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Antarctic expedition a success

Returning researchers talk about work and play at the South Pole

By Kimberly Hiss
Staff Writer, The Prague Post
March 26th, 2008 issue

The two-month mission to the Johann Gregor Mendel Czech Antarctic Station on James Ross Island was part of a long-term study of the effects of global warming.
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Favorable weather conditions allowed the team to get a lot done, including collecting samples, installing a wind generator and measuring climate change's impact on vegetation.
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Scientists monitored plant life such as moss and lichen.
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Czechs are being well represented at the ends of the earth this year. As a Prague-based film team is currently en route to the North Pole, where it will begin shooting a documentary for Czech TV next month, a research expedition from the south has just returned home.
On March 9, a group of scientists, mostly from Brno’s Masaryk University, the Czech Geological Survey and South Bohemian University, came back from a two-month stay in Antarctica. Their trip, which was based out of the Johann Gregor Mendel Czech Antarctic Station on James Ross Island, was part of a long-term study to research the effects of global warming in extreme climates. The team also worked to develop the first geological map of the area. Since their return, expedition members have been balancing press conferences and TV appearances with analyses of the data and samples they brought back.
“We can consider the expedition very fruitful and successful,” said Masaryk University plant physiology professor Miloš Barták, adding that it will “undoubtedly bring many results and scientific outputs not only for Czech science but also for the International Polar database.”
The Antarctic station had been built in 2006 through a collaboration between Masaryk University and the Education Ministry, and the first research team headed there in early 2007. Many of the scientists who participated in that inaugural expedition returned again this January, and were thrilled by the amount of work this year’s favorable weather allowed them to accomplish.
“Everything in Antarctica depends on weather conditions,” Barták said. “We had only a few short-term episodes of strong wind and almost no snowfall. This allowed us to work in several field camps and explore some locations quite distant from the station. Therefore, both geologists and biologists managed to fulfill an extensive research program and collected a great number of samples and scientific data.”
Expedition members worked in groups of two to five people, arranged by discipline such as geology, biology, limnology (the study of inland waters), botany and climatology. If conditions were favorable, field work ran from about 10 a.m. to 8 p.m. “Sometimes later,” said Olga Bohuslavová, a third-year doctoral candidate at Masaryk University’s Faculty of Science, “because there was still light and you never knew when bad weather would come, so it was necessary to do as much as possible every day.”
As for the nature of that multidisciplinary work, the geologists collected samples and sought to finish the geological map; biologists built plexiglass chambers simulating climate change in order to study the impact on vegetation such as moss and lichen; and limnologists researched the lakes around the polar station, according to Masaryk University climatologist Kamil Láska.
For his part, Láska added that aside from maintenance of meteorological stations (which suffered damages from the elements since last year’s expedition) he focused on measuring harmful UV radiation in the area.
“We are trying to find a connection not only related to the decrease of stratospheric ozone but we are also studying other atmospheric factors that lead to high doses of UV radiation reaching the Earth’s surface,” he said. The Antarctic peninsula is of interest in this respect, he added, because its specific patterns of atmospheric circulation impact local environmental trends, the most important being climate change and glacier recession. “Changes are also related to sea currents, sea-ice formation, salinity and nutrient fluctuations, on which the existence of sea ecosystems is directly dependent,” he said.
In terms of publicizing the expedition’s findings, Láska has high hopes.
“Our primary goal is to get most of our data and measurements into worldwide data centers such as the Global Atmosphere Watch database, which falls under the World Meteorological Organization,” he said. “The most difficult task is getting our results into prestigious international magazines and reports that are going to be prepared after the International Polar Year [a collaborative research initiative] is over.”
Láska hopes that work and contacts with the British Antarctic Survey, the National Institute for Polar Research in Tokyo, the Norwegian Polar Institute and the Netherlands Institute of Ecology as well as attendance at various international conferences will help them toward that goal.
Job perks
While expedition members are excited by the amount of data they gathered this year, the Antarctic continent had more to offer than research advances. The scientists were treated to some dramatic sights, according to Láska, such as “the captivating view of white-blue ice blocks bobbing in the waves of Prince Gustav Channel, or the snowcapped peaks of the Antarctic Peninsula … or whales swimming just like that around your boat.”
Barták was no less enthusiastic. “The scenery is marvelous,” he added, describing views of “Red Island, which is really red at sunset, and the rocky peaks and white ice plateaus of the Antarctic Peninsula.”
But, after 10-hour days of trekking through such frozen splendors, the research station itself, powered largely by wind, was a welcome home away from home.  
“Around 8 or 9 p.m. we usually had dinner,” said Bohuslavová. “Then we’d listen to weather forecasts and some news from Marambio [an Argentinean station 75 kilometers away] and then we would just sit around the table chatting, watching some movie or playing the guitar.”
But the party got a little more crowded than expected this February, when a boat full of 170 German tourists showed up.
“You know, James Ross Island and the surrounding area is far from being visited frequently by tourists,” Barták said. “We didn’t expect any tourist ship.” But the surprise guests turned into a positive development. When the ship radioed the station to request a visit, three expedition members headed out to it in an inflatable boat. After meeting with the captain, Barták said the researchers “gave a lecture about James Ross Island, the history of the building of the J.G. Mendel station, and recent scientific activities and expedition members.”
The visit, however, keyed into one of Láska’s concerns about the future of the region. According to him, global warming isn’t the only threat facing the southernmost continent.
“I really wish that Antarctica lasts as long as possible as it was when I had a chance to get to know it,” he said, “so that it is not affected by the influx of tourists, whose numbers, unfortunately, are rising every year.”
— Naďa Černá contributed to this report.

Kimberly Hiss can be reached at news@praguepost.com


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[21:27 28/03/2008] : I want to join your trip
razi
karachi
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