Poster Sessions

My poster session a few days ago went really well! I made a lot of good connections including a university of Warsaw professor who conducted similar research to me in west Antarctica using bryozoans. It'll be interesting to see how the water chemistry affects them as well! Overall the poster sessions have been good, which is a relief as I thought there would not be good exposure given the size of the conference center. Luckily, me and Justin were nearby so we could play a friendly game of "who can get the most people to talk to them". I was a little nervous so that helped a great deal. Also, we were near the wine and coffee, which seemed to draw a lot of people. ;) There were almost no undergrads so everyone assumed I was a grad or PhD student which was good because everyone took me seriously when I talked to them about my research. Given the topics of posters around me I'd say my topic was a little bit more serious than others as I really played up the large scale implications of the study. Overall, I think our posters were well above the par given the amount of information portrayed and the visual aesthetics of them.

Most of the people who approached me were American, in fact, I noticed that most people stuck to their fellow countrymen. It was refreshing that I had conversations with many school teachers from the US who had come for some continuing education. It felt good knowing that I helped them get some understanding not only about my research but antarctica in general, some geology/paleo, and ocean chemistry and acidification. I applaud the US for funding these types of continuing education trips, I guess were trying to smarten up a little. Way to go America!

Interwebs

So, I'm a few days behind in this blog and need to catch up; however, we do not have any internet at the hostel. So I'm writing this from the conference. We are doing well and have been really busy with all the stuff going on at IPY. I'll update later when we get internet back

Science Pow-Wow

These last few days have been great for science. Last night, we had an ice breaker on a huge research vessel which would put the Oceanus to shame. The G.O. Sars is rented out by the University of Oslo for a lot of it's research I later found out. The reception was good and we got to meet a lot of people even though it was broken into 3 different icebreakers (it's a huge conference). I'll admit, we snuck into the ice breaker on the ship and later went to our assigned icebreaker. Aboard the vessel we met many people including liminologists from Finland, polar bear biologists from Denmark and tundra ecologists from Russia. It was then that we realized how much of a minority America and undergraduates were at the conference.

By the time we went to the other icebreaker, the festivities were dying down; however, we were able to see traditional Norwegian customs in a dance and music performance. Then I tried my luck at an old Norwegian game to no avail.

The conference started early the next day and unfortunately, we missed the opening ceremonies as we did not realize the train ride to the conference was 30 minutes! Luckily, IPY posts many of the major going ons on its website: http://ipy-osc.no/live. We split up in order to see more talks as a whole, and I went to the phytoplankton talks. I caught the end of one talk about krill dispersion off the coast of south Georgia in the Weddell Sea. She found that rates of dispersion of krill are increasing and transporting from west to east. This is bad because there is a lack of krill in the west and the krill in the east is underdeveloped due to quick transport. The first talk of the next session was on phytoplankton dynamics by G.O.A.L led by Virginia Garcia from Brazil. They looked at the waters of the Patagonia shelf off the southeastern tip of south america which is very similar to antarctic waters thanks to the circumantarctic current. They used remote sensing and found areas of high productivity. Then they went to sites and took water chemistry and pelagic data. What they found was two separate peaks of phytoplankton; one in early spring dominated by large diatoms and dinoflagellates, and the other in mid to late summer by a coccolithophorid lag. With these blooms, they saw high chlorophyll and oxygen levels as well as low CO2 levels. This aids in the developing CO2 sink in Antarctica. They also found high levels of aerosols and DMS's which may be associated with the blooms, but this is a preliminary suggestion. The next talk was hard to understand and was quite dry so I had a difficult time following but it essentially went through the carbon budget for the phytoplankton blooms associated with antarctica. The next talk was by a young scientist from SCRIPPS who was probably better than most of the old greyhairs which was quite reassuring. He used remote sensing as well to figure out the affects of ice break on phytoplankton in the larson ice shelf. He fount that after the ice break there was an increase in chlorophyll in the broken region. The bloom raised the temperature of the ocean and may have sparked melt, which in turn sparks blooms, leading to a downward spiral effect. He also transected the area and found an increase of phytoplankton, peaking at 50m offshore. The longshore transect also was gradiented although this could be the result of advection between sites.

The Main talk today was by Steven Chown, Invasion biologist from South Africa and winner of the Muse award from IPY presented by Prince Albert II. The speech was inspiring and moving. I encourage you all to watch it on: http://ipy-osc.no/live. Titled "12:15 Plenary Lecture- Prof. Steven Chown Biodiversity change: an unintended legacy

The afternoon sessions we saw were quite uneventful. The majority of the talks were about populations of the arctic foxes and how they are dwindling. Their populations are being impacted by invasion of red foxes, limitations on the lemming populations(food source) and the shrinking and fragmenting tundras, which make up their habitat. One scientists suggests and implicates shooting of the red foxes as a means of replacing their primary predator, the wolf (which humans got rid of). That particular scientist ran experiments where he gave food to foxes and provided them with good shelters and found that 50% of arctic fox survival was dependent on lemming populations, 25% on shelter, 15% on the extra food and 10% on red fox shootings. My main question is why not increase the lemming population (unless it is at carrying capacity), that way the foxes can come out of endangerment naturally. If you ask me, we shouldn't be killing one species to save an endangered species that is on the brink of annihilation, soon we'll be talking about remediation of the red fox population! It seems like a wasteful allocation of time and resources (just like those silly pandas!). Leave natural selection be. Related Links:

Pandas 1

Pandas 2

The Animal Review

I Want To Ride My Bicycle

The last two days, we rented bicycles and essentially just wandered around the city. This turned out to be a great idea as we saw a lot of cool things and it was much easier to travel than on foot or by bus. The system we used was quite convenient in that there are stations all over town where you can leave your bike and pick up bikes that way, they aren't stolen. Yesterday, jet lag caught up with us and we didn't wake up until 4pm...:/. Luckily, it stays light until midnight here, so without a further waste of a day, we rented bicycles and took a ride around the harbor. We ended up in an ancient fortress currently occupied by the military (oops!), who are in the process of restoring the castle. After that we head into town and met some locals...one of whom was quite inebriated and I believe was talking about overthrowing the government. We then checked out a few restaurants to wind down the day (one of which had a bookshelf entrance to the bathrooms). When we returned to our futuristic hotel room to find a cute hedgehog outside the building. Overall, its been a fun few days exploring the intricacies of the city.

Oslo Thus Far

So it's been a couple of days since we've made it in to Oslo. The flight as long, as expected but the sights of the fjords as we flew in were pretty breath taking. When we arrived we were welcomed by the norse, a generally polite and mellow people.

We notice almost immediately how expensive Norway is compared to the US. Coke's cost about 5 bucks and dollar menu items are close to 10 dollars, but we sucked it up and caught our 28 dollar train ticket into town. The train was super fast and pretty advanced, in fact many things here are. It's all technology we have, but don't implement unless you're rich.

On our first day, we checked in, got settled, then went to check out the conference center where IPY will be hosted. You can almost see the whole city and harbor from the top of the opera house, it was quite extraordinary.

The weather thus far has been really nice. Yesterday we went to the viking museum, which was awesome! On the way out there we got to see some of the geology in the region. It looked to be a uniformly heterolitic fine grained sandstone and mudstone unit with some evidence of bioturbation (sorry all you non-geology folk translation=a mixed rock)

The viking museum contained some of the oldest ships ever found, dating back to 700 to 800 AD. it went in detail about how to create a ship, which seems like a lot of work even with modern technology. The vikings would create the keel (using oak) then build up and around that, religiously leaving no voids. What's most impressive is that there were no blueprints or notes and all the measurements were taken by eye! The ships were designed to be beached easily as so the vikings could sneak on land fast, pillage then get back in the water fast. They were also used as "graveyards" for nobles and warriors alike, which is why many of them got preserved so well.

The decorations we saw were quite incredible as well. Incredible amounts of detail went into wood working and sail making as well as tapestry design. Silk linens and tapestries were woven with incredible detail which probably added in their preservation. Unfortunately, we weren't able to take photo's of the fabrics, so a woodwork picture will have to do:

After the viking museum, we went to the Museums of natural history for geology, paleontology and zoology. There we saw incredible minerals, and fossils comparable to the Smithsonian, I think. They even had a section on forams! The zoology museum was nice and had many taxidermied animals.

Tomorrow, me and my collegue are headed beautiful Oslo, Norway for IPY. Should be a lot of fun, I can't wait. I found this picture and thought it was fitting.

Field School

For the last week and a half I have been participating in The University of Georgia's field program. We've been staying at the Abbey in Canon City, CO and mapping the general area. There are a lot of Hogbacks in the area which make for some good hiking.
Hogbacks form when a more resistive rock unit withstands erosion as the other units erode down. This creates some nice topography which we got to experience in our first mapping project. The units in our area were the fort hays, carlile shale, greenhorn, graneros and a quaternary gravel unit.