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SIUC Microbiologists in Antarctica!

A quest for unusual microbial life has taken two members of the SIUC Microbiology faculty, Drs. Laurie Achenbach and Michael Madigan, and three graduate students, Liz Karr, Matt Sattley, and Jennifer Carey, literally to the ends of the earth - Antarctica! Funded by the National Science Foundation's Life in Extreme Environments Program (LExEn), this project involved sampling permanently frozen lakes in the Dry Valleys of Antarctica during field trips in 1999 and 2001. Working out of McMurdo Station, the goal of this team was to isolate, culture and characterize the diversity of psychrophilic (ice-loving) photosynthetic and sulfur-reducing bacteria. Psychrophilic organisms are of interest because they carry out chemical reactions in extreme cold. This page will allow you to share in their exciting adventures.

General Abstract

Abstract from Funded Proposal

Research Progress

Southern Illinoisan Article "A Cool Place to Work"

E-Mail Correspondence from Laurie

Link to photographs from 2001 trip

List of photographs from 1999 trip

Christchurch New Zealand - The First Leg of the Trip

Photo. Aukland Airport.
Photo. Jen, Mike and Laurie in front of New Zealand's "most famous aviatrix"
Photo. Jen and Laurie at the Christchurch Botanical Garden
Photo. Same as above, close-up of their mugs
Photo. Jen Sledding. Antarctic museum in Christchurch
Photo. Mike and Jen at the Antarctic museum in Christchurch. They're standing in front of the wind chill machine in the cold room.
Photo. Mike, Laurie and Jen in the coldroom, Antarctic museum in Christchurch.

En Route to McMurdo

Photo. Jen and Laurie in transport plane enroute from Christchurch to McMurdo
Photo. Mike enroute to McMurdo
Photo. This is an interesting shot of the sea ice as it's breaking up.
Photo. This is the transition from the sea ice to land. You can distinguish between the two because the sea ice (on the right) is relatively flat and smooth compared to the land (on the left).
Photo. Finally, here are the pictures I took while we were in flight to the ice. This one is of huge ice sheets as we're approaching the Antarctic shoreline.
Photo. Now you can really tell we've hit land because of the mountains. I like the propellor in the foreground!
Photo. This is the edge of the Antarctic ice shelf. It looks like solid land, but it isn't.
Photo. These are some of the many mountains in the Antarctic. They're beautiful by air.
Photo. The view from the plane window just as we're landing on the ice runway at McMurdo. What a feeling to finally be here!

At McMurdo Station

Photo. View from McMurdo
Photo. Laurie's glamorous room at McMurdo!
Photo. Jen in our lab at the Crary Lab
Photo. Discovery Hut, the shed built by Scott and his group in 1902. This is the view of it from the dorm. It's about a 10 min walk down there. Outside the hut there's a charming mummified seal.
Photo. For those sick people who need to see it, The Mummified Seal!
Photo. Laurie at Scott Base, right down the road from McMurdo
Photo. Mike and Jen at Scott Base sign.
Photo. The mess hall, Building 155, which houses the cafeteria, barber (haircuts are free), base store, TV shop (Jen and I got a TV for our room -- probably about 15 yrs old, turn your own channel, no remote, 7 channels), library, etc. This is just what McMurdo looks like. A frontier town with (frozen) dirt roads and metal buildings. But the scenery is unreal.

Survival Course

Photo. Here we are loading up one of the tractors that brought us to the survival site which was located about three miles from McMurdo. We were each allowed to bring all of our ECW gear and a survival kit.
Photo. This is all of us at the beginning of the 2-day survival course. Mount Discovery is in the background.
Erebus1 & Erebus2. Here's two pictures of Mount Erebus (pronounced air-a-bus), an active volcano. The first day of our survival course, the weather was exceptionally clear, allowing us a beautiful view of Mount Erebus.
Photo. This is an aerial view of Mount Erebus, an active volcano visible from McMurdo Station that is 14,450 feet high.
Photo. Here's Mike and Jen all suited up for the cold. This is during our after-dinner walk; you can see Mt. Erebus in the background.
Photo. Here's one of Laurie in full ECW gear at the survival site. Mt. Discovery is in the background.
Photo. Here's a picture of a pack just sitting out in the middle of nowhere.
Photo. Here we are setting up a Scott tent. This is where Mike and Jen and I slept. We were toasty warm that night in our huge down sleeping bags!
Photo. This is Jen looking through the picture window we put in our snow-block wall. We placed the wall such that it blocked the southern wind and made it long enough to shelter two mountaineering tents. To make the snow blocks, you just saw blocks out of the snow, lift them out with a shovel, and muscle them into place. You really work up a sweat doing this, even at -15 degrees!
Photo. This is our group constructing a snow dome shelter. To do this, you place a bunch of duffel bags (we piled up our survival kits) into a pile and just keep shoveling on snow and packing it down until there's at least two feet of snow on top of the entire dome, top and sides. Then you let it sit for about 30 minutes. You then dig a passageway down beside the dome, then up into one side of the dome, making a door that's lower than the room inside the dome. Once you've removed the duffel bags through the door you made, you just shovel out the space left by the bags and smooth out the floor. You're left with a nice snow-covered room that sleeps 3-4 people. Since the entrance is lower than the room, you don't have any drafts coming through. The people who slept in this structure all rated their night as either a 9 or a 10 out of 10. They were cozy and warm!
Photo. Here's Jen cooking in our snow kitchen. Freeze-dried meals....yum!
Photo1. Photo2. Here's two pictures of Jen making snow angels. Girls just gotta have fun!!
Photo. There were two Italian scientists from the Cape Roberts project on our survival team. Here's one of them trying to reach Terra Nova, the Italian research station, on the radio. He wasn't able to get through, but we were able to reach the South Pole station!

Don Juan Pond in the Dry Valley

Photo. One of the intrepid travelers, Jen, in the helicopter. It was our first helo ride and we loved it!
Photo. This is looking out of the helicopter window during out flight to the Dry Valleys.
Photo. This is one of the many mountain peaks that we passed by on our way to the Dry Valleys. Not a bad commute!
Photo. Jen, Mike and I at Don Juan Pond in the Dry Valleys. This is a truly bizarre landscape with no plant or animal life and not even any snow or ice. The patches of white you see on the ground are not ice but, rather, salt deposits left by evaporation of the pond. The liquid in the pond (seen in other photos) is a near-saturation solution of calcium chloride and, thus, remains unfrozen even at temperatures of -50 degrees C.
Photo. This is the westward view from Don Juan Pond. Note our helicopter in the left side of the picture.
Photo. This is the eastward (toward the sea) view from Don Juan Pond. You can see the liquid in the pond in this shot.
Photo. Mike and Jen collecting water samples in Don Juan Pond. Think of dipping your hands into ice-cold calcium chloride and you'll have some idea of what Mike's feeling right about now.
Photo. This is a large ventifact at Don Juan Pond. Ventifacts are rocks that have been altered by windblown particles and are extremely common in the Dry Valleys given the almost constant wind that blows through there.
Photo. This is Ice Falls, a natural glacier structure located at the west end of Wright Valley in the Dry Valleys. It's easy to see how it got its name!
Photo. Here's a glacier coming partway into the Dry Valleys and then just stopping. This is why the Dry Valleys aren't covered with ice and snow.

What We've All Been Waiting For: Penguins!

Photo. Jen with some Emperor penguins near McMurdo.
Photo. Laurie and Mike posing with penguins (or were the penguins posing with humans?!)

Other Photos

Photo. Jen and Laurie next to the Canada Glacier near Lake Hoare. They finally got to touch a glacier!
Photo. Jen driving the 6-wheeler over the incredibly bumpy lake ice at Lake Hoare. Bumpy is much too mild a term...there were craters! I sat behind her and, youch, what a wild ride! We were hanging on for dear life at times. Mike was smart and walked.

Cool Quotations

"Of all the things I would like to do during my life, my greatest dream is to go to Antarctica and shake hands with a penguin!"
Larry Mester

"The odds were good , but the goods were odd."

Statement made by many "trolling" Mac woman scientists in reference
to the70 to 30 man-to-woman ratio at McMurdo.
From "Antarctica"by Kim Stanley Robinson (Bantam Books, NY).

E-mail us:

laurie@micro.siu.edu

madigan@micro.siu.edu

lizkarr@siu.edu

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