News from Antarctica

Good evening from Antarctica!

We have news! The drone is finally active and getting very cool digital terrain images. This means also that Juri is able to join us now in the field. Indeed, he has stayed inside the station for more than a week!
Yesterday, we went to the Dry Valleys where we could finish sampling the OTCs and snow fences plots there.

The full group after finishing the work in the dry valleys

Because of the big difference in snow cover that we are encountering this year, compared to the previous ones, we were even able to find one of our data loggers that we considered lost (we placed it in January 2018). During the past week, the weather was amazing, with temperatures around the station reaching positive degrees… the sunny days clearly make all the field work much easier! This was also the case in Pingvinane, a nunatak where Valentina and Bea went on the 22nd of January. There, the snow coverage was incredibly low and we were able to sample all the plots very fast. It is a very beautiful site!

Valentina sampling an OTC in Pingvinane

Finally, that day, we also went sampling some biological soil crusts or biocrusts on the Utsteinen ridge, which is very close to the station. The biocrusts are communities that colonize the soil surface and are composed by different organisms such as, lichens, fungi, cyanobacteria, heterotrophic bacteria, mosses, algae or microfauna. In the following picture, there is one of the beautiful biocrusts we found there. These communities are very well adapted to survive under extreme conditions such as those in the Antarctic, other polar regions or hot deserts. Their conservation is very important because they play a main role in these ecosystems, for example increasing soil fertility and stability. They are very susceptible, among other things, to trampling, so don’t bust the crust!

Biocrust found on the Utsteinen ridge

The MICROBIAN team