diatoms rule!

Thurs 14 Jan 2010

This morning our regularly scheduled lecture was postponed and the Sat evening participant talks took the place of the lecture. Saturday evening needed to be freed up because we are going to have a Station-wide lecture by the famous geologist/glaciologist, Dr. Charlie Bentley. This is his 7^th decade on the Antarctic continent, and his ice core drilling project has uncovered some pretty big science. More on him after his lecture on Saturday. Just one quick anecdote though, Josh Osterberg’s, a participant in the course (he is just about finished with his PhD at Duke University), great grandfather was Bud Waite. Bud Waite was a radio operator at Byrd Station (this is a U.S. Station that was built during the International Geophysical Year in 1956, 1400 km from McMurdo Station) in the early 1930’s. He developed the technology of using radio waves to determine the depth of the ice, and this advancement is what Dr. Charlie Bentley built his long life of work on. Kind of a cool course connection to the past.

I spent the rest of the day on anchor ice research. We are trying to build on the work of Dr. Paul Dayton and others to try to better understand how this ice interacts with different biological structures: sponges, sea anemones, sea urchins, algae…  One of our 4 experiments is done in a small tank (the earlier pictures of anchor ice on the urchin spine and just alone were taken in this set up) and we are trying to get a lot of replication of each type of tissue so we can know for sure that what we think we are discovering is real. For these experiments (in a general, one sentence explanation) we quantify the behavior of the growing/nucleating ice crystal (does it nucleate on the tissue, pass through the tissue, freeze onto the tissue and not nucleate, etc.) on each type of tissue.

My student talk was tonight in our evening course meeting, and the 5 of us presenting in this “mini-symposium” came from 4 countries: France, Italy, China, and the U.S. Pretty cool stuff! I think there are actually only 8 U.S. citizens of the 25 of us (but 12 are from U.S. institutions).  It is super interesting to learn about the research that everyone else is involved with back at their home institutions. Dr. Mario De Stefano is research faculty at The 2nd University of Naples and he studies diatoms and such. What is cool is that for 2 years in a row, images he took of diatoms won first place in the photography category of the International Science and Engineering Visualization Challenge. This is the only time the same person has won twice (MArio is AMAZING!). Awards are given annually by the National Science Foundation and the journal Science for images that employ modern technology to visualize complex scientific topics. This is the website where you can read about the image (and his 2nd win has not yet been officially announced so shhhhh).

http://www.nsf.gov/news/special_reports/scivis/winners_2008.jsp

Here is the picture Mario took for the 2008 contest. It is titled "The Glass Forest."

And the rest of the night, what was left of it, was spent relaxing with several of these incredible people that continue to inspire me with their knowledge, perspective, humor, and love of life and discovery.