The Limno Run

The video above was taken around 5:30 a.m. in the Polar Haven on the lake. Amy, Karen, and Anna (who traded camps with Tristy) sampled their water column at varying depths to obtain microorganisms from the liquid water beneath the ice. This sampling is something the MCM-LTER has been doing for several years, and it is now gamely known as “the limno run.” The heavy gray bottle that drops into the water and then gets winched up is called a Niskine. The Niskine collects the water sample. Both ends of the Niskie are open, and when it reaches the correct depth someone drops a weight down the line, which they call “the messenger.” Ingeniously the messenger impacts a lever on the Niskine underwater, which snaps both ends shut, locking in the water sample at the desired depth. After they winch up the Niskine, the water sample is drained into various bottles where different chemicals and radio isotopes are added to eventually test how much carbon the organisms use. They drop the Niskine in fourteen times. Afterwards they process and filter the samples in the lab buildings in camp.

I didn’t get much sleep last night. After going to bed around midnight, I woke up to the sound of the lake ice popping, cracking and booming at 3:30 a.m., then followed the beekers (scientists) out to the Polar Haven an hour later. I peered out of the circle entry of my Scott tent and saw a tinted rose smear aglow in the halflight of the austral autumn sky. Two nights ago was the first real sunset we could see from camp, and what I was looking at at 3:30 was an early dawn. At this point the sun goes below the horizon for a few hours, but not far enough below to cast us in darkness yet. Each day we’ll lose about fifteen minutes of daylight, lengthening the “night” and eventually giving us a lot of dark. We were sitting around imagining out loud how the night sky will appear in a few weeks, from the middle of a polar desert with no interference or light pollution. Tony, who has wintered-over four times, remarked that even from outside McMurdo the glow from town occupies part of the sky.

I am continually stunned at the deceptive scale of this place. A combination of extraordinarily clear, dry, cold air and perpetual low-angle sunlight renders the limited points of reference–tiny buildings or massive glaciers and mountains–flat and unusually approachable. When the light hits the face of a glacier several miles distant, you can still see an incredible amount of detail on its surface as well as its entire mass and form, with no obstructions. Yet to hike there would take all day. The object feels close, yet the vastness of what you see is not lost. How is this different than looking out at Manhattan Island, stretching across the horizon on a crisp winter day or night? New York’s hazy air and light, even with no human pollution, is far more softening. Even from a rooftop, or from a vantage like Sunset Park, the view terminates in a building, a hill with buildings on it, or possibly one more natural feature like the palisades, before engaging the horizon. I know it sounds like an exaggeration, but here it feels the only inhibition to seeing further is simply the curve of the planet. Or is my view of Manhattan just something I know too well?

It could also be about visual memory and what makes us feel comfortable–we are reoriented, if not disoriented, in a landscape so unfamiliar. After only being here a few days, it is hard not to imagine what the experience of the first people on other planets will be. This valley is said to be the closest Earth analog to Mars, and although that is from a practical scientific and environmental perspective–the Mars rover was tested here and next year an autonomous submersible will enter one of these lakes as a testing ground for the ocean of Jupiter’s Europa–there are seemingly deeper psychological implications about how we perceive our surroundings in a place so alien.

Then again, last night’s dinner was salmon, and we had tura melts for lunch and bagels for breakfast. We tell stories, radio town and other camps, and go online frequently–plenty of blood is flowing to this extremity of Earth–so it is often sort of normal. It is definitely premature for me to really describe this place with any insight, but the profound sense of space here seems like a product of our minds stretching to fill it. From our small vantage the valley’s boundaries are humongous but tangible, at least sort of explaining the awe.