Questions from Laura and Mario

Laura Jackman wrote: This is Laura Jackman from Cy-Fair College in Houston, Texas. I hope yÂ’all had a pleasant Thanksgiving. While it is difficult to be without your family on a special holiday, what you are doing is an important and unique experience. Is this your first trip to Antarctica, if not when was your last visit there? You have taken many pictures of the area and I want to thank you for addressing some of the everyday issues you are involved in such as how you eat, where you sleep, and even how you handle your trash. I was wondering if you could share your most surprising experience (or discovery) there? It can be related to your data collection, the weather, or anything else from your day-to-day experiences. Also, I was reading that a good portion of your entries includes repairs and setting up equipment. Could you give a percentage of the time that you have spent on fixes, setting up, flight time, and data collection? Sounds like the daylight is playing with your sleep time; hope you are getting enough. YaÂ’ll stay safe and good luck with your research. Answers: Laura, Thanks fothe encouragementnt. It is hard being away from my family. I am hoping to catch up with my parents soon after I get back to Houston. This is my second trip to Antarctica. My first trip was in early November 2000, and I was at the South Pole for less than 2 weeks. I was down at the Pole to set up some instruments and teach someone else how to operate them. That project was related to the work we are doing now. Since then we have learned a lot more about the Antarctic atmosphere. But seems like we still have a lot of questions. In a sense, 2 to 3 weeks is the perfect amount of time. Long enough to get a feel for the place, but not so long to be away from home. My most surprising experience is how quiet it is here and how "big" Antarctica is. While their are a lot of airplanes, helicopters, and big trucks around here. It is easy to go for a short walk from the small town of McMurdo and feel completely by yourself. The landscape here is incredibly large. Right now I am looking out the window at some Mountains. It that are 4 or 5 miles away, like you could walk to them in a couple of hours, but they are really over 80 miles away. They are just really big and you have nothing else to compare them to. The other thing that is really neat is how nice everyone is to each other here. You don't have to worry about someone stealing your laptop and everyone is here because the want to be here. Everyone I have talked to seems to be excited or curious about the various science projects going on here. Unfortunately, too much of our time is spent setting up and doing repairs. But things are getting better. We have only flown 3 of our 18 scheduled science flights. So lots more data collection to follow. We will not get all 15 of our remaining science flights in, but we still have about 17 days to in our experiment. So looks like we will be flying every day (weather permitting) from now on. Since flights are typically less than 5 hours, every now and then we might be able to fly two flights in one day. With most fieldwork, I would say about 40% of the time is just getting everything set up and planned and the other 60% is collecting and analyzing the data. Mario Vigorena wrote: I'm Mario Vigorena, a student from Cy-Fair. I was the kid that did the research othe Antarcticic Treaty and when our professor told us about your experience, I was like THATS COOL. I mean the pictures are just fascinating and knowing that Antarctica has such a large scientific significance ... I was intrigued to know that such treaty was passed. Well back to questions concerning you guys, I would like to know in more detail what you guys are really looking for. Does it have something to do with the interaction of the stratospheric ozone hole and the Sun and how that changes the chemical structure of the snow? Are the pollutants from fossil fuels involved? What about our increased demand for such energy resources? Like, what's in for the world? Answers: Mario, Good questions. We have about four primary questions (actually hypotheses) that we are looking at. They are all related to air chemistry and how this impacts snow chemistry. One has to do with how Sunlight causes chemical reactions to occur in the snow. One reason we are interested in this is because when glaciologists drill through the ice here in Antarctica and analyze frozen water that fell here as snow 100,000 years old, they want to know how reliable this record is. We are starting to learn that chemicals arpreserveded very well (relatively unreactive) and others can change over time. In this regard, the ozone hole does play a role, since it lets in much more sunlight to do the chemistry, but the ozone hole has only been around for less than 30 years. So it is not important over geologic time. Pollutants from fossil fuel combustion are quite important in atmospheric chemistry, especially near (and downwind) from large cities like Houston. In addition to atmospheric chemistry, the CO2 from coal and oil also is a greenhouse gas. The good news about Antarctica is that it has very clean air, because it is so far from any big cities. The bad news is that we still can measure long lived pollutants (like DDT and PCB's) in the snow. The interesting difference between the ice core record in Antarctica and Greenland, is that in Greenland (downwind from the US and Russia) scientists have measured the increase in pollution over the last 200 years since the start of the industrial revolution. The value of the ice core record is if can give us some information about how the atmosphere was in the past, before humans started burning coal and oil. If we can understand how things worked in the past, we should have a better idea of how things might change in the future.