Welcome

Hello everyone! My name is Jenny Whitten and I’m a graduate student traveling to Antarctica to do research with two colleagues, Kate Swanger (University of Massachusetts) and Jen Lamp (Boston University). We will be working in the McMurdo Dry Valleys to understand local climate change over the last few million years. To accomplish this goal we will be collecting rock samples and making measurements of rock properties.

The McMurdo Dry Valleys are a good place to study climate change because they are considered to be a polar desert. It is very cold (average temperature is -19ºC) and there is very little precipitation, meaning that the rocks erode very slowly. This slow erosion means the landscape does not change much, preserving a lot of important information in the geology.

Landsat 7 image of McMurdo Dry Valleys. Inset shows climate zones: Coastal thaw zone (CTA) in blue, Inland mixed zone (IMZ) in green and the stable upland zone (SUZ) in yellow. See Marchant and Head (2007) Icarus for more details.

In addition to studying climate change on Earth, the McMurdo Dry Valleys can be studied to better understand polar processes observed on Mars today. The reason we can use the McMurdo Dry Valleys as an analog for Mars is the weather. The valleys are very cold and dry, similar to conditions on Mars today. Similar climates allow scientists to extrapolate their observations and experiments and say what is observed on Earth may be occurring on Mars. Researchers have investigated features in the McMurdo Dry Valleys to compare with martian gullies, glaciers, patterned ground, etc. There is so much possibility in the McMurdo Day Valleys!

Over the next month or two I’ll be adding posts to further explain the research we are doing, how we can use the Dry Valleys as an analog for Mar, as well as other interesting geology we encounter.