by Gordon A. McFeters and Diane Edwards
Background Paper
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| Among the Earth's continents, Antarctica is the coldest. The driest. The
windiest. The highest (on average). The most remote. A place well described
by superlatives -- and by the slightly twisted mundane. Where Elvis sings
at supper, carpenters capture plastic spiders between outhouse windows,
and cargo sleds hang from the coffeehouse-quonset ceiling. A faraway locale
the "Frozen Chosen" who work there simply call "the ice"
-- where our sense of place and purpose became both abstract and concrete,
a common reaction to this human outpost within hostile Nature. Antarctica
also is where unique science happens, and thus we went in October 1996
to study sewage effects in this near-pristine environment. |
Diane Edwards at Ross Sea |
Moss Landing divers/scientists with
snow cat preparing to dive in a blizzard
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After eight hours crammed in the belly of a C-130 Hercules, we and dozens
of other scientists, military, and support personnel reached "the
town," McMurdo Station. The largest of three permanent U.S. Antarctic
research facilities, McMurdo sprawls on volcanic Ross Island, at the nearest-to-New
Zealand edge of a continent as large as Canada and the
U.S. combined. We'd
left the lush-green spring behind in Christchurch, where we'd each collected
piles of ECW (extreme cold weather) gear at the Antarctic program's logistics
center. We arrived at a frontier-style settlement of more than 1,000 people
living and working in a hodgepodge of quonsets, dormitories, and diesel
shops. |
| Begun in 1955, McMurdo is a cold jumble of old and new buildings, above-ground
heated sewer and power lines, carbo-loaded cafeteria fare, and a group
of can-do humans girthed against a nasty environment. Here one is struck
both by what is not here (no insects, no pets, no plants outside the greenhouse,
no elderly or children), and what is here (two-minute showers, mandatory
survival training, state-of-the-art laboratory facilities, a chapel next
to karaoke bars, dance lessons and costume parties). But the reason we
are here, nearly 24 hours in flight from Montana, is that McMurdo, despite
an admirable recycling program that ships 1,000's of tons of waste by ship
to Seattle each year, pumps chewed-but-not-treated human waste under the
Ross Sea surface ice, into adjacent Winter Quarters Bay. |
Aerial view of McMurdo Station with
active volcano Mt. Erebus in the background |
Diver entering drill hole through the dive hut |
As microbiologists, we were with the National Science Foundation-funded
S-320 project, in part designed to assess the distribution and impact of
the sewage outfall and to map the debris dumped in the Bay years earlier.
Our seven teammates were invertebrate biologists and specially cer
tified
scuba divers from the Canadian Museum of Nature in Ottawa and the Moss
Landing Marine Laboratory in California, thus an international and decidedly
multidisciplinary approach to environmental studies. Some on the team zigzagged
a submersible ROV (remote operated vehicle) equipped with video cameras
over the sea floor to film trash dumped before the NSF implemented a stringent
clean-up and recycling campaign. Others dived through holes in eight-foot-thick
ice to collect an amazing array of sea invertebrates, both for their own
research and ours. As nondivers, we did assays on the animals and bottom-sediment
samples they collected. With Antarctic drivers licenses in hand, we also
crisscrossed the frozen sea in cat-track vehicles, gathering Weddell seal
and penguin scat for related assays. We were looking for evidence of human
fecal contamination, by testing for the presence of a bacterium called
Clostridium perfringens, common in the human gut. |
| To help determine the extent of sewage-derived effects caused by McMurdo's
inhabitants, our samples and sampling sites were diverse and widespread.
Collected from October through mid-December, animals, manure, and sediment
came from sites scattered around the bay nearest McMurdo, as well as from
sites miles away near the Royal Society Mountains and the ice-open sea
edge (the distant sites were negative controls). Representative benthic
invertebrates studied included starfish (Odontaster validus), sea
squirts or tunicates (Cnemidocarpa verrucosa), urchins (Sterechinus
neumayeri), and nemertean worms (Parborlasia corrugatus). According
to the divers, under the ice here is some of the best diving in the world,
where colors and diversity of animal life astound and where mating seals
can alarm. While the rest of the team gathered samples beneath the ice,
in the laboratory we swabbed intestinal contents of invertebrates and on
our field trips we scraped
seal and penguin manure from the ice surface. |
Diane collecting seal scat |
Science Seminars Archive
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