Update #4
16 Jan. 2005

Yesterday the weather cleared and we finally made it out into the field.  We flew by Coast Guard helicopter, one of two of these aircraft stationed down here with the Coast Guard ship, an ice breaker.  The helicopter we were on had a female pilot and crew member who helped us load our field gear and explained the operations of the aircraft.  We left late in the morning and flew for 45 minutes to Beaufort Island, a small island just to the north of Ross Island where we are located, that has one high peak and a glacier on it.  I've been trying to get to Beaufort Island for several years now, but it's a difficult place to reach.  This year, however, the island is surrounded by sea ice thanks to the large ice bergs that are blocking ocean currents into the southern Ross Sea (see satellite image).  Because of that, it's easier to fly out to the island by helicopter as they don't like to fly over open water--the sea ice would still allow for an emergency landing, if necessary.

We landed on the base of a glacier on the north end of the island, where we could easily walk down to the beach.  Here, the ice-free beach stretched down to the south for about a kilometer.  At the north end, there was a small active Adélie Penguin colony.  Many of the birds had small chicks, but skuas obviously had been stealing eggs and chicks here all season. 

Just to the south of this colony, a small ridge line or moraine, was exposed from beneath the glacier and sloped upward to the south.  The top of this moraine had numerous pebble mounds, or old abandoned penguin colonies, along its entire length.  We were amazed at the number of these sites, something we did not expect to find!  Lots of penguin bones and feathers were eroding from the side of this moraine facing the beach, indicating that the sites had been here a long time.  Before starting work on these, we completed a survey of the entire ridge line, then returned to sample two of the sites.

One site exposed in the face of the moraine at the south end was unusual.  We found a band of penguin feathers and bone that was buried quite deep in the side of the moraine and was about 50 cm thick.  Examining this layer in more detail indicated that it was not a former breeding site (there were no pebbles and little eggshell as found in colonies). Instead, the dense layer of feathers meant this had been a molting site, or a place where penguins used to stand and molt all their feathers each year.  Molting must be done on land after the breeding season and takes the birds about two weeks to complete.  While molting, they just stand on the beach and can't return to the water, so they fast and complete the process in that manner.  Few molting sites like this are known, so we collected some samples of the matted feathers for radiocarbon dating to see how old is it.

Next, we returned to one of the abandoned colonies exposed by erosion.  The sediments were dry and dusty, so the site appeared quite old.  We excavated a 1x1 m pit in the site by 5 cm levels, screening all the sediments from each level to recover the bones they contained.  We found lots of eggshell and bone which we saved along with the finer sediments to wash and sort more carefully in the lab.  By the time we finished this excavation, and backfilled the pit, it was time to go.  The helicopter returned to pick us up at 5:30 pm and we returned to the station, tired but elated with our finds, just in time fo dinner.  Now, we hope to return to Beaufort Island at least two more times to thoroughly sample this fascinating place.  Unfortunately, the bad weather returned and we were stuck indoors for two more days, but we did get back to Beaufort Island for one more excavation on Jan. 14.

On Jan. 17, we are scheduled to fly to the Italian Station in Terra Nova Bay, north of us and on the Victoria Land Coast of the Antarctic continent, but still in the Ross Sea.  We will not have Internet access there, so I won't be able to post another update until we return on Jan. 31.  Stay tuned...