小蓝俱乐部

McMurdo Sound

It took another day for the storm to blow itself out, but by Tuesday the wind and driving snow had abated, and we drove our Pisten Bully back out to our temporary shelter near Cape Evans. It took several hours of digging to clear the snow away from our vehicles, but once we started driving away...

Scientist Spotlight: Greg Wanger

Greg Wanger was 3.7 km below the Earth’s surface, trapped not only underground but also in a country distant from his native lands of Canada and Liechtenstein. He looked around him. It was very hot and smelled like rotten eggs. As many people do during their graduate careers, Greg pondered...

Digging out from the storm

The next day offered more snow and wind: we still needed handheld radios anytime we ventured between the warming hut and any of the vehicles. The wind was so strong that snow began drifting up through the dive hole in the warming hut, and the windows completely glazed over with snow. At one...

Out onto the ice

It took an enormous amount of effort, but on Thursday we ventured out onto the sea ice with our train of sleds and snow machines. The tucker is our strongest (and slowest) vehicle, and it is pulling both our yellow research sled and a pair of snowmobiles. The red Pisten-Bully is pulling a...

Around Mac-town

We are now fully packed and our mobile research sled is ready to go. We are waiting for some final repairs on the Pisten-Bully which will pull our supply sled. The mobile laboratory sled will be pulled by the Sno-Cat Tucker, which also has cab space for six (riding in the mobile lab would...

Ice diatoms!

Today has been a day of preparations, as tomorrow we hope to leave McMurdo Station and head out on the sea ice. Our mobile sled is almost ready for deployment: the carpenters who work for the US Antarctic Program are quite amazing, and our sled has filtration racks for separating different...

Sea-ice class

Today Abigail Noble and I took a Hagglund transporter out onto the Ross Sea to learn the basics of sea ice safety and ice dynamics. The sea ice on McMurdo Sound can be 2 meters thick, but this ice is constantly changing, and when you drive along its surface, you can't assume that it is...

Happy Camp

Our project on the Ross Sea will take us far from heated facilities of McMurdo Station, so all members of our team need to attend "Happy Camp", a two day course on snow camping and basic Antarctic survival. Happy Camp is held out on the McMurdo Ice Shelf, and it is an immersion program in...

McMurdo Station

Entering McMurdo is like entering a modern mining town: lots of exposed rock and unpaved streets, above ground utilities and bare-bones architecture. Utilitarian. From the airport we were taken to a briefing room, introduced to our science coordinators, and given our shcedules. Since I am...

Hend Alqaderi, a 小蓝俱乐部collaborator and mentee to Marcelo Freire receives the L鈥橭r茅al-Unesco Women in Science award

The surprising results of a decade-long investigation by Alessandro Vezzosi and Agnese Sabato provide a strong basis for advancing a project researching Leonardo da Vinci's DNA.

Projects aimed at collecting big data about the ocean鈥檚 tiniest life forms continue to expand our view of the seas.

J. Craig Venter, PhD, argues scientists have 鈥渁 moral obligation to communicate what they're doing to the public,鈥� and that more studies deserve greater public criticism.

The discovery could sharpen scientists鈥� understanding of which functions are crucial for normal cells and what the many mysterious genes in these organisms are doing

The 小蓝俱乐部 is the recipient of three awards totaling more than $1.5M to study SARS-CoV-2 and heart disease