10 November, 1999

Arrival at McMurdo Station

We arrived at McMurdo Station on Monday! I was stranded in New Zealand for several days due to very strong winds and condition 1 (no visibility). I arrived yesterday and went through the various schools for safety and recycling today. With Pete Amati, I have two projects while here - one is a collaboration with ASA employee volunteers connecting them with teachers and schools across the country. This project is looking at the viability of using non-scientists to convey science information about research projects to teachers and students when given training by a science teacher - mainly Pete and me. The hope is that we will enhance the NSF and OPP program goals with better collaboration when given professional training by science educators. We plan to share information about the kinds of science that is useful to teachers and interesting to students. We will give them ideas about how to engage students with questions, talk about various jobs and science projects and explain their own jobs in addition to sharing personal observations about life on the ice. We hope that the e-mail collaboration will result in productive and engaging conversations that will disseminate knowledge about the science happening here even though the people sending the e-mail may not be trained in science.

The second project involved the schoolyard LTER that I helped established with the McMurdo Dry Valleys LTER.

I will be going out to the dry valleys and making some of the same measurements on the streams there with the same equipment that we do on Thornton creek. I will also use a Quiagen kit to extract DNA from some rotifers and tartigrades and bring it home along with some live Rotifers. The hope is to do some PCR on the DNA and then probe the ribosomal DNA with some probes and compare the results with similar tests done on local rotifers.

I will also do some work on stream flow, material transport and energy balance.

I will send some information on an interview I did with folks working on the SOAR project where they

measure magnetic differences as they fly over sections of land. It is part of a huge geology project. Also, I've learned a lot about the AMANDA (Antarctic meuon and neutrino detection array) There is so much interesting science here that it is unbelievable!