Hugh Ducklow performing a bacterial experiment with scientists

In an interview at Columbia University, Hugh Ducklow discusses his experience as leading scientist of the Palmer LTER Project. Behind a calm and collected face, Hugh reveals that he had been working collaboratively with the LTER crew for 18 hours a day for each of the 30 days of the trip while managing his own individual research.

While the LTER Project involves significant research at the molecular level, heavy research is emphasized on the Adélie penguins as their population has declined by 80% since 1975. One of the projects Ducklow had managed involved scientists continuing research of the Canyon Hypothesis. The Canyon Hypothesis, which Ducklow had also co-authored, suggests that many groups of Adélie penguins have chosen particular canyons that provide some benefit to the penguins; what benefits specifically, however, is still in question.

“We have no idea why the penguins are perched on the side of this cliff like they are. But it’s hard for the people to get up there. It’s harder for the people than the penguins to do it, actually,” Ducklow says.

Penguin biologist on Charcot Island

During a trip to Charcot Island, Hugh waited anxiously with several other scientists for members of the crew, called birders, who were sent to collect data from the penguins residing among the cliffs.

Collecting this data presented several challenges. The birders had to be sent out on a separate boat, as large glaciers prevented the main ship from going too close to Charcot.  Once there, the birders climbed rocky cliffs for miles before finally reaching the penguin colony and taking samples and data of the penguins, one by one. Meanwhile, Ducklow and his crew remained in contact with the birders by radio.

The bottom line is that Ducklow and the team are determined to understand the micro and macro elements of their research to help shape the future of climate change. Ducklow notes, with urgency:

“We’ve got some big puzzles to solve. We want to know why Antarctica is warming. We want to know why America as a civilization won’t wake up and take climate change seriously. We want to solve the puzzle of how we’re going to keep this planet surviving for the next hundred years.”

No one had ever looked more comfortable in someone else’s office than Oscar Schofield.  Sitting in front of the camera across from me in worn out jeans and a floral, Hawaiian-print shirt, he seemed more like a weather-beaten sailor on shore-leave than he did a Rutgers professor and one of the world’s premiere oceanographers.  However over the course of our interview, Oscar would explain that the two are not mutually exclusive.

This past winter Oscar embarked on a three month research voyage to a legendary facility known as Palmer Station: a fully-outfitted scientific research laboratory in one of the harshest, most remote locations on the planet – Antarctica.  For those working in marine and climate sciences, Palmer Station is the Holy Grail – some will spend their entire careers preparing, just to get out there for a couple months, if that.  Oscar casually refers to it “a summer camp for nerds” – it was a trip he had taken many times before, and is likely to take many times again.

Oscar spoke to us in depth about the life of a scientist at Palmer Station – with a total capacity of around 30 people during the summer months, including scientists and support staff, the Palmer family is closely knit to say the least.  Until the moment they go to bed, from the moment they wake up they are working non-stop, and without a sunrise or sunset in the Antarctic Circle they can work for a long time.  Oscar even tells us that in the “Wild West” days of Palmer, back in the 70s, there were incidents of people losing their minds and trying to kill their fellow scientists. These days though everyone must submit to psychological evaluations before getting the confirmation to go to Palmer, something that Oscars says, in his offhand way, “is probably a good thing.”

Yet in those rare moments of free time, Oscar tells us you get to see just how much of a shipboard, sailor-culture lifestyle these scientists down at the station really live.  There were people who’d try their hand at whittling and scrimshaw – the intricacy in some of these carvings were incredible — and even some who’d go boating, cross-country skiing, and crevassing through the glaciers.

However, through all the work, all the jokes, and all the globally significant climate research taking place in Antarctica’s Palmer Station, being away from his family in New Jersey clearly takes the hardest toll on Oscar.  Still they support him, because they know Oscar is going to continue sailing down to the bottom of the Earth to continue his research.  No matter what.

The research for a physical oceanographer in the West Antarctic Peninsula (W.A.P.) is a lot more complicated than just simply acknowledging that sea ice is melting. For ocean scientist Sharon Stammerjohn, who – like most of the researchers of the LTER – has been visiting Palmer Station since her graduate studies, the complications of climate change and sea ice have been visible throughout her entire professional lifetime. The West Antarctic winter season has grown 90 days shorter since the beginning of the LTER’s recordings, turning up the heat on physical oceanographers like Sharon who stay readily on their toes to collect satellite data of Antarctic ice mass.

In an interview with Film Bureau staff members Steve Holloway and Ryan Joseph at the Institute of Marine and Coastal Sciences, Sharon describes the universal sentiment that oceanographers share while studying the dramatically changing sea ice of the WAP. “It’s shocking,” Sharon says. “It’s hard to comprehend that a system is changing as fast as it’s changing.”

Sharon’s research at the Palmer LTER and the Ross Sea represents a larger effort that physical oceanographers are now making to address climate change in the world’s fastest winter warming place. In working in conjunction with other LTER specialists, including biologists like Oscar Schofield, Sharon not only studies the spatial changes of Antarctic sea ice that an ordinary physical oceanographer would examine, she also monitors temporal changes and its impact on the ecology’s wildlife.  “I want to know what time in the spring the sea ice is going away so I can relate that to changes that I see in the biological response,” says Sharon. “To have the opportunity to look at a system with other researchers and to be able to put all the pieces together to see how this system is changing holistically over time is an amazing opportunity.”

As a result, Sharon’s macro-view of Antarctica’s shifting geography is now a vital element in understanding how other scientists view climate change.

Similar to the interdisciplinary efforts between student filmmakers and Antarctic scientists producing “Beyond the Ice,” Sharon’s collaborative efforts with other LTER researchers epitomizes the kind of teamwork necessary to address climate change and to effectively make a difference.

Rutgers Oceanographer Oscar Schofield explains the changing geography of the West Antarctic Peninsula

Oscar Schofield lectures to RCDF film students.

An average day at work for Biological Oceanographer Oscar Schofield usually consists of monitoring the data collected by self-propelled robots gliding across the Antarctic, or studying the phytoplankton of West Antarctic seas on a world class research vessel.

Yet for the last month, the interdisciplinary collaboration behind the documentary “Antarctica: Beyond the Ice” has lead Oscar and his studies to the most unlikely of places – Mason Gross School of the Arts.
As a part of the film’s post-production process, Oscar has provided lectures to Mason Gross documentary students to teach them the science behind the scenes for their film. Through a series of slide shows and video presentations, Oscar taught the student filmmakers a broad understanding of his research, beginning with the Biological Carbon Pump responsible for rising Antarctic temperatures to the stigmas that many people face while addressing climate change.

The novel meeting between Oscar and the film students, who mainly study English, Journalism, and other humanity concentrations, represent a larger effort that scientists are now making to bring their research to the forefront of mainstream consciousness.  “We are losing the communication war on global warming,” Oscar told film students on his first lecture, hoping that this film collaboration between students and scientists will be a tool for social change and environmental policy. Oscar encourages the filmmakers that negative environmental impacts have been reversed by policymakers in the past, citing 1989’s Montreal Protocol that has successfully yielded the depletion of the Earth’s Ozone Layer. With this mind, pressure is a bit of an understatement for the students editing this important documentary.