Bunger Hills camp set up and ready for restart of the Denman Terrestrial Campaign
A remote camp in East Antarctica is being dusted off and restocked in preparation for scientists to start arriving to work on a deep field science campaign.
The Denman Terrestrial Campaign is in its third and final year, investigating the Denman Glacier system, one of the region’s fastest melting glaciers.
In the last two decades, the glacier has retreated five kilometres but little is known about what’s causing the accelerated melt.
Set-up team prepares Edgeworth David for DTC scientists
This year, 18 scientists will be based at Edgeworth David base camp at Bunger Hills, about 450 km west of Casey research station.
“The work program this year can be grouped into three different areas: biodiversity, understanding the Denman Glacier itself – its behaviour and structure – and thirdly, human impacts,” Field Leader Simon Cross said.
“The biodiversity work is terrestrial and also under the sea ice.
“The Denman Glacier work is classic glaciology, so looking at seismology, movement and what’s happening to that environment.”
The impact of humans living and working in the area is also being assessed. Permits awarded to the DTC mandate that the site is fully remediated when the scientists leave.
Some science teams will stay at Edgeworth David base camp. Others will spend short periods at more remote locations, with helicopter support.
“We’ll have a minimum of three satellite camps, one at Cape Hoadley and one or two in the Bunger hills operating different programs, and a third very light walk-in camp which will get minimal helicopter support to collect samples in the Bunger Hills,” Simon Cross said.
“They’ll run from five to ten days at a time. What’s new this time is we have a number of new teams. For about six people, this will be their first trip to Antarctica.”
Dr Sarah Thompson, a glaciologist with the Australian Antarctic Program Partnership, spent a month last season living in a satellite camp on the Shackleton Ice Shelf.
She and her team used a hot water drill to cut through 200 m of ice to find out about its structure and properties and then worked through 800 m of ocean, profiling its temperature, salinity and density.
Incredibly, the team then collected two sediment samples from the sea floor.
“It was an amazing achievement,” Dr Thompson said.
“We weren’t confident we could do it, but we were really happy when we got all the data back and the sediment cores as well.
“We’ve got a lot more information about this site now and it gives us a much better understanding of how the system behaved in the past, and the work we need to do to understand how it will behave in future.”
This season, Dr Thompson and her team will raise the height of two towers, equipped with solar panels and antennae, installed in the ice last season. They measure ice thickness, snow accumulation and changes to ice flow, and transmit the data back to Australia.
“We’re also installing new sensors that will monitor water flow through the snow so they can give us a sense of melting over the season and the length of the melt season,” Dr Thompson said.
“We’ll also drill through the ice on an epi-shelf lake, which is a freshwater lake that’s connected at one end to the ocean.
“It’ll give us a different understanding of the system but an equally important one because it’s so close to the point where the ice starts to float”.
Dr Sarah Thompson and a colleague, examining data while camping on the Shackleton Ice ShelfPhoto: Duane White
Investigating a unique environment remotely
A new project, run by Dr Jonny Stark from the Australian Antarctic Division and Securing Antarctica’s Environmental Future, will seek to find out more about biodiversity in the Bunger Hills region using remotely- operated vehicles (ROVs).
Very little is known about marine life in the target area, which is bordered by ice on all sides.
“The Bunger Hills is a unique environment because of its isolation,” Dr Stark said.
“Glaciologists suspect that it might have been isolated for 3,000 to 4,000 years, so it could be quite different to other areas.
“There's actually a population of Weddell seals that has been isolated there, possibly since the mid-Holocene.
“It’s an opportunity to look at a marine community that might be more typical of Antarctica thousands of years ago, when sections of the coast might have been more isolated”.
The ROVs – which are operated liked drones – are lowered into the sea through a hole in the ice to take video, photos and samples.
The photos are analysed back in Australia to identify the type and density of animals and plants living on the seabed.
“With climate change, there's a strong chance we'll see a lot of environmental change on the Antarctic coasts as sea ice retreats and waters warm,” Dr Stark said.
“A lot of the fauna that live there might not be able to survive in a future climate. We need to document what's there now, so we can understand potential future changes.”
When the scientists arrive, Edgeworth David will have a population of about 37 people.
Last season, the weather was kind for the first month but created very challenging conditions towards the end.
It will play a big part in how projects are managed again this time.
“The hardest part of my job is managing expectations,” Field Leader Simon Cross said.
“The other critical part is maintaining peoples’ sense of joy, the notion they’re doing positive work because it really is a challenging environment and what we want out of it is for people to leave, wanting to come back.
“We have to treat each other with real kindness and respect and and that usually gives us amazing outcomes, personally and professionally.”
The Australian Antarctic Program’s Denman Terrestrial Campaign is a major collaborative science campaign between the Australian Antarctic Division, Securing Antarctica's Environmental Future, the Australian Centre for Excellence in Antarctic Science, and the Australian Antarctic Program Partnership.
Dr Jonny Stark and his team use remotely-operated vehicles to investigate biodiversity under the icePhoto: Dr Jonny Stark and Dr Glenn Johnstone
