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Ohio State ANET research associate David Saddler visited St. Brendan Elementary School in Hilliard, OH on November 8th. He spoke to 64 3rd grade students about identifying rocks and minerals and the structure of the Earth; a subject they had just learned about in the previous weeks. As a bonus, he also talked about the ANET project, as well as the excitement and challenges that come with research in polar environments. 

Above: David Saddler talks to students from St. Brendan Elementary School in Hilliard, OH.

Above: Students from St. Brendan Elementary School in Hilliard, OH touch a volcanic bomb from Antarctica. Volcanic bombs are larger fragments of lava ejected from a volcano during an eruption. As the warm lava fragments travel through the air, they can transform into aerodynamic forms like the football shape shown here.

Above: Students from St. Brendan Elementary School in Hilliard, OH try on extreme cold weather (ECW) gear during a visit from ANET-POLENET scientist David Saddler (middle).

From November 6th to the 8th, the 2024-2025 ANET field team met at the EarthScope GAGE facility in Boulder, CO for two and a half days of hands on training. The team practiced important field tasks such as swaping the seismic hard drive to retrieve data, installing and leveling a seismometer, and replacing GNSS antennas and electronic boards. This practical experience is vital to ensure the team can operate smoothly in Antarctica, where conditions are harsh and ground time is short. 

Above: From left to right Jim Normandeau, Erica Lucas, Bob Greschke, and Franco Sobrero working with instrumentation during the November 2024 training in Boulder, Colorado.

The 2024-2025 ANET-POLENET season is nearly here! Our field team of 6; including science team members, engineers and a mountaineer will deploy to ALE’s Union Glacier Camp for a month-long deployment. The 6-person team will meet in Boulder, CO in early November for hands on training with GNSS/GPS and seismic equipment. Thanks to the Polar Geospatial Center (PGC) at the University of Minnesota, we are currently acquiring high resolution satellite imagery for our targeted field sites for this season. This imagery gives our pilots and mountaineer an early preview of what ground conditions or hazards we may encounter at each site. Stay tuned for live updates from the field team as the season begins in December!

New results from the GNET project show the Greenland ice sheet is losing approximately 8% more ice into the sea each year than previous estimates indicated.

‘The team behind the new research said better estimates of continental rebound rates could be even more significant in estimates of ice loss from the world’s biggest ice cap, in Antarctica, but that sparse data from the remote continent made analysis difficult.’

Read the full article: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2016/sep/21/greenlands-huge-annual-ice-loss-is-even-worse-than-thought

If you would like to attend our Glacial Isostatic Adjustment Training School lectures virtually, then please follow the link to the Training School home page.

http://polenet.org/?page_id=2261

There you will find dates, lecture titles, start times and links to the webinar meeting room. Please be sure to read the helpful hints to ensure you can get the full benefit of the lectures. Attendees will be able to see the lecture slides, hear the lecturer live and also ask questions through a comment window. We look forward to your participation!

I’m back at Zuchelli station after spending about five days at Hallett Camp. We installed the VL01 GPS station the day we arrived there. Weather was nice, just a bit of snow one day, otherwise mostly sunny. It was truly spectacular scenery. I shot lots of video – great place to be flying around in a helicopter!

Mario Zuchelli Station

The helicopter at Tombstone Hill, aka VL01

It’s been a hard day’s night! We departed McMurdo around 8:00 pm and flew to Butcher Ridge in a Bell 212. The site is about () southwest of McMurdo. It’s at elevation so it can be chilly if the wind is blowing.

The scenery was great but the Butcher was not friendly. The temperature was – (-25° C) and the winds increased from 20 to 25 knots (23 to 29 mph) during the more than three hours we were on the ground. That works out to a wind chill of – (-). No wonder my fingertips still tingle! It’s hard to use tools and take notes in conditions like that – but we fixed the station. Lucky for us it had been recording data without problem even though we lost communication with it back in July.

The Butcher Ridge GPS station. Thomas, in the red parka, is replacing the meteorological sensor. The “met pack” measures atmospheric pressure, temperature, humidity, wind speed, and wind direction. We are mainly interested in the pressure, because changes in atmospheric pressure move the bedrock up and down!

I’m happy to report that our IRIS Intern Emma Myers has now arrived in Colorado from Western Washington U. and is already off to a great start on the Antarctic POLENET seismicity project. We are making good progress with the USGS NEIC so far on Antarctic seismic data queuing and software development.  Nicole is working on applying similar mentors of seismicity detection and characterization, but with data from (earthquake central) Oklahoma.

Emma Myers, Dr. Rick Aster and graduate student Nicole Hoffman working on POLENET/ANET seismic data.

Eric at South Pole on 24 Jan 2014. Amundsen-Scott station is in the background. The photo of me standing on my head doing my Atlas impersonation didn’t turn out, so I need to go back. It was relatively warm, -18 F, only a few degrees colder than Columbus, which was -11 F last night.

Wilson Nunatak GPS station maintenance, 01 Jan 2014. We stopped by here on the way back to Union Glacier after finishing work at Howard Nunataks earlier in the day.