My latest composition takes climate change research in Antarctica for its theme. The continent is important to scientists for its pivotal role in the Earth’s climate system and
its sensitivity to environmental change. By collecting and merging diverse forms of data
from the Ice, they hope to better understand global warming and predict future
scenarios.

One of the indicators that scientists monitor is the Antarctic ozone hole in the stratosphere, represented by the semicircle at the top of my image. Diminished ozone concentrations are caused by man-made chlorine-containing source gases — primarily CFCs and related halocarbons — which in turn affect weather in the troposphere.
I pictured that as a comet-like gust of wind because ozone depletion combined with increased greenhouse gases and internal climate variability are known to have strengthened Antarctica’s winds. On the positive side, environmental regulation has
been shown to play a successful role in containing the ozone hole and its effects in
recent years.

Scientists also draw information from studying and comparing locales on the ground. I’ve represented two of these areas in my piece.

One is the McMurdo Dry Valleys, indicated by the ‘ice drill’ at lower right. This region’s sensitive ecosystem is monitored for its rapid response to small variations in solar radiation and temperature driven by human activity. Past climate change is studied by analyzing trapped air bubbles in ancient ice, obtained by extracting ice cores from Dry Valleys glaciers.

Another important area is the great Western Antarctic Ice Sheet (WAIS), depicted in
the left half of my piece. Researchers are collecting WAIS ice cores to measure historic greenhouse gas (carbon dioxide, methane) levels in up to 100,000 years of snowfall. The chemical makeup of the ice itself functions as a thermometer, revealing the atmospheric temperature when the snow fell. Research suggests that WAIS may be inherently unstable and that it likely collapsed in the distant past when Earth was a few degrees warmer than today.

Which leads to the issue of sea level rise. I’ve marked my projected water level at 15 inches in deference to the International Panel on Climate Change‘s estimate of a global average rise between 0.6 and 2 feet in the next century. While there’s no question that sea levels are rising, researchers also remind us that climate prediction remains an inexact science. In Antarctica, where temperatures have soared along the peninsula in the last several decades but have changed little over East Antarctica (thanks in part, ironically, to the ozone hole-induced winds), projecting the future has proven even more difficult. In fact just last year scientists were forced to retract a major paper on rising sea levels due to errors that undermined the study’s conclusion. That report suggested that sea levels could rise to a whopping 82cm (32.28 inches) by the end of the century.

Given the number of evolving climatic factors, researchers now generally agree to uncertainty about how much warming will occur in Antarctica. One thing for certain however is that WAIS will be monitored ever more closely, considering the amount of water stored in the continent’s ice sheets.

• • •

On a CalAcademy-related note: I’m currently creating a large, unique Earth Day-themed installation in the museum’s central Piazza space. The project is titled “Handle With Care” and is described on my site and on the CalAcademy’s programs page and in my artist’s statement. You’re invited to come on by, say hi, and see the piece in progress till April 20 and in completed form thereafter.

The subject of this assemblage is bdelloid rotifers, tiny transparent animals found in
moist environments worldwide, including Antarctica. These fascinating invertebrates
were described in a chapter of Aurora Australis, the book printed by Shackleton’s
Nimrod crew in the cold, dark Antarctic winter of 1908.

The chapter’s author, the expedition’s biologist James Murray, titles his essay “Life
Under Difficulties” which refers not to the hardships endured by the men as he points
out, but “…rather to some of our very humble fellow-creatures, animals quite micro-
scopic in size, which are able to live under conditions which seem to us extremely
unfavourable.”

Murray goes on to describe the bdelloids’ resistance to damage (because of their size), endurance of drought (by entering a state of dormancy), and their tolerance to extreme heat and cold “…which promises to shed much light on the limits of temperature at
which life is possible on the earth.”

Indeed it did. But there was more to come. A hundred years on, scientists learned that these creatures are the planet’s most radiation-resistant animals—more so even than
the hardy tardigrades (a.k.a. ‘water bears.’) They also know now that bdelloid rotifers reproduce asexually, challenging the assumption that sex is necessary for the diversification of species (over 450 species in this case).

Most intriguing is that these animals have evolved and thrived over millions of years through the special ability to pick foreign DNA up from the environment and incorporate
it into their genomes. The new material comes from sources such as as bacteria, fungi, plants, even semi-digested food, and gets into the cells that will become eggs.

Murray wrote about bdelloid eggs but he never knew they were products of ‘horizontal gene transfer.’ He surely would have marveled that this process — common to bacteria — should also apply to his beloved Bdelloidea. Their ability to evolve this way is believed to
be unique in the animal kingdom.

Somewhat along the lines of finding foreign genes to build with, I used scavenged
material to create the specimens here. Wood, hardware, thread, paper, and graphite combine to depict Claria, a parasitic (fam. Clariaidae); Collotheca (fam. Collothecidae); Abrochta (fam. Philodinavidae); Balatro (fam. Dicranophoridae); and Keratella (fam. Brachionidae); a set of bdelloids chosen for its array of physical features.

Like the smoke grenade posted yesterday, this one was retrieved from Antarctica’s
Dry Valleys where it was probably used for signaling purposes. Unlike the burning-type
grenade however, this bursting-type model used white phosphorus (WP) filler, spread
by explosive action. WP is a highly efficient smoke-producing agent, burning quickly
at 5000°F upon exposure to air, producing an instant bank of dense white smoke.
The intense heat generated by this process causes the smoke to rise rapidly in cold environments, ideal for ground-to-air signaling in Antarctica.

Big thanks to Chris Gardner who found and donated both grenades to the Long View Project in the course of his McMurdo Dry Valleys LTER field work. His Antarctic photos are great favorites of mine; I particularly like this Abstract McMurdo set.

This used colored-smoke grenade was originally housed in the type of container posted yesterday. Indeed, the two may have been a couple as both were found in the Dry Valleys, albeit by different individuals at different times. Ironically, the paper container’s label survived to tell us of its contents while the steel grenade relinquished all its identifying marks to the elements, including the top surface hue that originally indicated its smoke color.

The Army/Navy Model 18 Colored Smoke Grenade, as the M18 is officially known, has various uses both in training and combat. In pacific settings such as Antarctica, it can function to signal aircraft and/or to mark a target landing zone. Having experienced the Dry Valleys fog, I’ll guess that this device dutifully served to guide a helicopter safely to base back in the relatively nascent days of GPS technology.

Image source: Wikimedia Commons

Some technical details for the curious: The M18 is a burning-type grenade which burns oxygen. A pull-ring igniter activates the fuze which detonates the filler, creating pressure
to force the smoke out through the emission hole at the bottom. Weighing 19 ounces, the device can typically be thrown 115 feet (35 meters) and its 11.5 ounces of filler generates
a cloud of colored smoke for a duration of 50 to 90 seconds.

Some history on its early manufacture from the Redstone Arsenal Chronology:

16 November 1943: The first M-18 colored smoke grenade (violet) was produced at Huntsville Arsenal on this date. Production continued until 8 May 1945. Persons working in colored smoke were paid one grade higher to offset the danger involved in the manufacture of these munitions; to compensate for the dusty conditions under which they worked; and to make up for the staining of the employees’ skin. The higher wage scale applied to all of the different colored smoke operations.

This week I’m cataloging three more discards that I retrieved from Antarctica to include
in my artwork. All three items are of a military nature, which may seem odd in light of
the Antarctic Treaty‘s banning of military activity on land or ice shelves below 60°S.
But while the Treaty prohibits military bases, maneuvers, and weapons-testing on
the continent, it does permit the use of military personnel and equipment for scientific research and other peaceful purposes. It’s an essential arrangement for the National Science Foundation which relies greatly on the military’s ability to provide logistical
support in extremely harsh environments.

I first clued into this in Christchurch where the New York Air National Guard’s 109th
Airlift Wing is tasked with flying to Antarctica under tricky and unpredictable conditions.
(And recently, earthquakes. Word is that the Christchurch-based airmen are all safe.)

Over at McMurdo Station, the U.S. military coordinates strategic and tactical airlift, emergency response, aeromedical evacuation, deep-field support, sealift duties, and
the handling of seaport access, bulk fuel supply, port cargo and a host of other trans-portation needs.

This ongoing support mission, called Operation Deep Freeze, began as a Navy-led undertaking in the mid-1950s which eventually aligned with scientific objectives intro-
duced under the Antarctic Treaty. Today ODF is carried out through the Joint Task Force – Support Forces Antarctica by the 13th Air Force and the U.S. Pacific Command.
Military personnel currently comprise about 10 percent of the 1,200 people working
out of McMurdo Station.


The cylindrical paperboard container above was found in the Dry Valleys by Marble Point camp manager Randall “Crunch” Noring. The container was empty but its label tells us
that it once held an M18 colored smoke grenade. Oddly enough, I acquired just such
a grenade elsewhere in the Dry Valleys to create a snug match. I’ll post the second half of the happy union tomorrow along with thoughts on what it might have been used for.

The figures in this piece represent Ernest Shackleton and his Antarctic crew from the 1907-09 ‘Nimrod’ Expedition who produced the letterpress-printed Aurora Australis
book, fashioning its wooden covers from recycled provision cases.

Each page of the triptych is 11.75″ high x 10.25″ wide, created in graphite and cut
paper. The set is currently on exhibit in Cutters/Cork, the latest in the Cutters series of international contemporary collage exhibitions curated by James Gallagher. The show is
up through March 12 at West Cork Arts Centre in County Cork, Ireland.

These days, all metal discards in Antarctica are collected, sorted, and shipped back to the States for recycling or re-use. U.S. research station residents dutifully sort their metal into three categories to facilitate the process: aluminum (mostly beverage cans), light metal (less than 1/4″ thick), and heavy metal (over 1/4″ thick). Aluminum and light metals are crushed into bales at McMurdo’s Waste Barn, while the heavy stock is loose-loaded onto a ship in big flatrack containers.

These protocols were put in place through the Antarctic Conservation Act of 1991 whose waste management regulations successfully reduced the impact of science research on the continent. I hope to convey the importance of these practices and show how Antarctica can be a model for managing waste in other environments by re-using these Antarctic discards in my artwork.

Littering is no longer permitted in Antarctica, so stray objects in the field are rare and tend to be decades old. The rare can is still of concern however, as aging metals disperse particles into the ecosystem. Their impact is particularly worrisome in sensitive biological environments such as the Dry Valleys where this can was found.

This week I’m posting more metal vessels to the blog’s Waste Stream Reclamation category where I catalog the discards I collected in Antarctica for use in my artwork.
Like many of my favorite finds, today’s item and the next two owe their transformed beauty to the continent’s punishing environment where they languished for decades.
This is an exceptionally tortured trio of cans, thoroughly stripped of labels by the
elements, rendering them Antarctica’s brand alone.

Pictured is an ocean organism I imagine marine biologists finding in the icy depths some day. But in addition to continually discovering many new sea floor communities, scientists are also studying ways in which known ones are changing. One such effort is ICE AGED (Investigating Change in Ecology in Antarctica by Gizmologists, Educators and Divers), run by the Benthic Ecology Lab at Moss Landing Marine Laboratories, the folks behind SCINI mentioned a couple blog posts ago.

The ICE AGED team has returned to an Antarctic experiment site established in the 1960s, a time considered as the dawn of Antarctic benthic research. Comparing original data with the present state of marine life on abandoned equipment is presenting researchers with a unique opportunity to assess nearly five decades of changes in the local ecosystem. One of those researchers is Paul Dayton, now a 71-year-old professor at Scripps Institution of Oceanography who will be revisiting the very cages and floats he secured to the seafloor as a youth. Here’s wishing Paul and the team success in their research under the ice, and perhaps the discovery of a new organism or two in the process. Read their journals here.