Limnoir

 

"But have you heard about the badger head drill," said Krafty lighting up. "Now that's a lot easier. It's not nearly as heavy. We use that one to make little two-inch holes to measure ice thickness at different spots around the lake. The ice thickness changes throughout the year, but except for narrow areas at the edges of the lakes, the ice never melts out entirely. Our lakes are some of the only ones in the world with a permanent cover of ice. Jill piped up again. "Yeah and that helps make the water column really stable. Winds can't churn up the top part of the column, and the lakes don't experience the same kind of top to bottom overturning that lakes in some other regions do. This means that diffusion is the dominant process of mixing. The ice also prevents sunlight from making its way deep into the water column. So the lake organisms are adapted to a low-light environment. In fact, too much light can be harmful. Our sampling holes are drilled inside a Polar Haven so that when the samples are brought to the surface the organisms aren't exposed to direct sun, and our filtering is done pretty much in the dark."

Badger Head Drill Sampling inside the Polar Haven

Lake Hoare ice - walking back to camp from the Polar Haven - "Hey yoooou try driving an ATV on that stuff", says Jersey

By this time Jersey Mama was banging the dishes she was washing around with excitement. She continued talking about the monitoring for a while and then started in on her research. She was collecting samples from Blood Falls. My ears perked up. Maybe this at last was the key to the sinister workings of the limno team.

Blood Falls

"Blood Falls is a reddish-looking outcrop of the Taylor Glacier in the Lake Bonney basin. The red color of Blood Falls is caused by iron salts from an ancient salt-water lake being squeezed out of the glacier. And" - Jersey scrubbed a plate in particularly vigorous fashion to drive home her next point - "Blood Falls is home to some very interesting extremophiles. These organisms can survive in environments that we, as humans, would consider quite harsh. In the case of Blood Falls, I'm looking at cold-loving microbes that are psychrophiles and can live only at temperatures below fifteen degrees Celsius, that can survive freezing events and be found in ice, and that are chemoautotrophs and can grow in the dark without dependence on sunlight for energy. They're definitely tough stuff."

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