Antarctic Fieldwork

Through the support of NERC's Antarctic Funding Initiative (AFI) and Collaborative Gearing Scheme (CGS) I will be spending 8 months in Antarctica collecting samples for my project. From December through March in two consecutive years I will be living and working at the British Antarctic Survey's (BAS) Rothera Research Station on Adelaide Island.

Ryder Bay, just southwest of the base, is home to RaTS, the Rothera Oceanographic Time Series, an oceanographic monitoring program that has been in place for quite some time. Here, BAS staff monitor physical characteristics of the water column (temperature, salinity, ice cover) as well as biological production (such as chlorophyll, which measures how much plant life is growing in the sunlit surface waters). In collaboration with the RaTS monitoring, I will be collecting samples to analyse for phytoplankton composition, as well as nutrient use (primarily silica and iron) while my colleague Sian Henley looks at the cycling of carbon and nitrogen.