A five-member team from the Department of Geosciences is heading to Antarctica this October. Undergraduates Michael Ginsbach and Chad Crotty, environmental and conservation sciences graduate student Alex Smith, and faculty members Adam Lewis and Allan Ashworth will conduct research on Antarctica’s climate past. The team hopes to collect fossils of tundra plants and animals to derive estimates of summer temperature. Smith will focus on using deposits of volcanic ash to precisely date the ancient tundra. Initial work suggests the fossils are more than 19 million years old, meaning they date from a time before the continent was buried beneath massive ice sheets.
To get to Antarctica, the team will fly to New Zealand where they will be supplied with cold-weather gear before heading to McMurdo Station, the U.S. National Science Foundation’s base of Antarctic operations. From McMurdo, the team will establish a helicopter-supported tent camp in the Dry Valleys region. About a month later they will move by ski-equipped aircraft to Oliver Bluffs, only 300 miles from the South Pole. Work at Oliver bluffs will present the group with unique challenges. Long supply routes will complicate logistics and the terrain includes glacier ice, loose rocky soils and near-vertical cliff faces. To help deal with the harsh conditions and continuous sub-zero temperatures, Scheels of Fargo is helping supply the group with specialized mountaineering boots. The team will spend seven shower-less weeks in the field before returning to Fargo just before Christmas.
To help get K-12 students interested in science, the team will make weekly contact with several elementary and middle school classrooms in the Fargo-Moorhead area using a satellite phone system. Ginsbach, who is pursuing a second major in education, is coordinating communications through Barry Olson at Ben Franklin Middle School. The plan is to have the team relay weekly research goals to participating classrooms with follow-up conversations to discuss successes and setbacks. If the format proves successful, Lewis and Olson will try to establish web-based video links for future field seasons.