McMurdo Dry Valleys

And surely there must have been lake level recorded from ages ago.

Well, we've been studying these lakes in the Dry Valley since the late 1980s and very carefully since the early 1990s.

But Robert Falcon Scott, that dude who tried to be the first guy to go to the South Pole, he was exploring in this region, and he measured lake levels in 1903.

And so we have an indication of what the lake levels were in 1903, and we can compare them today.

No

Well, in a remo- remote continent of the Antarctic, or Antarctica, uh, awaits what many refer to as the Blood Falls, a waterfall that slowly drains into McMurdo Dry Valleys.

This waterfall is located in one of the driest, coldest places on Earth.

Many scientists believe that the red coloring of the water comes from red algae and other strange bacterial life, uh, life forms that inhabit the waterfall.

Both are named after ships on Sir James Clark Ross's 1841 expedition to discover Ross Island.

On the other side of the McMurdo Sound, we find one of the most extreme environments on Earth, the McMurdo Dry Valleys, a row of mountain valleys to the west of the Transantarctic Range, which are largely sheltered from wind and moisture billowing up from the coasts.

This puts them among the driest deserts on Earth, and one of the closest analogs we have to the sands of the planet Mars, which also endure extreme surface dryness, cold desert conditions, and heightened UV radiation.

As such, the survival strategies employed by the scarce few extremophile microbes that live here make intriguing templates for astrobiologists wishing to determine the kind of life that may once have existed on the red planet.

We can only take a handful of people down there, and so the work that a student does is very, very important.

The McMurdo Dry Valleys are the coldest, windiest, driest valleys on the planet, and so anytime I find anything living in these valleys, I'm pretty amazed.

That the most dominant, most abundant land animal in Antarctica is a nematode worm.

I just went to Antarctica, and I'm working on the nematodes.