Someone once told me you paint about where you’ll go next. I painted the experience first—frozen and floating in a beautiful overload of information—dense, emergent, optical, big. I didn’t know I would go to Antarctica at the time. That was just last year, before I came to know a small yellow tent in a remote field camp in Antarctica’s Taylor Valley as home for two months.
The McMurdo Dry Valleys are thirty minutes by helicopter from McMurdo Station, the nearest settlement, and 2,200 miles south of New Zealand. They are said to be the closest Earth environment to Mars. No significant precipitation or humidity, the largest land life form is a worm half the size of a grain of rice. In 1958 a surveyor spotted a boot track that could only have been left by Scott’s Discovery expedition 50 years earlier. Several glaciers draw into the Valleys but are held in check by their own evaporation as they advance. Which is to say they go from solid ice to vapor when the wind whips across them.
When the occasional seal or penguin wanders into the valleys from the sea and dies, the body remains intact for centuries. Werner Herzog, an NSF Artist Award recipient last season, caught one of these mysterious penguin moments on film, training his camera on a poor creature as it waddled away from its colony on the beach, and headed inland towards the Dry Valleys and its death. But some deaths here are temporary. A microbe found in Taylor Valley was re-animated after being frozen in lake ice for 2,800 years.
Even though the Dry Valleys are within a penguin’s death march from icy McMurdo Sound, they are an “ice free” landscape—a row of valleys scraped clean from the mile-thick dome of ice that encases 98% of the continent—looking somewhat like Nevada, but with glaciers oozing in from above. Because this is the coldest, driest, windiest place on Earth, free of human impact, the rocky surface and ancient life forms of the Dry Valleys are preserved virtually untouched for millennia. Even more rare, a series of hypersaline lakes lie in the valleys—the only perennial ice-covered lakes on the surface of Antarctica—that support what has been called the simplest ecosystem on Earth. Examining this environment, scientists find important data sets on climate change, examples of early Earth life forms still in their prehistoric ecosystems, and the signature characteristics of where life might be found on other planets.
Previously, support for research in these camps was provided only during the austral summer, leaving a significant gap in understanding about how the small subjects of this extreme environment manage to live, feed, and reproduce despite the four-month disappearance of the sun. This year and for the first time, researchers will stay in camp two months longer than usual–to see what happens when the sun goes down. Daily temperatures drop below zero degrees Fahrenheit after February, and daylight recedes from 24 hours of sun to total darkness in a matter of weeks.
From February to April I will travel to Antarctica and the McMurdo Dry Valleys field camps. Based at field camps in Taylor Valley, I will describe my journey and the first-ever extended field season in the Dry Valleys. Research infrastructure at this location provides an opportunity to observe a landscape that feels both fierce and fragile. The focus of my project will be the rich raw material of the imagination that I am confident will grow out of the vast emptiness of this place.
