Twenty-nine Pants Blowing in the Wind

Have you ever wondered how many pants is too many pants? Well our team has this internal conflict every morning as we decide how many layers to wear for the upcoming field day. As we have progressed with our first two weeks of sampling, we have encountered all sorts of different weather, from balmy 14°F days with no wind to -30°F with winds so aggressive Mary Poppins would quake in her boots. One day, as we were sheltering in our “Apple” (the warming structure at our Hutton Cliffs site), we decided to tally the number of combined pants our team was wearing and came up with a staggering 29 pairs for 7 people. Today, one team member broke the team record and wore 6 pairs of pants at once… So, the answer is, there are never enough pants!

Hutton Cliffs, the site of the aforementioned, nutritious-sounding warming structure, is a new study site for us this year and has presented a different set of experiences and challenges. It is one of the largest colonies of Weddell seals in the Ross Sea, so it’s been exciting to be in one of the seal pupping hubs of Antarctica! However, Hutton Cliffs is also notoriously windy – walking around on a typical day can sometimes feel like you are fighting a losing battle with the jet engine of a 737 about to take off. Despite these environmental hurdles, we successfully worked up five new pups at Hutton and have been regularly revisiting our critters as well as surveying all the pups to see how many are molting (shedding their fur). We are looking forward to finishing up the last couple animals of our one-week sampling time point; we’ll have a quick turnaround and re-work our first animal on Monday when he turns three weeks old!

Written by: Emma Weitzner