November 24, 1996

Taylor Valley and the Matterhorn

Sunday and I was still cleaning penguin guano from my recording gear from last week, writing the latest Journal entries and preparing for my next trip out into the field. This involved getting a sense of the work being done by Science Event S-042,"McMurdo Dry Valleys: Long-Term Ecological Research (LTER)." In the spring I had spoken with Dr. Robert Wharton, the Principal Investigator working out of the Desert Research Institute in Reno, Nevada. A gracious and enthusiastic person, he encouraged me to visit the Dry Valleys, even though he would not be arriving until after my departure.

The McMurdo Dry Valleys lie some 60 miles in a westerly course across McMurdo Sound from the US base. Unique in a unique place, the valleys are among the most harshly arid deserts on earth--drier and colder than most places we could imagine. The region is also the largest area which is relatively free of ice on the continent--some 4,800 square kilometres. There is life in the valleys...micro invertebrates, microbial communities, mosses and lichens have adapted to conditions in this environment. During the austral summer under a piercing sun, glaciers yield melt waters: streams come to life, permanently ice-covered lakes are replenished from beneath and a vital nutrient cycle plays out. According to Wharton and the host of researchers involved in S-042,"The overall objectives of the McMurdo Dry Valleys LTER are to understand the influence of physical and biological constraints on the structure and function of dry valley ecosystems and to understand the modifying effects of material transport on these ecosystems." Within this purview, 6 subgroups of research teams have identified a diverse range of studies and avenues of inquiry which they articulated in their proposal, including:

• glacier dynamics
• stream, lake and glacier chemistry
• stream hydrology
• microbial food webs
• soil productivity
• aeolian, or windborne, transport processes
• meteorological monitoring

As an interdisciplinary initiative, scientists have been working together in order to arrive at an integrated ecological perspective of this habitat.

My aim was to make sound recordings of glaciers, and I would have the opportunity to meet with those researchers at Lake Hoare who were working mostly on microbial life, micro invertebrates, glacier mass and balance and stream hydrology.