Members of the Scripps GOLF 1-8-2 Team (Julie Bowles, Hubert Staudigel, and Elise Sbarbori) are currently braving the elements (extreme cold, wind and maybe snow fall) in order to collect samples of volcanic rocks from the McMurdo area in Antarctica. By studying these igneous rocks, they hope to view a “snapshot” of what the Earth’s magnetic field looked like in the particular time and place the rocks were formed.
Below are some excerpts from their diary:
Day 22 – 5 December 2006 – Sea Ice Blowout
The sea ice will be breaking up soon (we’ve seen it get progressively slushier and progressively more cracked with each day that we’ve been out). Luckily we are through with our sampling of Erebus Bay. Twelve sites. Not bad! Now we’re keeping our fingers crossed that the sea ice recedes past Hut Point (it hasn’t in the past 7 years). If McMurdo Station becomes waterfront property, we may be able to see killer whales from our laboratory window!
Day 20 – 3 December 2006 – Skua: 2, Julie: 0
You’d think she’d have learned her lesson the first time around. This time the bird took a ham sandwich and Julie’s left pinky finger. Kidding, kidding. We’ve been extremely wary since the first skua incident, and opt to eat lunch in a warming hut instead of in the open air. Sites taken today include Little Razorback and Tent Island.
Day 19 – 2 December 2006 – Keeping Warm, Antarctica Style
Vicious winds today! With speeds as high as 20 knots this is probably the windiest weather we’ve seen so far, but at least it gives us the chance to fully utilize every last piece of our extreme cold weather gear on the snowmobile ride home. In spite of the cold, we manage to sample Big Razorback Island and explore Tent Island for good outcrop. Unrecognizable as human beings, looking more like piles of laundry, we navigate the sea ice, making sure to stop at the “warming huts” along the way to defrost our fingers and toes.
Day 18 – 1 December 2006 – Skua: 1, Julie: 0
Julie has a very “Hitchcockian” incident this morning while returning from the galley. In a scene that could be straight out of The Birds, Julie is attacked by a vicious skua, determined to free her from her buttered toast! Despite her best efforts to thwart the feathered beast, she steps away from the scene absent one continental breakfast. Fieldwork today includes revisiting the dike near Turks Head to finish orienting our samples as well as sampling Turks Head itself. The slush ponds deepen as the tide comes in, so we have to wade through water in order to make it home!
I posted questions to the GOLF Team via email (golf182@gmail.com) and researcher Elise Sbarbori of the expedition team offered some interesting answers:
1) What time zone are you in down there?
We are sharing New Zealand summer time (that is, we are 21 hours ahead of the west coast of the US).
2) Do you see any evidence of global warming down there?
Tough question to answer, although, that is certainly a hot topic here. There are many groups (including, for instance, ANDRILL, among others) who are taking sediment cores or ice cores to better characterize past climate change (in order to put present change into some kind of context). Maybe this link will be helpful:
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/15850535/
3) What do you expect to find when taking your samples?
We are sampling rocks that range from 20,000 - 1,300,000 years old. This time interval spans several reversals, so we’d expect to find that some of our sites are of normal polarity (similar to today’s magnetic field), and some of our sites are reversed. BUT, the latitude that we’re sampling (>70
degrees) is of particular interest to us because it represents the part of the geomagnetic field that is influenced by this inner-tangent-cylinder fluid regime in the outer core. We are hoping to find whether and how the field has behaved differently in these high latitudes, and we are expecting the data collected in McMurdo to be useful in advancing our understanding of how the geodynamo works.
4) Do you have an image of the tangent cylinder and what it looks like?
Below is an image from Aurnou et al, 2003. It’s not the greatest (especially in illustrating the the hypothesized “columnar flow” in the outer cylinder region of the outer core) but I hope it’ll help. I’ll try and find a better image for you later.
See image on page 2 of research article: http://www.jhu.edu/~eps/faculty/olson/pdfs/TangentCylinder.pdf
Not bad, it really can occur
That sounds very challenging!
[…] We put Expert Voices blogs in an archive section when people seem finished with them, but you can read them and post to them. There is a lot of good stuff on the older blogs: one has journal entries and a photo from the plate tectonics team’s trip to Antarctica. The next web seminar is scheduled for the evening of May 22. It is a general session on how to use NSDL content effectively, hosted by Core Integration Outreach specialist Robert Payo and featuring many examples of actual classroom projects that worked well. The season ends with a session June 19 designed especially for middle school science teachers, hosted by Chad Dorsey of the Maine Mathematics and Science Alliance. See you there. Posted in Topics: General Jump down to leave a comment. […]
I thought this website was about golf but after reading it I am glad I found. Great information.
Mike
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This is indeed an interesting blog. Luckily I’ve stumbled it.
Good luck to you guys with your great adventure. I support you all the way.
Nice article…helps correct all those prejudices about golf and especially golfers
I think I’ll stay here in Tampa though.
Well after thinking about it, I decided to stay here is Myrtle Beach, SC.