Greetings from McMurdo Station!

Bill, I and the rest of the field team just finished up a good season at a remote volcano in West Antarctica called Mount Waesche. We left New Mexico in mid-November and, after a few days of delay in New Zealand, flew from there to McMurdo in a transport plane called a C-17. These planes don’t have skis, so instead land on wheels at a compacted snow runway near McMurdo. Once we arrived in McMurdo, we dove into assembling and packing our field gear between attending the many training classes required for scientists working in the U.S. Antarctic Program.

The field team this year was 8 people. These were Elliot Moravec and Forest Harmon (drillers with the NSF Ice Drilling Program), Robert Ackert (University of Maine glacial geologist/cosmogenic isotope specialist), Renee Clavette and Keegan Bellamy (University of Maine glaciologists/radar scientists), along with Bill McIntosh, Nels Iverson and myself from New Mexico Tech, bringing the volcanology/geochronology expertise.

The objective of our work this season was to drill through the ice on the flanks of Mount Waesche, to sample sub-ice lava, with the goal of gaining information about when, in the past, the West Antarctic ice sheet was thinner than it is today. A technical summary of the project is accessible on the NSF website. Because the project involved drilling, it was more complicated than the typical geology project and also required a lot more equipment! Our total cargo into the field was 25,000 lbs, including two drill rigs, drilling rod and casing, drill fluid, big generators to run the drill, radar equipment, tents, snowmobiles, a solar power module, and lots of fuel. Also, 1500 lbs of food to feed our team for the duration of the field work. Because our campsite at Mount Waesche was at around 6000’, the air temperature was always well below freezing so we were able to take lots of high-quality frozen food, which, although heavy, is much more satisfying to eat than dehydrated camping food.

After a series of delays related to aircraft availability and weather, we finally caught a flight in a ski-equipped C-130 transport plane to WAIS Divide, a small camp in West Antarctica with a prepared snow landing strip. Some of our cargo had already arrived at the camp but we also had a lot of cargo in the plane with us. At WAIS Divide, we were met by a smaller ski-equipped aircraft called a Basler (a refurbished 1943 DC3) that took us and our cargo to our final field site at Mount Waesche, where they did what is called an “open-field” landing, which means just landing out on the snow or ice without a prepared landing strip. These can be quite exciting, but went well, thanks, in part, to the smooth blue ice at Mount Waesche. Once there, we moved all of our gear, using snowmobiles and sleds, from the landing site (aka “the Airport”) to our campsite, where we set up our tent camp, which included sleeping tents and one communal cook tent, and started our work.

As soon as we arrived at Waesche the two radar scientists, Renee and Keegan, did a quick radar survey to pick the exact spot to drill. Then, the two drillers, Elliot and Forest, got right to work on the first hole. The rest of us provided extra hands whenever needed. Getting the drill moved to the correct spot and setting up with whole drill operation set up took all 8 of us. Once the drilling was going, 4-5 people were needed. The two drillers took turns actually running the drill, and the rest of us helped out by managing the drill fluid and moving the drill rod into place when it was needed. The whole drilling process involved a lot of hard physical work and was particularly grueling on windy days. Our typical air temperature was between -10 and -15 degrees C (15 to 4 degrees F), which was pretty pleasant on sunny, calm days. But, with any wind, it felt pretty cold. The drillers had brought some big windscreens with them which we set up to make the drilling conditions easier.

Our first priority was to drill a transect of 3 successively deeper drill holes through the ice to bedrock, targeting a 130,000-year-old lava flow. And we were successful! This type of drilling is quite tricky because volcanic rocks can be fractured and permeable, making it hard to keep the drilling fluid circulating. We had a few close calls with getting the drill stuck, but it all came together. A first-order observation is that the lava flow that we drilled into appears to have erupted in dry conditions, suggesting that the ice sheet was thinner than it is today when the lava erupted.

In addition to the drilling to bedrock, we collected a couple of 30-meter ice cores, collected a series of 439 short cores across a 4 km stretch of blue ice to recover past climate information, collected a lot more radar data on ice stratigraphy and sub-ice topography, visited a number of geological sites that we weren’t able to visit during our 2018/19 field season, and did high-precision remeasurement of a number of GPS markers in order to learn about ice flow and ablation rates. We were able to pack all of this work into a month of field time because we only lost one day to bad weather! This is unusual for this part of Antarctica, which is prone to storms.

During our time in the field, we were living in Scott tents, but also had a larger cook tent called an “Arctic Oven”. We had very warm sleeping bags, and no one had trouble sleeping because they were too cold. We took turns cooking dinner every night and also planned out our next day’s work in the evening. Breakfast and lunch were less organized, although we did make a cooked breakfast now and then, usually involving a lot of bacon. Melting ice to make water was a constant task, but we were lucky to have plenty of ice available. Because of its density ice is a much better material for water-making than snow. Although our weather was quite good and we didn’t see any wind over about 25 knots, we know that it can be very windy at Mount Waesche, as evidenced by the large blue ice field and also the presence of rocks that are wind-sculpted. So, to be on the safe side, we strung old climbing ropes between the tents in case we had to travel between tents in high wind.

At the end of the field season, our gear and people were shuttled out of Mount Waesche by the same Basler that put us in, but also by a smaller aircraft called a Twin Otter, back to the WAIS Divide camp, and then, a few days later, on to McMurdo. Because our season ran pretty late, when we arrived back in McMurdo, the sea ice was almost completely broken out, and the station was surrounded by beautiful blue ocean and ice floes. And the Coast Guard icebreaker and cargo ship, which resupplies the station and takes back cargo, were in town, getting things ready for the next field season. From here, our group returns to New Zealand and then to our respective homes in New Mexico, Maine, Vermont, Montana, Wisconsin and Canada.