Science in Antarctica Trivia Quiz

Answer: Yes

Antarctica was not always at the South Pole! Beneath the layers of ice, it's a continent like any other, and its fate is determined by continental drift. Once a part of the southern supercontinent, Gondwanaland, Antarctica actually straddled the equator some 500 million years ago, and developed a thriving ancient ecosystem. Ginkgos, ferns and cycads abounded, especially along the coasts -- and larger life existed, too, including (eventually) dinosaurs!

Paleontologists hoping to excavate in Antarctica do not have an easy life. Digging deeply into the ice sheets is not an option, so they're limited to investigating ice-free mountainsides and islands along the coast. Despite these limited opportunities, the short summer excavation season, the terrible weather and the dangers of ice floes, several twentieth-century expeditions struck gold (so to speak). An ankylosaur was found by Argentinean scientists in 1984, followed by the British find of a hypsilophodont in 1989. Two years later, American scientists found the first Antarctic skeleton of a carnivore: Cryolophosaurus, a crested critter about seven meters (23 feet) long.

Answer: All of these can be measured from the ice cores

Ice cores are drilled in pieces, each up to six or so meters in length; by drilling in one spot and combining multiple pieces, total ice cores stretching back hundreds of thousands of years have been recovered. Through careful work with the ice core samples, scientists can recover several types of precious data. For example, air is trapped as bubbles in the ice cores as the snow around it freezes; when it is extracted, scientists can measure its composition, from the concentration of greenhouse gases to the presence of volcanic ash. The temperature at which a given layer of ice was formed can be measured by counting the relative abundances of water molecules with certain isotopes (for example, water molecules with 8-neutron oxygen as opposed to 9-neutron isotopes): water molecules made with heavier isotopes condense at higher temperatures. Even the levels of snowfall and rainfall can be determined!

Ice cores, in addition to tree rings and other such records, help to assemble a climatological timeline for the region -- and by comparing ice cores from, say, Antarctica and Greenland, scientists expect to be able to determine which climate patterns were truly global. By understanding the history of the world's climate, perhaps we will be able to understand our future.

Answer: Neutrinos

Neutrinos, very light particles that interact with matter only via the weak force, are notoriously difficult to detect. (In fact, one could send neutrinos through a block of lead a light-year thick and only stop half of them!) One successful way of detecting them is by placing a vast quantity of water in their path. Very rarely, a neutrino will collide with an atom inside the water, creating (among other things) a fast-moving, charged particle called a muon -- a sort of heavier cousin of the electron. The path of this speedy particle is marked by distinctive bluish light (Cerenkov radiation), which can then be detected by standard equipment. AMANDA (operational since 1997) and IceCube (construction began in 2005) lowered their light detectors over 1.5 kilometers into the ice; the ice on top is excellent shielding from other sources of muons.

The neutrinos these experiments measure have traveled vast distances across time and space, giving scientists information about black holes, supernovae, and other cataclysmic events from outside our galaxy. AMANDA and IceCube will catch only a tiny fraction of these particles, but their messages will fill out our understanding of the universe.

Answer: Europa

Europa, one of Jupiter's four Galilean moons, has a surface covered entirely with ice -- but the smoothness of the ice suggests that there is a liquid ocean underneath it, filling in the impact craters. On Europa, it's thought that the ocean is kept from freezing by the heat of tides induced by Jupiter; in Lake Vostok, the water is warmed by a combination of geothermal energy from below and the pressure of the mammoth ice sheet above. The two environments are similar in a number of important respects (the cold, the lack of sunlight, the absence of a direct connection between liquid waters and air), but also have differences: Lake Vostok, for example, is known to be a freshwater lake with a high oxygen concentration, whereas Europa's magnetic field has led to speculation that its ocean is saltwater. Yet the existence of life in such a harsh environment as Lake Vostok is a strong argument that life could exist on Europa.

Any study of Lake Vostok's ecosystem is fraught with peril: Antarctic ice sheets have isolated it from the outside world for some 15 million years, so any opening into the lake would contaminate it with outside microorganisms. The 1998 team drilled an incredibly long ice core, stopping a few hundred feet above the surface of the lake -- so their long cylinder of ice included Lake Vostok water that had frozen to the bottom of the ice sheet. In that refrozen water, they found microbes -- stunning evidence that life always seems to find a way.

Answer: Ozone layer

Ozone - a molecule made up of three atoms of oxygen, instead of the more stable two - is a pollutant at sea level but a literal lifesaver at an altitude of tens of kilometers. It just so happens to be very efficient at absorbing light in the ultraviolet (UV) range of the spectrum - and it's in that range that the sun produces most of the light that can hurt humans. UV radiation is deadly stuff, causing sunburns, damaging DNA and even contributing to skin cancer. The ozone layer is thus one of the most immediately important parts of the stratosphere, although the word "layer" is a bit misleading: even at its most concentrated, the atmosphere's ozone represents only a few molecules out of every million. This stuff is precious enough that it inspired one of the early triumphs of environmentalism: a widespread ban of chlorofluorocarbons, a compound used in aerosol sprays that destroys stratospheric ozone molecules.

By the mid-1980s, scientists already suspected that CFCs were depleting the ozone layer - but Joseph Farman's, Brian Gardiner's and Jonathan Shanklin's 1985 discovery of an "ozone hole" over Antarctica showed that the severity of the problem was far greater than predicted. The Antarctic ozone hole appears every spring, when sunlight and cloud patterns drive ozone-depleting chemical reactions, and spring winds trap this air in a vortex. As the clouds break up and the vortex lessens, the ozone-depleted Antarctic air gradually mixes with air from the rest of the world, but the ozone lost there will take eons to recover via the much slower processes that produce those molecules.

Answer: Most of Antarctica's ice is on land -- so its melting raises sea level more than floating ice sheets.

When you drop an ice cube into a glass of fresh water, the water level rises: the ice displaces a volume of water whose weight is equal to that of the ice cube itself. Thus, when the ice melts, the water level stays the same: the meltwater simply fills in the "gap" left by the water that was displaced when the ice was added. Floating ice packs in seawater are a little more complicated, since the fresh meltwater is less dense than the surrounding seawater, so melting sea ice does end up raising sea levels slightly -- but the melting of glaciers on land, draining ice and water into the sea, has a much greater impact. That is why the melting of Antarctica's enormous glaciers would have such a devastating impact on our geography: if both the east and west Antarctic ice sheets were to empty entirely into the sea, global sea level would rise by 189 feet (58 meters), putting the world's coastal plains underwater.

Answer: Mount Stromboli

This type of eruption is called a Strombolian eruption, after an Italian volcano in the Aeolian Islands north of Sicily. Eruptions are triggered by gas bubbles that move rapidly up the column of magma sitting beneath a volcanic vent; at the top, the pressure changes and the bubble bursts, flinging lava up into the air. This type of eruption doesn't do much to relieve the stresses acting on the interior of the volcano, so a Strombolian volcano might erupt nearly continuously for an astoundingly long time. Mount Erebus has been active at least since its discovery in 1841.

The volcano is close to two permanent scientific bases (New Zealand's Scott Base and the United States's McMurdo Station), making it relatively easy for volcanologists to study: every southern summer, the Mt. Erebus Volcano Observatory is assembled on its slopes. From the summit of the mountain, scientists can make close observations of its eruption patterns -- and can even view one of the very few molten lava lakes on Earth, tucked inside the crater of Mount Erebus.

Answer: Radio-wave-detecting materials perform best at very low temperatures.

When you step outside at night and see the twinkling of the stars, you're really seeing atmospheric turbulence. A star's brightness depends on the air that you're seeing it through, and when the quality of that air changes -- for example, when cold air is mixed with warm air -- the apparent brightness of the star varies too. Naturally, this presents a problem for the poor astronomers analyzing data from ground-based telescopes!

At high altitudes, though, the air is thinner and the stars correspondingly less twinkly. Long continuous nights are not an advantage by themselves -- a radio telescope can continue to observe the universe during daylight hours -- but when the sun isn't moving through the sky, it isn't heating up the atmosphere and making it more turbulent. And the presence of lots of people always makes astronomical observations more difficult, whether the contamination comes in the form of visible light or longer-wavelength emissions from our radios, televisions and other equipment. There's nothing special about the materials that detect radio waves, even in the microwave range, however -- a telescope like this is just a glorified antenna!

Answer: The sun does not provide a natural clock: it never sets during the summer, and never rises during the winter.

Human activity is roughly regulated by our circadian rhythms, a 24-hour clock which affects when we sleep and when we get hungry. Melatonin, a hormone secreted by the pineal gland, helps to enforce these rhythms: high melatonin levels increase drowsiness and decrease body temperature in preparation for sleep. But the system of melatonin production did not evolve for the modern age! Bright light suppresses melatonin secretion, whether it comes from the sun or from electric lights.

In the extreme polar regions of the world, melatonin levels can become seriously maladjusted -- over 110 straight days of light, or of darkness, would maladjust anyone. Medical research in Antarctica, conducted on a small, healthy and well-regimented group of people, may lead to a better understanding of extreme versions of human body rhythms -- and of how to help cure body rhythm disorders.

Answer: Fossils of tiny extraterrestrial life forms

In most of the world, finding a meteorite (an object from space that has fallen to earth through the atmosphere) is like searching for a needle in a haystack; an impact millions of years old may not have left much evidence to guide the searchers! In Antarctica, however, geologists have two advantages. First, meteorites (which tend to be dark in color) stand out against the snow and ice. Second, a meteorite that lands in the Antarctic highlands does not stay near the site of the collision: gradually buried in snow and ice, the glaciers carry it slowly across the land. The Transantarctic Mountains stop parts of the ice flow cold (if you'll forgive the expression), and erosion gradually reveals the buried meteorites. Although most meteorites are swept to sea, enough remain that the concentration of meteorites near the mountains is denser than anywhere else on earth.

ALH 84001 was discovered and removed from Antarctica in 1984; subsequent analysis showed that it was probably from Mars. McKay's 1996 article in "Science" set off intense debate: using a scanning electron microscope, he had found tiny structures that resembled Earth bacteria (although they were significantly smaller). When this quiz went to press, there was no consensus as to whether this was really compelling evidence of Martian life: the possibility of contamination by Earth bacteria, or that the structures could have emerged from weathering instead of from fossilization, could not be ignored.

I hope you've enjoyed this look at the surprisingly lively scientific community associated with the frozen continent. I know I'll never look at Antarctica in quite the same way again!