, though, and wondered if that would be instructive?

Drawing of an agglutinated foram, with notes on objects in the tent, as I remember seeing things in the Polarhaven. (Actually, I placed a red mask over the drawing below, so this is really just a simulation.)

How the drawing looked when viewed outside the Polarhaven - surprisingly ... ugly?

Looking deeply, working hard, trying something new, failing ... but having fun. Art and science share a lot in common.

Apologies for Silence

All is well in Antarctica, although the work load has been overwhelming at times. It seems there's just too much to do at every level ...

So for now, I'll just post a picture of Mt. Erebus as seen at midnight.

Cellular masonry (and intelligence?)

In 1878, agglutinated foraminifera were dubbed "nature's little masons" by A.M. Norman, a prominent British reverend and naturalist. William B. Carpenter, arguably the 19th-century's premier cell biologist, also pointed to the "skill" displayed by foraminifera in selecting materials to build their shells -- a characteristic that got Edward Heron-Allen in heated debates with colleagues over the definition of intelligence. (See, for example, his paper entitled Purpose and intelligence in the Foraminifera published in the Proceedings of the Zoological Society of London, 1914:1069-1070.) In future posts, I'll dedicate some space to Heron-Allen and examine the seemingly incongruous mix of science and mysticism that marked his career.

Four species of agglutinated foraminifera from the same handful of Antarctic sediment. Each species collects a characteristic range of grain sizes or type of mineral to build a shell.

Speaking of incongruous mixes, Claire Beynon's December 28th post juxtaposed a recipe for chicken kofta and my watercolor of Astrammina rara - one of the unicellular giants that we collect in Antarctica. About a decade ago, Joan Bernhard and I used straightforward statistical approaches to show that Astrammina "selects" sediment particles that range in size from 0.25 to 0.50 mm to use as the main non-compressible (read: hard) component of its shell. Since then, we and coworkers have noted that A. rara's shell usually contains a conspicuous, red-orange sand grain. This feature prompted ceramic artist Katherine Glenday to write a poem in which, to paraphrase, she describes A. rara as "the species that builds its heart on its house." I adore the beautiful aesthetic of that anthropomorphism! But it begs the question: does it really select one red grain, or is this simply a consequence of chance? If it is indeed displaying selectivity, what is the molecular basis of this cellular process?

As an expression of rote scientific curiosity, we'll do a bit of experimental work to explore this question and post some results here. In a sense, though, I almost don't want to know the answer. Why despoil a beautiful poem with a rational whitewash?

Mucking a dive hole

Muck: v. to clean up; especially to clear of manure or filth ...

Merriam-Webster online search

Although there's a difference between ice crystals and manure, the process of slinging debris is the same: Scoop it up, and flick it aside. In these photos, Claire shows how it's done.

First, scoop out dislodged ice using a dip net.

Then drain water from the ice and give it a toss!

Alternatively, you can fling the ice into the air and pull away the dip net. Mucking gives your forearms and shoulders a good workout...

A bit unstuck

The Herbertson Glacier site is finally finished! The Hotsy melted a nice hole, and in the process the stuck drill bits dropped to the seafloor. Today we loaded our dive gear on the ATV and snowmobiles, and set out to collect specimens, map the undersea topology, catalog organisms living under the ice, deploy sediment traps and experimental arrays, and add a new layer to our art/science project. Oh, and to recover those pesky drill bits.

The "down line" that we lower into the dive hole is decorated with flags and flashers; these help the divers find the hole while underwater. The down line has a basket on its end for lowering equipment and raising samples. A small bottle of emergency air rounds out the string of things lowered with the divers. Also seen here is a small hand winch we could use to help haul a diver out of the hole.

While the divers are underwater, the tenders must be prepared to help in any way. We carry first aid kits, hot water, and an emergency supply of oxygen (inside the grey box that Claire is holding).  Not to mention radios with spare batteries to call for help, if needed.

"Prepare for the worst; expect the best" is our motto ...

Coring never boring

One of our many science objectives is to examine the diversity (in other words, the number of different types) of small organisms on the sea floor in Explorers Cove, and to monitor changes in diversity over time. One way to accomplish this goal is for scuba divers to take sediment cores and bring these small samples to the surface for analysis. It is important that the divers take the cores haphazardly so that sampling bias is reduced -- in other words, sampling should be as random as possible so that the results are statistically sound. You can see a video of a diver taking sediment cores here; please also see the "skittle core" activity for K-12 students, developed in conjunction with a highly dedicated group of teachers that we work with.

Once the core reaches the surface, a scientist will slice it into sections that are one centimeter in thickness. Each section is then sieved, and the organisms within each slice are poured into storage bottles, which are refrigerated to keep the critters inside healthy. Back in the lab shack, the organisms in each sample are identified and counted. Simple statistical methods allow us to estimate the total population of a given organism at each dive site (we call these sites "sampling stations"). 

Doing this year-after-year allows us to plot changes in population over time. Shown here is Claire selecting a "good" core for analysis. (The best cores have perfectly clear water above the sediment, which indicates that minimal disturbance was caused by the coring process.) She is then seen cutting the core into 1-cm slices using a thin piece of metal, and then placing each slice into a sieve (in this case, she uses a 1-mm mesh size), and anything smaller than 1-mm diameter is washed away. The "sieve residue" is then seen being transferred to a storage bottle. Coring is one of my favorite things to do in Antarctica...