Limnoir

Christine Foreman wasn't in the bar that night, which was a little strange. "Cool Finesse" liked to work the scene. She'd been doing it for years. As smooth as water and as rough as Lake Hoare ice, she'd get the job done. Christine Foreman - Keeping it cool

Ringleader and mastermind, JP John Priscu was nowhere to be found either. He was surely plotting some devious scheme, I thought. John Priscu - Scheming

My next encounters with the limno team took place out in the field, and my suspicions grew. At the base camp, the team spent a lot of time in a small building known as the "rad lab." The building was off-limits to other teams. You needed special protection to enter, they said. Protection from what, I wondered. Protection from whom?? Danger - Rad Lab

When the team wasn't in their special little meeting house on land, they seemed to spend a lot of time in another special little meeting house out on the lake. This one though had a cutesy name - the Polar Haven, like it was a limno team "sanctuary" or something. Limno Sanctuary - the Polar Haven

Occasionally, the team would make an appearance in the main hut of the camp. They'd walk in with a slight swagger, like they'd really accomplished something. "Yeah, just finished a limno run," they'd say. But these so-called "limno runs" would start at odd hours of the morning, like 4 AM, and would last for hours.

Then there was the matter of their "equipment". They'd slip up and refer to it in conversation - the Jiffy Drill, the Hotsy, the Hot Finger. It sounded like something out of James Bond. Who were these people? Researchers? Health fanatics? Fugitives from the law? I decided to investigate.

The next time we were at a base camp with the limno team, I sidled up to Jersey Mama in the main hut, supposedly to help her wash dishes. "So how about those limno runs," I muttered under my breath. She turned sharply towards me. "What about 'em," she replied defensively. "You know," I said like I knew what she knew so that she wouldn't know that I didn't know what she knew and would tell me.

"Well, the limno runs are part of the long-term monitoring that we do on the lakes in the Taylor and Wright Valleys," said Jersey. "We collect lake water from various depths down the water column to create a profile of the lakes' basic chemical and physical parameters - things like dissolved oxygen, anions and cations, pH, temperature, light intensity. We're also looking at the biology of the lakes. You know - at the primary producers, those autotrophic guys able to synthesize their own food from inorganic substances using light or chemical energy and at the consumers, the heterotrophs that can't synthesize their own food but must eat what other organisms generate, in this case the primary producers. We're trying to create a picture of the ecology of the lakes."

Next>>