Andrew Martin and Ken Ryan drilling an ice core (Scott's Terra Nova hut in the background), and Ken Ryan showing algae growing on the bottom of an ice core (Mount Erebus in the backgroun). Images: A. Ballance
Each winter the sea around Antarctica freezes (click here to see the extent of Antarctic sea ice over the preceding 30 days).. By mid June the sea ice already wraps Antarctica in a giant frozen blanket, and it reaches its maximum extent of about 18 million square kilometres in late September. While it looks desolate and inhospitable, the sea ice is actually home to a great diversity of algae and microbes that live within or on the underside of the ice.
While Alison Ballance was at Scott Base last summer she visited a research project called Life in the Ice, in their field camp at Cape Evans. Ken Ryan and Meghana Rajanahally from Victoria University, Julie Deslippe from the University of British Columbia, and Andrew Martin from the University of Tasmania explained their work and demonstrated some of their techniques. Ken began the tour by explaining why the sea ice is the Antarctic equivalent of a sheep farm, with the algae on the underside of the sea ice being the grass, and tiny krill being the sheep.
You can listen to stories on the physics of sea ice which played earlier this year here: Tim Haskell and Pat Langhorne.
Ken Ryan sawing up an ice core, and Andrew Martin about to deploy a CTD into a large dive hole drilled in the sea ice (Images: A. Ballance)
