1. How is the garbage handled on Antarctica?
Disposing of garbage and wastes has always been a difficult challenge in Antarctica. In the early days here (1950s and 1960s), there was little concern for the environment and a lot of waste ended up in the ocean or in landfills near the stations. Today, however, all countries that are active down here have agreed to follow an environmental protocol and minimize their impacts to the environment. Thus, garbage at each station is carefully sorted into burnables, non-burnables, and recyclable materials. Here at Casey Station, for example, there are up to six garbage cans to choose from when throwing something away. We make the extra effort to sort our garbage from the beginning, so we toss an empty plastic container into one bin just for those, aluminum cans in another, glass in a third, and so on. From there, the recycables and non-burnables are stored until the next ship arrives, then transported back to Australia. Burnables can be incinerated here, but only in an enclosed system that does not release pollutants into the air. Human wastes are treated on station and the treated water, mostly clean now, is pumped into the sea. It's a very good system, how wastes are handled down here now, and a model for how recycling could and should be done in the U.S. all the time!
2. How long does it take to get the results of your research?
Like most field studies
in biology, the fun part is actually collecting the data in the field.
After that, the analyses can be time consuming and tedious. Part of
that is true with my research. Once I get back to UNCW, I will send
samples of bone and eggshell from my sites to a specialized lab for radiocarbon
dating. I'm as anxious as anyone else to know the age of my sites, but
that analysis can take up to two months or more. So, when I return in
March, the earliest date for when I'll know the age of my sites will be sometime
in June. I will be sure to post that on this page at that time.
As for the diet remains in the sites, that will take longer. My students
and I will be sorting through the sediments I bring back to UNCW for many
months before we can know what kinds of fish, squid, or other species were
being eaten by the penguins in the past. One has to have lots of patience
in research as rushing can result in inaccuracies in the data.
Yes, there have been invasive species in Antarctica. This is unavoidable with so many ships and people coming here each year. So, especially in the Antarctic Peninsula, there have been introduced plants and insects that seem to have established themselves near some of the stations. There are not many species that can do this as the weather is still pretty cold here, especially in winter, compared to other places in the World. Many species may arrive here, but not survive so their invasion is unsuccessful. In fact, there is a species of bird, the Cattle Egret, that is the only species of bird to have naturally dispersed to all seven continents on the planet. Small flocks have reached the Antarctic Peninsula, but then they are too weak from the long flight and die from lack of food (they eat insects, mainly). I have found carcasses of these birds in a couple of places in the Antarctic Peninsula. This egret, by the way, occurs near Wilmington as well. With the warming trend in the peninsula, we may see more invasive species establish themselves in the future.
For this question, I assume you are talking about air bubbles trapped in the ice and retrieved from the ice cores from glaciers. A core, when taken from a glacier, is drilled out of the ice and appears as a long cylinder of ice. The deeper into the glacier the core goes, the older the ice and air trapped within it. By studying the ancient air trapped in the bubbles, it is possible to determine the relative temperature of the air in the past. Extracting the air cannot be done in the field--the core must be taken to a lab where specialized equipment is used in a sealed chamber to extract the air. The air itself is not what gives us the data on temperatures in the past, but the isotope ratio within it. To understand how that works requires a lecture in isotopic geochemistry, something I don't think you want to read about here! However, if you do have more interest in this procedure, you can learn more about it on the web. A good site that shows pictures of cores, how they're taken and how they are analyzed can be found at: http://www.glaciology.gfy.ku.dk/Icecores.htm
Fortunately, my research in the field does not require a lot of complex equipment. Mainly, all I need are tools for digging, screening, and washing sediments from the abandoned colonies. So, I have hand tools (trowels, small shovel), tape measure and line level (as carpenters use to keep a level surface, it's a bubble in a small cylinder of fluid), buckets, and screens. I use the tape measure to mark the 1x1 m grid I excavate and to measure depth for each level using the line level. These are the same kinds of tools used by archaeologists to maintain stratigraphic control in their excavations. The rest of my materials here are bags, vials, and small tools (tweezers, dental picks) for sorting and storing small bones and other organic remains from the sediments. We sort as much as we can down here to minimize the amount of sediments I have to ship back to my lab. I also use a low-power stereomicroscope to help sort some of the remains from the sediments, but the bulk of the finer work has to be done in Wilmington. In addition, the more complex analyses (e.g., radiocarbon dating) require complex equipment found only at labs specialized to do this work. If I needed equipment like that down here, it would be very difficult to ship everything here. Hence, that's why I'm fortunate in that my field work requires only minimal supplies and tools.
Steve Emslie