Dr. Katie Howe (Postdoc), Lydia Hayes-Guastella (PhD student), and Kristen Lamprect (PhD student) from the Kiel Reese lab are currently on a research expedition from New Zealand to the Ross Sea (near Antarctica) funded by the National Science Foundation (Award number 2044453 to BKR). The transit to the Ross Sea will take us approximately nine days on the Nathaniel B. Palmer research vessel and icebreaker. Our team is very excited for the opportunity to be a part of this expedition and to be able to collect these unique samples from such a remote location.

So far on our expedition we have had many safety training sessions to help us prepare for life on the ship, as well as working in extremely cold conditions. We have also spent several days setting up our lab spaces with equipment and creating clean conditions for our sterile microbial work. Once we arrive at our sampling location, we will anchor onto ice for stability while we reconfigure the sampling equipment on deck to allow for sediment gravity and piston coring to take place.

The overall goal of this project is to understand the sources and fate of methane hydrates in the continental shelf of the Ross Sea, Antarctica. We will collect sediments using a mixture of gravity coring and piston coring to sample for future metagenomic (e.g., all DNA in a sample to tell us about abundance) and metatranscriptomic (e.g., all RNA in a sample to tell us about activity) analyses of the microbial communities that are associated with methane gas hydrates. We will also collect sediment samples for cultivation of microorganisms, cell counts, and silica incubation experiments. Methane gas hydrates are pockets of methane gas that become trapped in a crystal structure of water; the resulting solid is similar to ice. These hydrates are formed under high pressure, low temperature conditions and can be found in the ocean sediments of the Ross Sea.

This expedition presents a lot of milestones for this group: it is Kristen’s first time leaving the country and her first long-term research cruise, it is Lydia’s longest research cruise and second research expedition to the Eastern Hemisphere in less than 2 months giving her a total of over 100 days at sea, and Katie will be reaching her final continent over her birthday, and means she has visited both the Arctic and Antarctic Circles within 7 months.