"GPS" or "How to put the rocks back where you found them"

Two major things happened today:

1) This morning we had our environmental training. Basically, this meant listening to PowerPoint presentations and watching NSF-produced videos for an hour and a half. The Dry Valleys have a very sensitive ecosystem and are therefore considered an Antarctic Sprecially Managed Area or ASMA. A lot of measures are in place to protect them, for example extra-sensitive spill precaution measures and reporting procedures and delineations around camps where impact is localized. Because we are going to very remote areas of the Dry Valleys - including sites very near the Linneaus Terrace Anarctic Specially Protected Area (or ASPA) - we need to take even more special precautions such as replacing any rocks we moving to anchor tents; this is the ultimate experience in Leave No Trace camping. See the map below for a view of the area - we'll be in the Asgard Range, the Olympus Range, and up north of the extent of this map.

Dry Valleys ASMA Map - Taylor and Wright Valleys

2) GPS (Global Positioning System) training was the second order of the day. We will need to know the location of the samples we take not only so we can write an environmental impact report, but also to properly calculate the ages of the samples we take. (Cosmic rays attenuate as they pass through the atmosphere, so the higher a sample is the higher a production rate it will have - a value essential for calculating a sample's exposure age.) We learned a bit about GPS theory, got a tutorial on the hardware and software we'll be working with, and then took the equipment outside to play around with it a bit to make sure we understood everything. 

Jenny spent some time walking around to test our roving GPS unit. On the plywood box in the foreground you can see our base station and it's accomanying solar panels.

The high-resolution GPS equipment down here is managed by an NSF sposored group (UNAVCO), who also does all the training for the units. We will be using differential GPS - by comparing signals from a roving unit and a base station errors can be reduced and we'll be getting signals with accuracy on the centimeter scale. By a great coincidence, the same person who taught us today was up in Alaska when I participated in the Juneau Icefield Research Program, training us to use a similar system. Training scientists and conducting surveys in Greenland, Alaska, and Antarctica - sounds like a job I could handle!

Tomorrow Jenny and I will be off to Snowcraft 1, also known as Happy Camper School, which will include our first night outside a building in Antarctica. Wish us luck!