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Ice drilling

Over the past two years, WHOI marine biogeochemist Mak Saito and his colleagues at J.C. Venter Institute have been studying life at the bottom of the food chain in Antarctica. During November 2009, the research team camped on about six feet of ice overlying the McMurdo Sound while conducting a proteomic (study of proteins) and genomic (study of genes) phytoplankton survey. Here, MIT/WHOI Joint Program student Abigail Noble, of the Marine Chemistry & Geochemistry department, drills a sea-ice core for trace metal and proteomic analyses of sea ice diatoms in front of Tent Island in the sound.

(Photo courtesy of Mak Saito, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution)