Antarctica, Day 35
I’m sitting on the surface of Mars, awkwardly balanced on a red-tinged dolerite rock in the middle of an endless boulder field, tired, fingers freezing, hoping I don’t need to pee into a Nalgene bottle soon, eating long-expired strawberry PopTarts… and thinking that this must be the pinnacle of living. Beacon Valley in Antarctica is as close as you can get to being on Mars without being an astronaut, at least according to a number of NASA scientists. It’s where NASA tested instruments for their Mars Phoenix Lander before it touched down on the red planet. It’s higher altitude, drier, colder, and windier than many other parts of the Dry Valleys and notably devoid of ice, at least on the surface. There’s no glaciers or frozen lakes here, but there is ice underground.
Me on Mars, aka Beacon Valley.
A foot or so below my boots exists the remnants of a glacier from millions of years ago. Scattered around in sandstone that has fallen to the valley floor from up high in the mountains, you can find fossils of squirmy paths large ancient worms once navigated. But I’m not here to explore the heydays of Antarctica’s past. I’m here to uncover the life that is managing to still lurk here today in one of the most extreme environments on the planet.
Beacon Valley from the ground.
You can only get here by helicopter, and even then it’s not a guarantee. The expanse of boulders make for a tricky landing, where the pilots have to circle around multiple times to puzzle piece together a safe and level landing spot. After a few scouting circles and wishing I had popped a Dramamine, we finally landed safely and my team and I set out on our various missions. I’m embedded this year with the McMurdo Dry Valleys Long Term Ecological Research group that focuses on the soils and the edges in which microscopic animals live in them. The group split up to go gather samples around the valley, while I pulled out my drone and camera to capture the landscape and look for what I was hoping to find: endoliths. Endoliths are tiny organisms that take shelter inside of rocks. The porous sandstone up high in the mountains, remnants of a Jurassic beach, is one of the few places life can find shelter here. Burrowed inside a rock, it’s just slightly warmer and wetter, and with lightly-colored sandstone, it lets in just enough light to allow for some photosynthesis. It’s not necessarily a luxurious home for endoliths, but it is enough to make ends meet, especially with no predators.
Behind the scenes of filming myself in Beacon Valley.
Soils sampled, rocks gathered, footage shot, after half a day on Mars it was time to head back to the main field site where my team and I were camping, just the eight of us. The day prior I had visited another otherworldly spot: Blood Falls. It’s visually one of the most striking places on the entire continent.
Blood Falls captured by my drone.
An iron-rich subglacial pond occasionally leaks out to the surface, oxidizes in the process, and coats a glacier and frozen lake in what looks like a waterfall of blood. For a long time, it was thought to be totally lifeless, but within the past couple of decades it was determined to contain life! No tardigrades or animals, but bacteria happily swimming around. Blood Falls had long been a dream of mine to visit. It’s a monument to the determination of science to explore and investigate. And it’s a monument to the many unique, weird, and charming ecosystems hosted in the Dry Valleys of Antarctica. I made my first pilgrimage here four years ago and was filled with so much glee. But the visit was shorter than I anticipated and I had been admittedly a little bummed to have very little footage of such an important place. This year proved to be redemption and I can’t wait to eventually share the footage I captured here in my forthcoming docu-series. I’ll post occasional sneak peeks to my Instagram in time.
Me taking in the awesome weirdness of Blood Falls.
After an incredible week, I’m now back at McMurdo Station for a few days to charge my batteries (literally), catch up on sleep, process the soil samples we collected (which involves weighing the soil, extracting the microscopic animals from it, and counting how many there are), and prepare for my next field deployment coming up in a few days. It’ll be the last big field deployment while I’m here, so I will be trying to squeeze out every bit of energy I have to film as much as I can and fill in any gaps that I didn’t get around to over the last month. We work seven days a week while here since our time on this precious continent is limited, but at least on Sundays in McMurdo I’m able to sleep in, grab some cinnamon pancakes, and ask amazing scientists big questions about the nature of life.
<3
Ariel