New Year’s falls right in the middle of the austral summer season for the team at the Princess Elisabeth Antarctica research station. The passing from one year to the next serves as a divide between the first and second halves of the season.
Ever since the 2019-2020 season kicked off on November 5th when the first team left Cape Town for Antarctica, the BELARE team has been hard at work accomplishing a number of key goals for the 2019-2020 season and providing world-class assistance to scientists conducting research in East Antarctica.
A new airstrip
One of the first milestones the current season in Antarctica has been the arrival on November 21st of the first intercontinental flight from Cape Town to the newly constructed Perseus Airstrip. This airstrip is located just 60 km from the Princess Elisabeth Antarctica. The flight brought the first team of scientists of the 2019-2020 season from the CHASE, MASS2ANT, POPE, and LOSUMEA research projects, as well as a team of Japanese scientists.
Having an Intercontinental Airstrip so close to the station makes it possible for an Ilyushin cargo plane flying out of Cape Town, South Africa to land within a few hours' driving distance of the Princess Elisabeth Antarctica by modified Toyota Hilux. This allows scientists traveling to the station to avoid the need to take a feeder flight from the Russian Novolazarevskaya base (as had been the case in previous seasons), which reduces the overall cost for scientists to conduct their field missions in Antarctica.
Updating the station
After ten years of service, the station’s garage is getting a complete overhaul. Over the last decade, the ice upon which the garage was originally constructed in 2008 has shifted and receded enough that it has started to warp the structure of the garage. So it was decided to build a completely new garage. Once completed, its position can be adjusted as the ice underneath it moves.
The new garage's structure will be anchored to the granite ridge that the main body of the Princess Elisabeth station is built upon. It will be able to swivel on a hinge so its position can be adjusted as the ice below it shifts and diminishes. The team is placing pistons on the western side of the garage so it to be lifted each season as the ice below it recedes, ensuring that the garage will remain level.
The majority of the old garage has already been torn down and the anchor point of the hinge put in place. During the second half of the season, the new garage will slowly be put together, recycling as much wood from the old garage as possible to reduce waste. We can't wait to see what the final product will look like.
Supporting science
Most of the scientists scheduled to conduct research during the first part of the season got straight to work soon after their arrival. At the beginning of the season, the Princess Elisabeth Antarctica hosted scientists from the Japanese Antarctic Research Expedition (JARE) for a few days before they headed off to conduct a geological survey in the the northern part of the Sør Rondane Mountains. And then from the end of November until a few days before Christmas, scientists from the CHASE, MASS2ANT, POPE and LOSUMEA projects used the Princess Elisabeth Antarctica as a base for their field work.
The CHASE team collected atmospheric particle samples from their field instruments in their mission to determine what kind of organic and inorganic particles are found in the atmosphere there (and to what extent pollution from the rest of the world reaches Antarctica). With the help of the station's technical team, they performed maintenance on their instruments. Even after their departure, a member of the IPF station team, Benoît Verdin, will continue to take atmospheric particle samples until the end of the season.
Accompanied by profesisonal field guides from the IPF station team, the MASS2ANT scientists travelled to the coast to take certain snow and ice parameter measurements at the ice rises where they drilled ice cores during the last two field seasons in their quest to better understand ice mass balance in East Antarctica.
The station also team assisted scientists from the POPE project, which is looking at the interactions between clouds, precipitation and complex terrain in Antarctica, to collect data using a wide variety of instruments. Two engineers currently working at the station - Guus Luppens and Johan De Muylder - constructed mobile solar-powered units that allowed scientists from the Federal Polytechnic University of Lausanne (EPFL) working on the POPE project to run radar equipment they used to take field measurements on 100% renewable solar energy. This made it possible for them to forego using a diesel-powered generator and the 50 litres of fuel a day required to poser such instruments in the field.
Station team technicians also rebuilt and moved equipment to measure snow drift for the LOSUMEA project, which focuses on snow accumulation, transport and erosion processes to understand and quantify local changes in the mass balance of the Antarctic Ice Sheet, A scientist for the project is at the station for the majority fo the 2019-2020 season.
Most scientists left Antarctica in time to be home for Christmas, although a few have stayed behind to continue taking measurements.
More to come
In January, the station crew will welcome a fresh batch of scientsits, including 2018-2020 Baillet Latour Antarctica Fellowship Laureate Dr. Kate Winter from the Univeristy of Northumbria to complete the second of two research seasons for her BioFe project. Everyone is excited to attack the second half of the season.
More detailed news and a number of photo galleries taken by scientsits and staiton crew alike can be found on the Princess Elisabeth Antarctica website. Make sure to have a look!
It’s the end of the year, and already the first teams of scientists for the 2019-2020 season have come and gone.
On December 21st, a plane bringing fresh food supplies and equipment from Cape Town arrived at the Princess Elisabeth Antarctica and returned the first scientists to take part in the 2019 -2020 season to Cape Town, where they spent a few nights before returning home to Belgium in time for Christmas.
Having arrived on the first intercontinental flight from South Africa to Perseus Airstrip just 60 km north of the PEA station, the scientists at the Princess Elisabeth accomplished their respective missions for the season in a month’s time.
CHASE
Preben Van Overmeiren from Ghent University (UGent) and Stefania Gili from the Université Libre de Bruxelles (ULB) spent their month-long stay in Antarctica visiting seven sampling sites the project installed during previous field campaigns under the CHASE project, which is investigating the kinds of particles that are in the air in East Antarctica, and if pollution from the rest of the world reaches such a remote part of the world.
The sampling sites (which lie along a 250 km transect from the ice rises at the Princess Ragnhild Coast to the Antarctic Plateau) have instruments with special filters that collect samples of airborne particles over time. Each site has an instrument that samples organic compounds and an instrument that samples inorganic compounds from the air.
The special filters taken from the sampling sites have been collecting air particle samples since the last time members of the CHASE project visited the sampling sites during the 2018-2019 season. Preben and Stefania removed the filters and replaced them to continue collecting samples of organic and inorganic particles for another year.
During their time in Antarctica, the CHASE scientists also took samples of organic and inorganic atmospheric particles on a weekly basis near the PEA station using active sampling methods. Even though both CHASE scientists returned to Belgium in time for Christmas, Benoît Verdin from the International Polar Foundation team will continue to do active sampling of the atmosphere at the station until the end of the season.
All filters collected during the 2019-2020 season will be shipped out on the last cargo flight leaving from Perseus Airstrip in February. Once they arrive in Belgium, researchers from the many academic institutions participating in the CHASE project will analyse the compounds they collected in the filters.
MASS2ANT
After two successful seasons, including one in which ice cores drilled to a depth of 260 meters were extracted at an ice rise along the Princess Ragnhild Coast, the final season of field work for the MASS2ANT project involved returning to the boreholes that were drilled in two separate ice rises during the previous two seasons.
The field team measured snow and ice parameters around the boreholes such as temperature using an optical televiewer, surface strain around the borehole using GNSS and radar, and crystal orientation and fabric of the ice around the borehole using phase-sensitive radar.
The team - which consisted of Frank Pattyn from the Université libre de Bruxelles (ULB), Thore Kausch from the Technical University of Delft and Eric Keenan from the University of Colorado Boulder - also removed automatic weather stations that had been placed on the two ice rises sampled during the project to record weather data over the course of the project. The team also used a Snow Micro Pen developed at SLF in Switzerland to measure surface accumulation and variability (density and depth of snow) at 665 points around each of the ice rises.
The data collected from the MASS2ANT project will contribute to the ever-growing volume of data tracking the surface mass balance of the Antarctic Ice Sheet, or the amount of ice that the massive ice sheet covering the continent is gaining or losing.
Alain Hubert and Raphael Richard provided field guide support during the field campaign.
POPE
The POPE project, which aims to collect reference observations on the interactions between clouds, precipitation and complex terrain in Antarctica using a suite of remote sensing and in-situ instruments all based at ground level, had a highly productive first season at the Princess Elisabeth station.
The two scientists responsible for deploying the instruments this season, Alexis Berne and Alfonso Ferrone from the Federal Polytechnic Institute of Lausanne (EPFL) in Switzerland started installing their instruments on November 22nd, a day after their arrival at the PEA station. They put a number of instruments at or in the immediate vicinity of the Princess Elisabeth station, including Lidar (to measure atmospheric temperature and aerosols), MXPol radar (which tracks movement of clouds), and micro rain radars (which tracks fine precipitation).
Both Guus Luppens and Johan De Muylder (from SYSTECH) provided technical support to their work with the mobile solar-powered units they built to power the radar instruments with renewable energy. Emmanuel Poudelet provided field guide support.
Alexis and Alfonso stayed for one month to install everything. Alexis returned home on December 21st, but Alfonso is styaing behind to continue to collect data and dismantle all of the equipment at the end of the season (February 13th).
LOSUMEA
Another Swiss scientist who arrived on November 21st is staying until the end of the season. As in previous seasons, Hendrick Huwald, who is also working with the Federal Polytechnic Institute of Lausanne (EPFL), is staying behind to continue taking measurements for the LOSUMEA project.
The project is complimentary to the work of the POPE project in that it focuses on snow accumulation, transport and erosion processes to understand and quantify local changes in the mass balance of the ice sheet in the vicinity of the Princess Elisabeth Antarctica Research Station.
Since the 2016-2017 season, two snow drift stations near the PEA station have been collecting data on snow particle transport, as well as related meteorological variables such as wind, snow depth, and surface temperature. Members of the station team maintained the instruments over the last few seasons, and have improved the instruments to also allow them to collect data on heat flux.
During the current season, one of the snow drift stations has been completely rebuilt on higher ground after snow accumulation was starting to bury its instruments. The second station has been dismantled, moved, and rebuilt on the Antarctic Plateau so it can be in a place where constant katabatic winds (which discourage snow deposition) are more dominant than close to PEA. A solar radiation sensor was added to both stations to measure surface energy balance.
Instead of doing terrestrial laser scans in previous seasons, the station staff have been using a surveying drone to conduct areal photogrammetry over selected areas of interest, including in the vicinity of the two snow drift stations, the area around the Princess Elisabeth Antarctica, and around Utsteinen Nunatak.
Next, please!
The station team is eagerly looking forward to welcoming the scientists who will arrive during the second half of the season, including 2018-2020 Ballet Latour Antarctica Fellowship Laureate Dr. Kate Winter, who will compelte the second of her two seasons in Antarctica.
The two cooks whose job it is to feed the hungry BELARE team - Christine and Guillaume - offered a glimpse into Christmas traditions and preparations for Christmas Eve Dinner at the Princess Elisabeth Antarctica.
It's December 24th, 2019, and it's that time in the afternoon for everyone to have a small snack: the fourth meal of the day! Most of the team comes inside to warm up and recharge their batteries with a snack in the dining room for a few minutes before finishing off the rest of the day's work. Dry fruits, peanut butter, hot bread from the oven and instant noodles are there to satiate their growing appetite.
But what are they waiting for? Christmas Eve Dinner, of course!
Since the beginning of the week, the kitchen team has been preparing for this festive meal with the help of volunteers, including carpenters, plumbers and mechanics working at the station.
In the kitchen, we already received our Christmas present on the plane that arrived at the station on December 21st: Many fresh fruits and vegetables from distant Africa add colour, flavour and vitamins to the dishes we will prepare. Fresh lettuce and fruit salad are appreciated by all the foodies at the station.
Even here in Antarctica, three days after the summer solstice, traditions are respected. Tonight, the menu will consist of cheese gougères (a French puff pastry dish), guacamole toasts, mini pizza bites, and bits of cake as appetisers accompanied by some white wine (even here, we can discover South-African oenological treasures!) Everyone will dress up tonight and will be seated around a table featuring duck à l’orange with carrot purée, mushrooms, and broccoli. The traditional Christmas log dessert cake will contain an apple filling and be topped with chocolate and nougatine.
On Christmas Day, the symbolic traditional Belgian brioche pastry representing Baby Jesus - the cognou - will of course be served!
We'll enjoy the Christmas celebrations, because very quickly, everyday life will resume for the whole team.
In the meantime, it's time to return to the kitchen and wish everyone a Merry Christmas!
Already several weeks into the new season, the old garage on the north side of the station is in the process of being torn down while the anchor points for its replacement are being installed.
The old garage has served the station team well during the first 10 years of the life of the station, housing equipment and serving as a workshop to perform maintenance on vehicles. This temporary technical facility was built during the construction of the Princess Elisabeth Antarctica Research Station. Since then, the station has hosted more scientific activities and scientists than initially planned during the pre-study phase of the project. It was not foreseen that there would be such a high demand to use the station from the Belgian scientific community.
The additional infrastructure that became the old garage was set up on the ice (a small glacier moving slowly down towards the west). The IPF wanted to study the movement of the ice in order to determine how to design and build a more permanent structure that would take into account this movement while having a sustainable structure supported by sliding posts with a hydraulic system to lift it up the station once a year.
This work was started in 2012-13 and will be completed this season by the reconstruction of a new technical garage space.
Mathieu Chables, the building foreman who is responsible for overseeing the garage demolition and replacement project, explains why this change was necessary. He also gives some details about the new garage and the construction process.
Why was it necessary to replace the old garage after ten years?
Slowly flowing ice beneath the old garage was the main reason to tear down the old garage and construct a new one. The old one had been constructed on top of the glacier in front of the station and anchored directly into the ice.
But as any glaciologist can tell you, ice pretty much anywhere on an ice sheet like the one covering Antarctica moves very slowly but surely over time through a process known as plastic flow. All the ice in Antarctica, Greenland, and the world’s mountain glaciers slowly flow towards the coast like a very slow-moving river due to gravity. This means any structures built on top of ice will slowly be distorted over time as the ice moves. The flow is imperceptible, but over time, in some locations in the world, ice can flow as fast as several meters per year!
At Princess Elisabeth, each year, the ice moved both horizontally and vertically by about 10-15 centimetres. As the ice flowed, so did the anchor points of the old garage in the ice, making the entire structure increasingly crooked with each passing year. After 10 years, this movement adds up. By the start of the current season, one side of the garage had dropped almost a metre, and the walls of the structure had been distorted.
How will the new version of the garage solve the problem of having to build over slowly flowing ice?
The new garage will be anchored on its eastern side to the granite ridge that the main body of the Princess Elisabeth station is built upon. This new anchor point - which is essentially a hinge - will make it possible for the garage to be moved back into place as the ice below it slowly flows and recedes. The western side of the new garage will have pistons, allowing it to be raised each year as the ice on the glacier beneath it drops, making sure it stays level with the rest of the station over time.
It’s quite an ambitious project to undertake over the course of the 2019-2020 season. How far along in the process?
We started the demolition of the old garage in November not long after the first members of the BELARE team arrived in November. It took us about three weeks to tear down the old garage.
Will materials from the old garage be recycled?
In accordance with the philosophy behind the Princess Elisabeth Antarctica to leave as small an environmental footprint as possible, we’re going to re-use as much of the wood from the original garage as possible. We’re also going to re-use the glass wool insulation from the old garage in the new garage.
Wood that can’t be re-used in the new garage will be used for other construction projects around the station. We always need wood for something we’re building, so it will be put to good use one way or another. Any leftover waste that simply can’t be used again - which we hope will be very little - will be sent back to South Africa to be disposed of.
What’s the timeline for the construction of the new garage?
As the old garage was being torn down, we already started to install the main anchor point where the hinge for the new garage will be attached. Once this is installed, all we need to do is wait for materials that will arrive on the supply ship later in December to start the construction of the new garage. Once these materials arrive in Antarctica, they are transported from the coast to the station on the annual mid-season traverses that the BELARE team does.
Once we have all the materials we need, I expect that we’ll need about six weeks to build the garage. It should go very quickly once we have everything we need because the specific design and architecture of the building will allow it to be assembled very quickly. We also work very well as a team and can get things done very quickly when we put the effort in.
How big will the new garage be?
It will be 430 square metres in area and about around 4.5 metres high.
How many people are working on the garage renovation project?
It varies from week to week, depending on who might be needed elsewhere to take care of another job. But on average, at any given time, we have about ten people working on the garage renovation project.
What are the challenges in the construction of the new garage
Cutting into the granite ridge to make anchor points for the hinge of the new garage has been challenging. The hinge of the new garage will be placed on this anchor point. We drilled deep holes in the rock, into which the hinge will be placed and then secured with resin, similar to how we secured the supports of the Princess Elisabeth Antarctica on the same ridge. We also have to be sure the hinge is perfectly level to ensure smooth movement of the garage as we need to adjust it over time.
Aside from the new hinge system, will there be any other significant differences with the new garage?
One major improvement that the mechanics and technicians of the station will appreciate is that the new garage will be heated. The old one wasn’t, so it was often -15°C or -20°C in the old garage. At these temperatures, it was often difficult to perform maintenance on vehicles and equipment.
The new garage will no longer serve to park vehicles and will only be used as a workshop. Now that the hangar at the Winter Park (which is 2 km from the station) has been built, most of the machines can find a sheltered space during the winter and when not used. This means more room to work and store equipment in the new building. The garage will also be equipped with a pit so that mechanics can comfortably work on the underside of vehicles.
Scientists who are concerned about the carbon footprint that doing research in Antarctica can leave are certainly happy that the Princess Elisabeth Antarctica - the world’s first polar research station designed and built to run entirely on renewable energy - goes a long way in reducing the carbon footprint their research leaves. However, when scientists need to conduct research in the field for extended periods of time, they often need to take diesel-powered generators to run their scientific equipment.
A cleaner solution
Instead of having to rely on polluting diesel-powered generators for all of their energy needs in the field, Belgian engineer Guus Luppens, who’s in charge of increasing the energy production capacity of the Princess Elisabeth Antarctica over the next several seasons, has teamed up with fellow engineer Johan De Muylder to create solar-powered energy units that scientists can use while on extended research missions in the field.
The two engineers - who together work at a firm in Belgium called Pull The Plug, which installs solar panels on peoples’ homes - designed and built two kinds of solar power units that scientists can take into the field. Now at the Princess Elisabeth station for a few weeks, they’ve been able to take advantage of the good weather and the access to the materials at the station to create portable solar power units and a mobile solar-powered container unit.
Power units for field equipment
The first device the two engineers pre-assembled already in Belgium before leaving for Antarctica is a relatively small and easy to transport mobile solar power unit. It consists of two solar panels mounted on a metal frame about 1,5m high, an inverter, and a 24-Volt battery to store energy produced. The battery powers any equipment that is hooked up to it.
The mobile solar power units are able to produce up to 25 kWh per day and can easily be transported into the field by sledge and set up practically anywhere. Three of these mobile solar power units will be available for scientists to use in the field to power small equipment.
BELARE team leader Alain Hubert also plans to take a team and install two of these mobile solar power units to supply energy to a new antenna that will be palmed at Vesthaugen Nunatak about 30 km away from the Princess Elisabeth station. The antenna will serve as a relay point for radio communication with the new intercontinental Perseus Airstrip 60 km north of the station.
Converting a container into a power unit
Guus and Johan took some time to equip a mobile container unit with 3000 Watt peak of solar panels and batteries to store the energy produced. The mobile container unit is a large mobile power unit that can be used to provide energy to much larger scientific equipment while in the field.
They affixed solar panels to all sides of the container unit, along with inverters and several batteries. The entire container was mounted on runners, allowing it to be easily towed by a Prinoth tractor in the field.
Each container unit is able to store up to 30 kWh of energy, making them very powerful devices.
Scientists from the Federal Polytechnic School of Lausanne (EPFL) in Switzerland working on the POPE project are already using the solar powered container unit to power a large radar device for their research.
“Normally, scientists would need to expend 50L of fuel a day to power such a machine with a generator,” said Guus. “Now, with these solar powered container units, they can save 50L of fuel along with the CO2 emissions that go with burning that fuel.”
The container units can also be used to power appliances such as laptops, and other devices that scientists use in the field to provide more of the comforts of home such as a stove or a coffee maker - all with clean, renewable energy!
On the morning of Saturday 7 December 2019, scientists from different parts of the world joined the operational team of the International Polar Foundation working at the Princess Elisabeth Antarctica station to express their support for Climate Express, the Climate Coalition, and many other NGOs for the "United for Climate - Human Chain" awareness-raising campaign by symbolically stretching the human chain they plan to make in Brussels on Sunday 8 December all the way to Antarctica.
Scientists are currently at the Princess Elisabeth Antarctica (PEA) station to study the importance of the ice, the climatic history of our planet, our environmental footprint, the local biodiversity and other important research topics. PEA is the first ever zero emission polar research station on the Antarctic continent - one of the most sensitive places on Earth to the warming of the oceans and the atmosphere caused by climate change, and also a place that plays a major role in regulating the planet's climate.
Right now, in the middle of the 25th United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP25) the ClimateCoalition and Climate-Express decided to join forces with many NGOs in Belgium to create a human chain in the center of Brussels on Sunday 8 December to urge our politicians to take meaningful measures to significantly reduce greenhouse gases emissions causing climate change. As climate change is a global problem that knows no borders, all who are currently at PEA wanted to symbolise this by being part of the chain as well.
For more photos of the extension of the human chain in Antarctica, please have a look at the photo gallery on the Princess Elisabeth Antarctica station website. On this website, you may also find more information about the activities taking place at the world's first ever zero emission polar research station.
On Sunday 1st December, the International Polar Foundation, together with APECS Belgium, was present at the Royal Belgian Institute for Natural Sciences in Bruxelles to celebrate Antarctica Day - the anniversary of the signing of the Antarctic Treaty - with the visitors of the Museum’s temporary Antarctic exhibition.
Activities for families
During the day, different activities were organised to present to parents and children the scientific activities conducted by Belgian researchers in Antarctica. Models of the Princess Elisabeth Antarctica station were on display so everyone could get to know the world’s first zero-emission polar research station. Attendees played exciting games to better understand the differences between food webs in the Arctic and the Antarctic, while children were able to look through microscopes to observe microorganisms that inhabit the ice-covered continent.
In the early afternoon, adults and children had the opportunity to have a videoconference with Henri Robert, IPF’s Scientific Liaison Officer, who is currently at the Princess Elisabeth station for the 2019-2020 season. Adults and children were fascinated by the opportunity to see the ice-covered continent via live video stream.
After getting treated to the breathtaking views of the Antarctic landscape as seen from the station, Henri was asked several questions about the daily life at the Princess Elisabeth Antarctica. These questions raised awareness about the future environmental challenges caused by climate change and led to discussions about the need to preserve Antarctica.
The last question for Henri from one of the children, who asked if Antarctica worth all the trouble needed to get there, and if Santa Claus delivered gifts there, too. Henri replied that at the station they have always received a lot of chocolate for Christmas.
It looks like we’ve piqued the interest a future generation of young Antarctic scientists, whom we hope to see at the Princess Elisabeth Antarctica in the not too distant future!
Why do we celebrate Antarctica Day?
On the 1st of December 1959, the Antarctic Treaty was signed in Washington, DC by the twelve original signatories (including Belgium) that had significant scientific interest in Antarctica at the time, and had recently participated in the International Geophysical Year 1957-1958. Becoming a signatory to the Antarctic Treaty means accepting to preserve Antarctica as a place free of military activity to be used for peaceful scientific research purposes only.
The treaty entered into force on 23 June 1961. Since then, dozens more countries have signed on to the treaty, and today 54 countries are signatories.
Many subsequent conventions have also seen signed and entered into force since the original treaty was signed, including Agreed Measures for the Conservation of Antarctic Fauna and Flora, and the Protocol on Environmental Protection to the Antarctic Treaty.
Ever since the first teams of scientists from the CHASE, MASS2ANT and POPE projects arrived on the first ever intercontinental flight to Perseus Airstrip on 22 November, all have been acclimating to life in Antarctica and getting started on their research.
After being welcomed to Antarctica with an evening ride to the Princess Elisabeth Station on modified Toyota Hiluxes, the scientists had a good meal and got a good nights’ sleep in the newly expanded station. The following day, a logistics team that hauled the scientists’ equipment and supplies for the station from Perseus Airstrip the morning of 23 November arrived in the late afternoon. Everyone lent a hand to unload the tractors when they arrived.
Now that the scientists had their equipment, they could get started on their work for the season.
Field training
But before any field work can be carried out, all scientists and crew must partake in a two-day field training exercise so they can handle emergency situations in Antarctica.
First and foremost is the usual crevasse training, which involves being lowered into a crevasse and then pulled out by your colleagues. This training is essential to have in case you or a colleague fall into a crevasse. As the ice sheet is slowly but surely moving, this creates cracks in the surface of the ice called crevasses, which can be several tens of metres deep and a few meters wide. They are often covered over by a thin layer of snow and can be undetectable to the unaided eyes and usually form where the bedrock underneath the ice imposes constraints on the moving ice. However, it remains vital to be prepared to know what to do in case a person or a vehicle falls into one.
All scientists are also given first aid training. While a certified field guide knowledgeable in first aid always accompanies every field team, it’s important for everyone in the field to know how to handle medical emergencies until help arrives.
And of course, scientists are trained on how to use skidoos and other equipment they might need to use in the field, such as a GPS device so they don’t get lost. Antarctica can be a vast, white, barren landscape in all directions in many places, so having a GPS at all times to get your bearings is essential.
Getting down to work
With the two-day mandatory field training taken care of, the three scientific teams began their work on their various scientific projects.
CHASE
Scientists from the CHASE project (Stefania Gilli from the Université Libre de Bruxelles and Preben Van Overmeiren from Ghent University) start to work which consist on the replacement of the filters of the project’s air particle samplers around the station.
In the coming week, the two of them will also take a short field trip to the coast in order to change other filters and retrieve samples of air particles that have been collected since last season.
The purpose of the CHASE project (which is sponsored by the Belgian Federal Science Policy - BELSPO) is to collect samples of air particles in Antarctica to see to what extent organic and inorganic airborne particles from the rest of the world reach Antarctica. Every year researchers collect filters that have accumulated particles over the course of a year, and replace them with fresh filters.
How much of the pollution in the mid-latitudes from human activity ends up in Antarctica? We’ll find out once the project releases its results.
MASS2ANT
Jean-Louis Tison and Frank Pattyn from the Université Libre de Bruxelles have already started their field research for the MASS2ANT project (also sponsored by the Belgian Federal Science Policy - BELSPO), which is studying surface mass balance variability in the Princess Ragnhild Coast, 200 km from the station.
Frank and PhD student Thore Kausch left for the coast on Saturday 30 November to visit the same regions of ice shelves that the team visited in previous seasons. Along for the ride this time is another PhD student from the US named Eric Keenan, and of course, a field guide, Raphael Richard.
Their goal this year will be to collect the two meteorological stations that had been set up at Frank Kenny Ice Rise along with radar and GNSS measurements. They will also take teh temperature and optical televeiwer (OPTV) measurements at last year’s ice core borehole. The OPTV is a kind of camera that films and analyses the snow and ice layers inside of the borehole that was drilled at a record 260 metres at T-Ice Rise last season.
The MASS2ANT team will be at the coast for three weeks, and will return to the station on around the 19th of December, before heading home on the 22nd and arriving in time for Christmas a few days later.
This will be the last season for the MASS2ANT project. Will their research be able to determine if human activity has influenced surface mass balance in the Princes Raghnild Coast Region? To what extent is surface mass balance in the area influenced due to variability in atmospheric and ocean circulation? We’ll find out these questions and more when the results of their research are published.
POPE
Scientists from the Polytechnic School of Lausanne (EPFL) in Switzerland, including Alexi Bern and Alfonso Ferrone, are continuing their study of snow accumulation in Antarctica under the Princess Elisabeth Station Orographic Precipitation Experiment (POPE).
The scientists from the POPE project are trying to determine where and how precipitation in Antarctica forms, and how much of this precipitation, once deposited on top of the Antarctic Ice Sheet, eventually gets transformed over time into ice.
This season the POPE team is installing additional equipment, including a large dish that detects the movement and quantity of snow fall. At the moment, they’re analyzing different options to determine the best locations in the vicinity of the station to install their sampling equipment.
Knowing this rate of accumulation and loss of ice will help glaciologists such as those working in the MASS2ANT project get a better idea of the mass balance of the East Antarctic Ice Sheet in the region of the Princess Elisabeth Station.
JARE
For a few days earlier this week, the Princess Elisabeth Station also hosted five Japanese scientists from the Japanese Antarctic Research Expedition (JARE) as they prepared for a mission to in the northern part of the Sør Rondane Mountains. They will set up a camp close to Brattnipane nunatak to perform a geological study of the area.
They are expected to be in the field for one month, returning to the station around Christmas.
We’ll provide more updates on all of the scientific teams as they make progress with their research.
On 22 November, the new Perseus Airstrip, located just 60 km north of the Princess Elisabeth Station, welcomed its first intercontinental flight when an Ilyushin 76 plane carrying the first scientists of the 2019-2020 season from Cape Town touched down just after 18:00 UTC.
The Perseus Airstrip is now part of DROMLAN (Dronning Maud Land Air Network), which is responsible for all logistics in the Dronning Maud Land region of East Antarctica. Under ALCI (Antarctic Logistics Center International), the logistics service provider in DROMLAN based in South Africa, the new airstrip is partly maintained by the BELARE (Belgian Antarctic Research Expedition) team members and will allow savings of both time and money for scientists doing research at the Princess Elisabeth Station and its vicinity.
An ideal location
Situated at 71°25’42” South and 23°33’57” East, the 3 km-long Perseus Airstrip sits atop a blue ice field close to rounded nunatak called Romnoes. The climate at this location is quite dry, with very little snow accumulation. This is due in part to the fact that the airstrip sits on the leeward side of Romnoes, allowing it to be partially protected from katabatic winds from Antarctica’s interior, and snow accumulation. This makes bulldozing maintenance to smooth out the airstrip easier than it would be at other locations.
Sitting on solid blue ice in a cold environment that never goes above freezing also means that the airstrip won’t be at risk of melting during the austral summer, which can sometimes happen at stations at the coast when temperatures get warmer.
Great benefits to science
The new airstrip is within a couple of hours’ driving distance from the PEA station.
“Before the Perseus airstrip was operational, scientists always had to fly to the Russian Novo (Novolazarevskaya) Station 450 km further to the west and take a feeder flight to get to the Princess Elisabeth Station,” explained Henri Robert, the International Polar Foundation’s Science Liaison Officer and one of the passengers on this flight. “Sometimes bad weather could hold up scientists at Novo for days or even a week, and that’s a big loss of time if you only have four weeks to do your research project. Since a feeder flight is in this case no longer needed between Novo and PEA, the cost of the overall bill to transport people and cargo to the station can be reduced. This also offers more opportunities to bring heavy scientific equipment directly to the vicinity of the station.
When Henri arrived, he and the other scientists were driven to the Princess Elisabeth Station by members of the BELARE team in customised Toyota Hiluxes. The journey took less than four hours. The following day, a separate BELARE crew used Prinoth tractors to haul to the station the scientists’ equipment along with supplies for the station, including fresh food from South Africa.
“In terms of convenience and savings, participating in the development of this runway has been well worth the investment of time and effort,” Henri stated.
Contribution to infrastructure
The Perseus Airstrip project has been in the works by ALCI over the past two seasons, during which time the Princess Elisabeth Station team has participated in its maintenance.
This activity is part of the contribution BELARE makes to DROMLAN. Each station in the DROMLAN region in East Antarctica agrees to take part in the maintenance of common logistical infrastructure every research team in the region uses.
During the 2019-2020 season, ALCI is building a hangar at Perseus to house maintenance vehicles such as a firefighting truck and bulldozers that will be used to maintain the airstrip.
In close partnership with the Mission of Canada to the EU, BOZAR, and its many Arctic Futures Symposium partners, the International Polar Foundation co-organised a highly successful second edition of the Arctic Shorts film evening at BOZAR Centre for Fine Arts in Brussels on Monday 18 November.
More than 350 members of the general public filled up Salle M auditorium at BOZAR, making the second edition a repeat of last year’s very successful first edition.
The Arctic's diversity on display
An official side event of the annual Arctic Futures Symposium, and part of the BOZAR Nordic Fall programme, the Arctic Shorts film evening included seven short films by film makers from all across the Arctic.
Following introductory keynotes from Chris Cooter, Chargé d’Affaires at the Mission of Canada to the EU, and a brief opening statement from Martha Otte, the Director of the Tromsø International Film Festival, the audience was treated to works made by filmmakers from Arctic Canada, Greenland, Iceland, the Faore Islands, Norway, Sweden, and Sápmi / Finland.
After the films were shown, two of the filmmakers who were able to make it to Brussels to show their films took part in a panel discussion led by Martha Otte.
Executive Director of Wapikoni Mobile Odile Joannette whose film Katatjatuuk Kangirsumi was shown, and Inuk Jørgensen, the Director of the Greenlandic Film Home, responded to questions about their respective films. In addition to discussing their sources of inspiration, the two of them discussed topics such as the significant number of young indigenous peoples working in the arts to promote indigenous culture, and to address the problems their regions face due to climate change.
A big thank you
The International Polar Foundation would like to thank the Mission of Canada to the EU for the lead role it played in making the second edition of the Arctic Shorts film evening happen, BOZAR for hosting the event and making it part of its Nordic Fall programme, and all the Arctic Futures Symposium partners who helped provide the films selected for the event.
And special thanks is also owed to the general public, which again proved that there is a strong interest in Arctic culture in Brussels!
