Antarctica is UMD professor's office

DULUTH

Summer in Antarctica is much like winter in Duluth, except for the 24-hour-a-day sunlight.

That's the take from University of Minnesota Duluth geological sciences professor John Goodge, who is set to embark on his 11th trip to the frozen continent this month. He, along with four others, will continue research on the geology of Antarctica buried beneath thousands of miles of ice.

"We're covering a huge territory this time -- enough of a section where we can start to look for broad patterns," Goodge said.

The group will sample material from rock outcroppings and glacial boulders that help build a better picture of the continent. During a year-long 2005 trip, Goodge found a rock that is helping researchers reconstruct the look of a supercontinent that existed more than a billion years ago and shows a connection between North America and Antarctica. This time the group will work in a new section of the Transantarctic Mountains and will try to cover up to 1,600 miles in a six-week span.

Goodge has grown to love the massive continent, a place he first visited in 1985 as a graduate student at UCLA.

"It's an incredible place," he said. "It makes you feel significantly small. It leaves you a healthy perspective on what the human position is relative to the Earth."

Temperatures during the summer months of Antarctica, considered North America's winter, are usually 0 to 10 degrees, sometimes warmer or colder, depending on the wind, Goodge said. Each member of the camp sleeps in a private tent that sometimes is left partially open to cool off inside if the sun is too warm.

"It's really pretty cozy," Goodge said. "It's like a little oven."

Despite intensive work days that tax your body, Goodge said, he doesn't sleep much because the constant light is energizing.

The team is using two camps this time in different parts of the research area.

They fly to and from. Each camp has a tent for eating and a tent for a bathroom. A section of snow is cordoned off for drinking water, which they melt constantly to drink because the land is a dry polar desert.

"It's the cleanest environment in the world," Goodge said.

Food is buried in snow so the sun doesn't thaw and spoil it, and dinners are a long process of thawing to cook a hot meal of pasta or chicken at the end of a 10-hour day. Breakfasts and lunches are granola, beef jerky, cookies, crackers and instant soup.

"We eat a lot of butter and chocolate," Goodge said. "Your body is always losing energy; you eat an amazing amount of food."

During whiteout conditions and extreme wind, researchers retreat to tents to read or eat. They rarely miss a day because time is so crucial, so even Christmas will be a work day if it's safe enough to be out, Goodge said.

The team wears several layers of clothing and uses mountaineering gear to work. Sunglasses are essential because of the blinding snow. Because of the danger from crevasses in the glaciers, no one ventures anywhere alone or without a high-frequency radio.

University of Minnesota graduate student Tanya Dreyer is going with Goodge to Antarctica for the first time for the National Science Foundation-funded research. Dreyer, of Cape Town, South Africa, saw snow for the first time in Duluth when she arrived this fall.

"I'm really excited," she said. "It will be very different from what I've seen in South Africa; I'm looking forward to the challenge of extreme conditions."

The group will fly into Antarctica's U.S. McMurdo Station from New Zealand. Dreyer will get survival training there, as every new visitor does. After the group arrives at its first camp, she'll be trained in how to work in the field.

Knowing how to live in Antarctica is very important, Goodge said.

"It's a huge place and there's never any sense of scale," he said. "There are no trees, light poles, roads or buildings. You can be looking across vast distances and not know it. It's you and it and not much else."

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