The Antarctic environment is particularly harsh, but recent studies suggest that the absence of significant amounts of liquid water allow landscapes to be preserved for significantly longer than found elsewhere on Earth, and indeed longer than previously thought. The present study is designed to establish, over a relatively long timescale for human activity (~50 years), the effects of chemical and physical weathering on naturally occuring materials in many different microenvironments in the Antarctic ice-free valleys.
Eleven sites were established ten years ago by deploying over 6000 individual samples of well characterized rock materials ranging in physical properties from soft non-welded pyroclastic tuff to extremely hard, fine-grained dolerite and coarse-grained granite. Samples were deployed on racks above the surface, on the surface, and beneath the surface, to accumulate the effects of chemical and physical processes over many years. Included are 2.5 cm diameter, 0.5 thick disks of rocks deployed at 7, 14, 21, 35, and 70 cm above the surface and facing N, E, S, and W, 8 cm cubes, and 5 cm long by 2.5 cm diameter cylinders.
Samples have been returned after one year exposure and five years exposure. The purpose of this year's effort was to recover materials that have been exposed for ten years. Samples remain in place that can be recovered later, nominally after 15, 20, 30, 40, and 50 years.
This research is supported by the National Science Foundation's Antarctic Program.
All of the material here was captured by M.C. Malin during his fieldwork at McMurdo and environs in December 1993 and January 1994. Both video and still frames were recorded using a Sony Hi8 video camera and digitized using a video capture board in an Apple Macintosh. The frames were then transferred to a Sun for compression using the Berkeley MPEG encoder. All of this processing was done at McMurdo. The final products were then sent via the Internet to MSSS, where they were assembled in HTML form and put on our WWW server.
This process demonstrates that the most remote places on Earth are now within easy reach of the Internet. It also shows that there is much work to be done -- for example, we had a *lot* of trouble getting the MPEG conversion to work, and it shows in lots of glitches in the movies.
These two MPEG segments were sent by Dr. Malin shortly after he and his assistant M. Ravine arrived in Antarctica. The first (1.6 Mbytes) shows their arrival and visit to the first sample site via helicopter; the second (1.7 Mbytes) shows their work at that site and return.
These pages contain various still images and video clips sent back from McMurdo during the 1993-1994 mission.
Mike Caplinger (mc@msss.com)