The weather can change pretty quickly down here,
and it can get extremely cold extremely quick.
The minimum temperature with wind chill
is expected to be around -47 to -50 degrees Fahrenheit.
One of the main concerns is that we lose visibility quite frequently when the winds pick up.
So every time we go out, we have survival bags, so that we could survive for three days
if a really bad storm set in and we had to stay out on the sea ice.
I'm currently in the Crary Lab Research Facilities in McMurdo Station, Antarctica.
The very first time I came down here, I expected an environment that was just a flat sheet of ice.
I was hit by the realization that Antarctica is filled with mountains.
The beauty of it really kind of surprised me.
Research proposals that come in on an annual basis to do work down here, are probably up around
200 to 300 proposals a year, and they may fund, on average, maybe 10 of those proposals.
And so it's highly competitive.
We're here looking at how the fish that are adapted to subzero waters
are able to respond to changes in temperature.
These fish typically see very little change from year to year,
but with climate change coming on, we expect that to be more variable.
As well as changes in temperature, the ocean's also changing in pH.
And so those combined effects may actually have some pretty negative impacts on the fish
as they try and adapt and respond.
It is go, go, go, for us, seven days a week for about three months.
We have a relatively short season when the sea ice is stable enough for us to work on it,
so we sometimes have even gone on three different fishing trips in a day.
Typically we'll wake up and head over to the galley and grab a hot meal.
Then we will head on over to the Crary Lab facilities where we do most of our research at.
We'll gear up, get into a tractor vehicle called a PistenBulley,
and then we head out onto the sea ice to go fishing.
Along the way, we may have to profile a few sea ice cracks
to make sure that the thickness of the ice is safe enough to cross.
"So right now we’re headed out towards Inaccessible Island,
and we've just about reached the Erebus Glacier Tongue.
We’re getting close to a crack that sets up here annually, in between
the Erebus Glacier Tongue and Tent Island, which is off to the left.
So we’ll head up here and see if we can find the crack, and then we’ll have to profile it
to see if we can get across it today."
Once we get there, we'll drill some holes in the sea ice using a machine called a jiffy drill.
It’s basically a 10-inch auger that we can use to drill into the ice.
Once we've caught enough fish, we place them into aerated coolers with ambient seawater
and drive them back to the station, where we put them into aquariums.
They actually make up about 90% of the fish biomass down here, and if they start to struggle,
then the food chain that is reliant upon them is also going to start to struggle as well.
It may help us get some sort of insight into how these populations are going to handle change,
and whether or not we should be concerned about any of these fishery species,
and start to manage them differently.
Cell phones do not work down here.
You don't have to cook for yourself.
You don't shower every day, because we need to conserve on water.
Those kind of daily activities that distract you from your goals and your focus --
all of those are kind of removed from your everyday life
and it really simplifies things for you down here.
It allows me to really pursue research, which is what I was trained to do, is to be a scientist.
It allows me to come down here and actually go after questions that I can't ask
anywhere else in the world.
In another episode of Science In The Extremes, a neurobiologist free-dives with great white sharks,
to understand how fear works in the brain.
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