Getting ready

Our field season officially kicks off on Sunday. The team consists of myself, two graduate students, Amanda Kelley and Isaac Sleadd, and a field technician, Allison Barden. We take a commercial flight from LAX to Christchurch, New Zealand. There, we gear up at the clothing distribution center, which is operated by the United States Antarctic Program (USAP). The next day, the weather in Antarctica permitting, we take a US Air National Guard flight down to the ice. We will be at McMurdo Station on Ross Island, at the edge of the Ross Ice Shelf, for three months. During our field season, we catch the cold-adapted fishes common to McMurdo Sound and take them into the lab facilities to run our experiments. We are interested in understanding the impact of elevated temperature on the biology of these extremely environmentally sensitive species.