Over The Horizon

Cold Summer for Students

Two Otago students have won the inaugural Sir Robin Irvine Antarctic Scholarship, named in honour of a former Otago University Vice Chancellor. The scholarships, funded by Antarctica New Zealand, are designed to encourage young scientists into the field of Antarctic research, a cause championed by Sir Robin before his death last year while chairman of Antarctica New Zealand's board of directors.

The scholarships, worth $10,000 over two years plus logistical support for research conducted in Antarctica, have gone to PhD students Stephen Read and Brent Sinclair.

Read plans to visit remote areas of the Transantarctic Mountains to examine a suite of 500 million year old rocks and collect samples for sophisticated chemical analysis.

"These sites provide extremely valuable opportunities to understand magmatic and tectonic processes in plate margin environments worldwide," Read says.

His results are expected to help unravel the history of movement of the earth's crustal plates around the time that the rocks were formed, then cooled from their molten state. He will spend five weeks in the mountains with three other Otago University scientists later this year.

Sinclair will spend time on his hands and knees near a penguin colony on the northern tip of Ross Island. He will be examining tiny invertebrate animals which live among mosses and lichens, dependent on brief summer melt water from glaciers. His research will focus on how these animals survive such low temperatures and any possible effects of climate change on their populations. It will involve technologies ranging from a computer-controlled cooling system to plastic cloches, familiar to spring-time gardeners.

"The cold Antarctic environment is very harsh for terrestrial invertebrates. Not only do they have to survive the cold, but they have to deal with a total lack of liquid water for more than half the year. Any change in the environment is going to have an enormous effect on the biology of these animals," Sinclair says.

In addition to these awards, the $10,000 Kelly Tarlton's Antarctic Scholarship went to Auckland University masters student Lara Wilcocks, who will study wave motion in sea ice, an important factor in understanding climate change in the Antarctic. The annual formation of sea ice doubles the size of continental Antarctica and affects ocean circulation, the exchange of gases like carbon dioxide, and temperature on a global scale.

"Ocean wave energy travelling through the sea ice causes its break up, but exactly how this occurs is not well understood," Wilcocks says.

She will work for five weeks from a containerised camp on the sea ice north of Scott Base, part of an international team led by scientists from Industrial Research Limited and New Zealand universities.