Not enough posts.

Been a busy week as we head towards Christmas hell. While everyone else seems to be winding down for the holidays, if you are an Antarctic scientist the opposite occurs! We now have less than a month before we ship out for the first season of the DryVER (Dry Valley Environmental Resiliance) project. As its our first year doing the human impact studies on various land surfaces, there is lots of tinkering with our methodology and how we do things.

This morning I've been out at Sumner Beach running though our field sampling methodology. We are trying to quantify the changes in soil compaction and surface disruption when someone walks across a range of land surfaces.

In this photo are three different surface types we are interested in. 1) Above the tape measure is undisturbed sediment, 2) just below the tape is a trail that is the accumulation of me walking over it 20 times and 3) below that are three individual footprints. The white discs are target markers for the high resolution SfM photography I am doing (I've already talked about this technique in a previous post). We are repeating this a number of times within a defined geomorphic unit (i.e. fluvial channel, lake or glacial sediments etc).

If you think that the beach is a crap proxy for Antarctica, heres a photo of the dune field in Victoria Valley!

Lower Victoria Valley dune field.  Photo by Warren Dickinson. Antarctica New Zealand Pictorial Collections (2015)

I'll explain more about the DryVER project this week ( I promise!) and the role that I play in it.