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Victoria University Antarctic Research Expedition Science and Logistics Reports 2000-01: VUWAE 45

17) MANAGEMENT OF SCIENCE IN THE ROSS DEPENDENCY

17) MANAGEMENT OF SCIENCE IN THE ROSS DEPENDENCY

During the early stages of our event at Scott Base and Lake Vida, we became aware that official communication and planning between NZ and the US at the program level could have been improved. We expect that drilling work similar to that carried out by K047A will be required in the future,for both NZ and US programs. It makes economic sense to spread drilling mobilisation costs between several groups where possible but we require agreed guidelines to enable NZ contractors to support both national programs without incurring unnecessary costs that could reduce NZ technical expertise, commercial advantage and leadership in this field.

Prior to K047A deployment to Antarctica, Peter Cleary determined that preparations and requests for the Lake Vida program within the US system had not been completed as per our expectations and stated in the Raytheon contract. We are grateful that he pursued this on our behalf so that this problem was largely dealt with on our arrival at Scott Base.

There is continuing problem about importing Antarctic soil, sediment, rock and ice samples. With all the snakes, mosquitos, spiders etc that have recently been found in the country, MAF are coming under real heat to control imports. As such they are loath to distinguish and make exceptions for samples which come from Antarctica. Scientifically however, it would be very difficult to justify a biosecurity threat from any antarctic samples. Rock samples seem to be OK, but sediment, soil and water (non seawater) seem to pose a risk. As you know, there is a very fine line between soils and sedimentary rocks which flake and crumble.

To date we have avoided the MAF dogma by claiming all of our samples are rocks, which when dealing with sedimentary rocks is really not the case. If we continue to do this MAF may eventually find out how we are bending the 'rules' and get very nasty on us. The bottom line will be the increased cost we will have to bear to appease the regulators that Antarctic samples are biologically safe. It would be most helpful if Antarctica NZ could approach this problem on some sort of higher level with MAF that would allow a variance for Antarctic rock, soil and ice samples.

Notes for Hydrocarbon Sampling of Frozen Core.

At Scott Base during the field preparation period in early November we cored frozen volcanic sediments and bedrock to test the drilling equipment using chilled compressed air and diamond drill bits. This was carried out in the road area adjacent to the Pump House and WetLab in an area which was expected to have some possible hydrocarbon contamination. The coring operation went very well with complete core recovery of a few centimetres of sediment on top of vesicular basaltic bedrock. The total core recovered was in excess of 1.0 metre. Vesicles and fractures in the bedrock were filled with ice that was recovered intact. At the time of core recovery a hydrocarbon smell was noted on several occasions but this disappeared after a few hours and the ice content also ablated away even though the cores were kept frozen. It was not clear if the hydrocarbon smell was associated with the ice content but this could be possible at shallow depths were flowing water and hydrocarbons may be present during the high summer melt page break period. The relationship between ice content and the volatile hydrocarbons may indicate how fluids move in the subsurface and at the permafrost interface.

We recommend that compressed air coring should be carried out with Ambient air temperatures not greater than −10°C to prevent downhole melting. Samples of core should be taken immediately on recovery of the core, stored in airtight containers to preserve both volatile and residual hydrocarbons and kept frozen −18°C. Containers where the headspace can be drawn off with a syringe for gas chromatograph analysis would be advantageous.