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Morgan-Kiss Lab

The Wrap Up of TLICE

1/27/2020

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The last few days the team has been busy wrapping up our transplant experiment, TLICE. This involved us going out to our hole in the polar haven, (a hut in the middle of the ice to protect us from the elements) and to the moat to pull up the frames that have our transplanted microbes in dialysis bags, or sausages as Parnell calls them, attached. After retrieving the sausages, we slice them open to get their water and then filter that water for various analysis such as DNA, chlorophyll content, and carbon and nutrient content. Additionally Rachael has started a new experiment, currently known as MMIC (spoken as mimic) where she and her colleague, Ian Hawes, takes frozen mat samples and thaws them in a containers stored in the lake to see if these are a major source of nutrients! We are quite excited to see how this turns out when we pull this experiment out on Monday!
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January 20, 2020 Day Trip

1/23/2020

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I was lucky enough to tag along on a day trip with two colleagues to three beautiful sites in the dry valleys, which I don’t usually have an opportunity to visit in a neighboring valley (Wright Valley) from Taylor Valley, where our study lakes are located.
We began our day flying to the beautiful Lake Brownworth, a rarely visited lake with a very thick ice cover, which receives constant input from a neighboring glacier in the form of large ice blocks. There we began our day of soil sampling – my colleagues are trying to standardize a simple way to monitor bacteria in soils from different sites.
Next, we stopped at a site above Lake Vanda, a large deep lake that has a warm bottom because the transparency of the ice allows light to penetrate and warm the waters. We found an interesting “ventifact”, which are rock formations shaped by the winds over thousands of years. We thought this one resembled the Star Wars character, Jaba the Hut.
Saving the best for last, we flew to one of my bucket list places, the Labyrinth, a large part of the dry valleys that contains deeply scoured channels and canyons. It is a mythical place with amazing rock formations, which you can’t find anywhere else in the dry valleys. We flew home on the “highway” which is a helicopter route through the mountains.
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Polar deserts could provide first look at climate change effects in Antarctica. By Susan Meikle, university news and communications

1/14/2020

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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

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The Little Guys in the Valley

1/14/2020

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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!

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December 28, 2019. Field Work.

1/10/2020

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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

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December 28, 2020 Field work at Lake Bonney

1/9/2020

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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.

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Preparing for the Field, December 20, 2019

1/2/2020

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After Arriving to Antarctica there is much we must do! Following our trip with Ivan we check in and get keys to a dormitory style room where we stay while in town, usually with one other roommate. Over the next few days we have a variety of tasks such as inventorying our camping gear and packing it at the Byrd Field Center and getting trained on some basic camping skills such as lighting a stove and setting up a tent. Usually we have a little time for fun still however, such as taking a hike up a nearby geological structure known as Observation Hill, or Ob Hill for short. This place gives an awesome view of the surrounding landscape and holds a memorial cross for Robert Falcon Scott and his team of scientific explorers, who perished while collecting samples from the area in 1912. Parnell also got a chance to visit Scott’s hut, where his team staged some of their expeditions.
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McMurdo Bound December 19, 2019

1/2/2020

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After many failed attempts to use the slow internet in Antarctica to post our first blog from the field, I gave up….. and asked for help. Abby Mills, a grad student in our lab, who is back in Oxford and DOES have good access to the internet has agreed to post our blog posts for us. So sorry for the delay, but hopefully we’ll start doing regular blogs again now.
So we boarded a C-130 Hercules to McMurdo Station on Thursday December 19th – sometimes the planes are forced to “boomerang” which means after flying for 5 hrs, the weather conditions are too extreme for landing in Antarctica on the sea ice runway and we need to turn around and fly back to Christchurch. Spoiler alert – we made it on our first attempt! You can see from the photos that it was a PACKED flight – we were literally sardines cozied in together in all our ECW gear and lots of other cargo.
After 8 hours flight time, we successfully touched down in McMurdo on Phoenix Runway. You can see Parnell setting foot on Antarctica “soil” (sea ice) for the first time. “One small step for mankind, one giant step for Parnell…..” Shortly after deplaning, we were whisked away by “Ivan the Terrabus”, a very famous vehicle which shuttles Antarctica visitors to and from the base. Many interesting songs have been written about Ivan….The last photo is our plane heading back to Christchurch to get ready for the next transport.
Next blog ….. preparations in McMurdo and out to the field!
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Day 4 - Antarctica Bound

12/18/2019

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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!

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Day 3: Successful arrival in Christchurch New Zealand

12/17/2019

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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. 

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    Rachael Morgan-Kiss
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    Associate Professor, Department of Microbiology
    ​Miami University

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