What are the forces that formed Antarctica? Armchair theories are one thing. Penn State geoscientists, with colleagues from Washington University in St. Louis and the University of Alabama,  are embarked on a project to take the true measure of the frozen continent. By stringing arrays of seismic stations across thousands of kilometers of icy desert, then analyzing the shifts and tremors their instruments pick up, they hope to better understand the crust and mantle beneath the Transantarctic mountains, the range that splits the continent into east and west.

            Eight seismic stations are already in place. Over the next month, the 15-member TAMSEIS team (that's for Transantarctic Mountains Seismic Experiment) will be installing 36 more. First, they'll complete a dense array in the vicinity of McMurdo Station, hub of the U.S. Antarctic program. Then comes the hard part: extending a 1,400 kilometer chain of stations across the vast east Antarctic plateau. For that, team members will be dropped by Twin Otter airplane to a remote camp at 12,000 feet, where they'll spend two weeks in a place where the air is thin and the daytime highs are  minus-25 degrees Celsius. Talk about going to extremes!

            Team member John Pollack, a freelance journalist, will be sending regular dispatches on the expedition's progress. Grab some hot chocolate and follow along. 

PEOPLE:

Principal Investigators Sridhar Anandakrishnan is an assistant professor of geophysics at the University of Alabama. Much of his previous research has been aimed at understanding the stabiliy of the West Antarctic ice sheet using seismic techniques. In January, Anandakrishnan will rejoin the geosciences faculty at Penn State, where he was formerly a research associate in the Earth System Science Center.  [http://ice.geo.ua.edu/~sak/]

Andy Nyblade is an assistant professor of geosciences at Penn State whose investigations of crust and mantle structures have led him to conduct broadband seismographic experiments in Tanzania, Ethiopia, and Kenya. [http://www.ems.psu.edu/People/Nyblade.html]

Doug Wiens  is a professor of earth and planetary science at Washington University in St. Louis. He has previously led seismographic deployment expeditions in Chilean Patagonia, the Shetland Islands, Fiji, and off the tip of the Antarctic peninsula.  [http://epsc.wustl.edu/seismology/doug/doug.html]

Our Correspondent

John Pollack, a freelance writer, was a speechwriter for President Bill Clinton and before that for Congressman David Bonior. He has been a reporter for the Hartford Courant, and spent three years in Spain as a freelance foreign correspondent. [jdpollack@aol.com]

Research and technical staff

Bruce Long, electrical engineer, Penn State
Tim Parker; PASSCAL Instrument Center, Incorporated Research Institutions for Seismology
Patrick Shore, technical staff, Wash. U.
Rigobert Tibi, postdoctoral researcher, Wash. U.
Don Voigt, technical staff, Penn State

Graduate students

Maggie Benoit, Penn State
Jesse Fischer, Wash. U.
Juliette Florentin, Penn State
Yongtao Luo, Alabama

Others on the team

Jennifer Curtis, an elementary-school teacher science teacher in Fall River, Massachusetts, participating in the Teachers Experiencing Antarctica program. [http://tea.rice.edu/tea_kabofrontpage.html]
Joseph (Ted) Voigt, an undergraduate student in liberal arts at Penn State, and son of Antarctic veteran Don Voigt.