Temperatures fall to negative 35 degrees Celsius. Winds reach 100 miles per hour. Everything freezes including toothpaste. The sun is up for 24 hours a day. The nearest medical clinic is 400 miles away. And the nearest bathroom is a wooden box with a trash bag that says, ‘Caution: poop.’
The only living beings are a team of Boston University professors and students. The landscape of East Antarctica is even devoid of ice, and a little-studied but rich history lies beneath the scientists’ feet.
A team of Boston University affiliates camped out in the Southern Victoria Lands’ Dry Valleys of East Antarctica for three summer months in 2002, studying the Earth’s surface. What they found proved to be revolutionary the oldest fossil glacier ice in the world, dated 8.1 million years old, and volcanic ash during the Quaternary Pliocene-Miocene periods, spanning from 1 to 8 million years ago.
This new research has produced three major revelations, including the possible effects of global warming and the discovery of moss perfectly preserved in the ice that scientists hope to bring back to life.
College of Arts and Sciences Associate Professor of Earth Sciences David Marchant, has been traveling to the Dry Valleys for 17 years to gather evidence for his Stablist Theory.
Marchant’s Stablist Theory says that East Antarctica has cold-based glaciers that is, he believes the ice sheet has remained relatively secure for the past 10 million years and has not melted even in spite of increased temperatures.
Marchant’s new research he says discredits some glacial dynamists’ theories that Antarctica’s ice sheets are melting, and it allays some environmentalists’ fears that global warming will cause rising sea levels. Some worry that increased levels of carbon dioxide from global warming and higher air temperatures could cause Antarctica, the largest ice mass on earth, to melt, flooding sea levels.
If West Antarctica were to melt today, sea level would rise six meters, according to Marchant. And if East Antarctica were to melt, sea levels would spike up to 60 meters enough to drown the eastern seaboard and its cities, he said.
Based on millions-of-years-old evidence preserved by Antarctica’s cold, dry climate, Marchant’s research indicates that massive melting is unlikely. He and his colleagues drilled into the ancient ice and found preserved air bubbles of carbon dioxide from 1 to 8 million years ago, and those bubbles showed carbon dioxide levels twice as high as current levels.
If the greenhouse effect continues to raise global temperatures, in a few centuries temperatures will reach those experienced in the Pliocene period. Yet the scientists found that East Antarctic ice has remained intact and did not melt during the period of intense heat and carbon dioxide levels.
‘If the ice sheet didn’t melt then, it’s unlikely to melt in the future,’ Marchant said.
Instead of the ice sheets in East Antarctica melting, the blocks survived and expanded, contrary to what many scientists expected, Marchant said.
He predicts that if temperatures rose five to eight degrees, then the East Antarctic ice on top of bedrock would expand, while the West Antarctic ice in contact with the ocean could melt with even a half of a degree change in water temperature.
Marchant said nevertheless, ‘The new evidence doesn’t say anything about dramatic sea change, but it does begin to remove uncertainty about the behavior of the East Antarctic ice sheet due to CO2 emissions.’
Recently, another unexpected discovery came from the collaboration of Marchant and Dr. James Head of Brown University, an expert in Mars geology. They theorized the passage of cold-based glaciers in the Dry Valleys mirrors Mars’s surface. Antarctic cold-based glaciers, in the absence of water, leave polygon-patterned sediments different from those found in the Northern Hemisphere.
The sediments that fall on top of southeast Antarctic glaciers are associated with similar patterns of Mars, Marchant said.
From Mars’ moraine ridges (sediment near lava flows), sublimation till (buried ice beneath debris), and lobe (rock glaciers), Marchant and Head deduced Mars once had a dynamic hydrogeology of ice moving from its poles to its tropics as the axis tilt changed. Where there is the advance and retreat of glaciers, there is the possibility of life, said Marchant.
The team also studied life in extreme environments, searching for the presence of freeze-dried microbes, bacteria and fungus.
‘Ancient ice is a repository for dry organic remains,’ said Marchant.
Research assistant and Antarctica team member Adam Lewis, a graduate in the School of Arts and Sciences, found moss entombed in sediment dated 15 million years old.
‘It’s just little weeds,’ said Lewis. ‘This might not seem like a big deal, but no one has ever seen this before. [In the Dry Valleys] no one has ever found any plant fossil. These were the very last things that were able to survive.’
Biologists are testing the DNA and RNA of this first glacial fossilized moss to see if it matches modern plant life. Lewis is also interested in reviving the ancient moss and other seeds.
‘Algae is so simple,’ he said. ‘You could bring it back to life. There’s a small chance it might work.’
According to Marchant, ‘It’s not as exciting as bringing dinosaurs back to life, but if you’ve got things frozen for millions of years and they’re viable, then that’s interesting.’
Marchant’s work has grabbed the attention of The New York Times, Popular Science, Time Magazine and garnered recruitment offers from NASA.
Back in the early 1990s, ‘I was one of three guys who believed that the East Antarctic ice sheets were stable,’ said Marchant, ‘It’s gratifying to finally see the work gaining recognition.’
Marchant said he plans to return to Antarctica and continue his research. He encourages students majoring in earth sciences to seek out these trips to Antarctica. But as Dr. Lewis warns, ‘It’s hard physical labor. But there’s no other place on the planet that looks like this. You literally would have to go to Mars to find anything that looks like this. It’s not your everyday trip.’
Two or three BU undergraduates accompany Marchant each year.
‘The most interesting questions are the most fundamental,’ said Marchant, ‘And to ask those big questions it starts with a single pick in hand.’