Start of the field season

Elie Verleyen, Quinten Vanhellemont and Valentina Savaglia have arrived at Novo airfield (Antarctica)

Blog 19/01/2019

The field season has started for the BelSPO funded (Brain.be) MICROBIAN (http://www.microbian.ugent.be) team. Elie Verleyen (Ghent University), Quinten Vanhellemont (Royal Belgian Institute of Natural Sciences) and Valentina Savaglia (University of Liège) just arrived at the Belgian Princess Elisabeth Station (http://www.polarfoundation.org), Sør Rondane Mountains (Antarctica). The team is going to stay here for a little bit less than a month. The aim is to sample the soils in ice-free areas in order to study the microbes living in these extreme polar environments. This is important, given that the diversity and functions of these tiny life forms are poorly understood. They are however the only permanent residents in Antarctica, where they are crucial ecosystem engineers. In other words: bacteria and microbial eukaryotes are the major components of the food-webs in Antarctic soils. They sometimes form visible biomass and occur in so-called Biological Soil Crusts (BSCs), but in the drier habitats they don’t form visible biomass, yet they are certainly present.

East of Utsteinen nunatak showing the growth of lichenized Biological Soil Crust

Because we still lack the baseline data on their diversity and functions, it remains unclear how they will respond to climate change. The Belgian Princess Elisabeth Station is ideally suited to study this, because it provides access to ice-free regions which are located at more than 200 km from the coast. This is unique, given that other ice-free regions in which stations are located are generally situated near the coast. The Sør Rondane Mountains can therefore be considered as a natural laboratory for microbial ecologists and allow them to study those taxa which are situated in inland locations and compare this with those living in coastal regions. During the present campaign, the MICROBIAN team will run field experiments to study the effect of climate change on the diversity of these microbes and the ecosystem they perform, such as photosynthesis. More to follow the coming weeks…