Check out this wonderful article about our 2019-2020 field season.
https://www.miamioh.edu/news/top-stories/2020/01/rachael-morgan-kiss-20th-year-antarctic-research.html

Over the past few days Rachael and Parnell have been collecting samples to perform microscopy on. In preparation, we have stained these organisms so that certain parts of them, such as chitin, a common substance found in fungi, and peptidoglycan, a bacteria specific substance, will create a green color. Using a technique known as epifluorescence, we can then look at the shining stain (shown as green in the images) to see the outline of different microbes, akin to looking at a glowstick in a dark room. In the images you can also see red fluorescence, which comes from chlorophyll, which is commonly contained in organisms such as cyanobacteria and algae.
With microscopy, several interesting organisms have been found, including some large ciliates and fungi parasitizing algae. We plan to take these organisms back home to get even more in depth, high quality pictures to better understand the physical interactions of these organisms!

The Team has arrived at Lake Fryxell! After setting up our tents and getting organized we all got to work. We have two major experiments here to do at Lake Fryxell. One is called SLIME, short for Soil-Lake Inundation Moat Experiment, and the other is called TLICE, Transplant Lake Integrated Connectivity Experiment. SLIME is an experiment that tests the changes to life that live in the lakes and soils, as well as the moat, which is a ring of liquid water that forms around the ice-covered lake in the summer months. This experiment largely involves drilling holes and sampling water at different regions of the lake and its shore, and examining how the abiotic, or unliving factors such as dryness, light levels, nutrient levels, etc. change in correlation to biotic factors, such as algae and fungi populations rising or falling. TLICE is an experiment that involves transplanting, as the name suggests, water from one region of the lake to another. We facilitate this by collecting water at the depths and regions we want and placing them in dialysis bags, which are pieces of plastic with really, really small holes that allow nutrients and small particles to escape and enter, but traps the microbes inside and then attaching these bags to pvc pipe frames. By placing these transplants in different regions, we can see how microbes will survive the disturbances caused by climate change, such as increased water levels or exposure to other microbes that they were normally isolated from due to ice cover or other physical barriers.
                  So far, the team, consisting of Shasten Sherwell, Parnell Sheldon, and Rachael Morgan-Kiss has completed half of our SLIME experiment and has started the incubation of our TLICE experiment. In the coming weeks we will take the frames holding our transplants out of the lake and collect DNA and other info to see how the populations have been affected

We started our field work at Lake Bonney, the furthest of the McMurdo LTER lakes from the coast. We travelled in a very packed Bell 412 helicopter and landed on the shores of east lobe Lake Bonney on a beautiful sunny day.

Living and working in the dry valley field camps: The McMurdo Dry Valleys has several “permanent camps” which are generally not staffed but are available for scientist to live and work. The field camps are generally only populated by scientists in the summertime. They are relatively primitive, but provide a large Jamesway for cooking and 1-3 small labs for our instruments and processing our samples. Power is provided by modern solar panel systems. Water is provided by calving glaciers or chipping ice from the lakes.
Science at Lake Bonney: We conduct two major activities at the lakes: i) sampling the under-ice communities in the water column, and ii) stabilizing lake water samples for later analyses back in our laboratories at Miami University. At Lake Bonney this year, Parnell and Rachael collected water from under the iced as well as in the open water moats for two projects i) Parnell’s research on aquatic fungi in the McMurdo lake, and ii) concentrating lake water microbes and algae for a Microbial Ecology teaching laboratory which we will be conducting when we get home in February.
Packing up and moving on: after a week at Lake Bonney, we move camps to Lake Fryxell. There we will join another LTER group and collaborate with them to combine our lake/moat samples with their science on the benthic (bottom) communities. The benthic work requires diving in dry suits under the permanent ice cover to gain access to luxuriant microbial mats which flourish on the bottom of the lakes where light is available.

Ice flight day! We were picked up at our hotels at 5:45 am to prepare for a 9 am flight. In order to be allowed on the cargo plane (a C-130), you need to be wearing all your ECW gear which feels pretty strange since it's a beautiful summer day in Christchurch. All our baggage is checked except for a small carry-on. Ear protection is important on the cargo planes - you are basically trapped in a noisy, metal tube for 8 hours ( or longer if we "boomerang"). Boomerang means the crew decided the weather isn't safe for landing in Antarctica, and they turn around and go back. If you're sleeping, you might land in New Zealand again and be very confused by the sheep and grass!

After >24 hours of commercial airlines, team protist successfully arrived in Christchurch, NZ.  We have a day and a half to recuperate, enjoy the food and sights of Christchurch, and most importantly, prepare our scientific and cold weather gear for the "ice flight". 

We were a bit nervous that one of our science cases was missing, but Parnell finally spied it as one of the last items on the carousel.