Science in Antarctica

The the cold desert of Antarctica's Dry Valleys, a land that would seem to hold no life, Emily Roberts is studying creatures that make their home in the area's always frozen lakes.

Emily, a 24-year-old graduate student working on a Master's Degree in limnology from Nottingham University in Nottingham, England ("Near Sherwood Forest," she says, with a grin, "where Robin Hood was from"), is in her second year of research at Lake Hoare, and is part of a large project there called the Long-Term Ecological Research in Antarctic Cold Deserts, or LTER for short. The project is overseen by Bob Wharton, the chief scientist for the many different scientists working on various parts of the Dry Valleys eecosystem. Wharton is based out of the Desert Research Institute in Reno, Nevada.

Protezoa, the microscopic creatures Emily studies, are one-celled organisms that are neither plant nor animal, but make up a whole Kingdom of their own.

The protezoa she studies include ciliates, flagellates and bacteria, which all form a chain of relationships under the ice, which Emily is trying to form a picture of. One of the tings Emily wants to know is this--if the whole system depends on sunlight, if the flagellates are photosynthetic organisms, meaning they get their energy from the sun, then what happens in the Antarctic winter when there IS no sun? Even in the summer, when the sun is up all the time, 99.5 percent of the suns rays are cut out by the ice.

For more information on the work scientists are doing in the Dry Valleys click HERE.

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