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• Discovery Issue 33 »
• Soil climate in the Ross Sea Region

Antarctica: monitoring soil climate in the Ross Sea Region

Dry Valleys, Antarctica.

It’s considered by many to be the earth’s last frontier but work by Landcare Research in Antarctica is going some way to better understand and protect the environment there as well as further afield.

In collaboration with the Natural Resources Conservation Service of the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) and the University of Waikato we established soil- climate stations in the Ross Sea Region to study the thermal state of the active layer and the permafrost, which are key indicators of climate change.

We have eight soil-climate stations and two permafrost temperature-monitoring boreholes. Four of the stations border the Antarctic coast, three are in the McMurdo Dry Valleys, and one is on Mt Fleming at the head of the Wright Valley on the edge of the polar plateau.

At each site, atmospheric and below-ground measurements, extending from the active layer into permafrost, are made on an hourly basis.

Data loggers record air temperature, relative humidity, solar radiation, and wind speed and direction. Thermistor temperature probes and Vitel moisture probes are installed at depths of 2 cm to 1.2 m. Soil variables are measured every 20 minutes. All measurements are averaged and recorded hourly and at each locality the instruments are replicated to provide information on variability. USDA staff visit sites annually for maintenance and downloading data.

‘With up to 10 years of continuous monitoring for each site our database is becoming increasingly valuable and the value is increasing with the length of the record,’ says Dr Jackie Aislabie, who leads the project. Extensive analysis of the climate data provides the best available data on active-layer depth of soils in the Ross Sea Region and establishes an unexpectedly high level of between-season variability in active-layer depth and in the timing of maximum thaw within the summer season.

The climate data contribute to the international global programme Circumpolar Active Layer Monitoring (CALM) to help determine the impacts of global warming on permafrost stability. As climate models predict that the high altitudes will be most sensitive to changes, we provide observational data to test the models.

A key collaborator in this project is Dr Cathy Seybold, USDA Soil Scientist, who is responsible for maintaining the soil-climate stations and ensuring quality and accessibility of data collected. The soil-climate stations and costs for maintenance and ensuring data quality and accessibility are met by the USDA.