Staffed Field Camps
Five field camps will have resident staff to provide logistic and operational assistance to McMurdo-based researchers.

Each year numerous groups conduct research throughout the Dry Valleys. Two resident staff will operate the main base camp at Lake Hoare primarily to support the Long Term Ecological Research (LTER) projects. The Dry Valley camp staff also have oversight of the Lake Bonney, Lake Fryxell, and F6 field camps. Other groups will operate from small tent camps throughout the region.

Siple Dome with three resident staff will support two science projects: Slawek Tulaczyk (I-345-M), and Brenda Hall (I-196-M) will use Siple Dome as a staging area and travel to independent, tent camps. I-345-M will obtain GPS time series and geophysical data, while I-196-M will sample moraines along the Scott Glacier. Anne Nobel (W-469) and Lisa Blatt (W-467-M) will take photographs at the camp, focusing on light.

The West Antarctic Ice Sheet (WAIS) Divide field camp will have an approximate population of 60 people. Eleven resident staff support ten projects: Kendrick Taylor (I-477-M) will continue collecting a 3,400 m deep ice core in West Antarctica. Ice Core Drilling Services (ICDC, T-350-M/Charles Bentley) will complete the setup and operate the DISC Drill System at WAIS Divide. This year the project will work through brittle ice using the Deep Ice Sheet Core (DISC) drill. The National Ice Core Laboratory (NICL, I-478-M/Schumann) will provide quality assurance and oversight for the DISC operations. Richard Alley (I-168-M) will provide records of visible stratigraphy, depth evolution of ice grain size and orientation, bubble sizes, size distributions and characteristics of the Deep Ice Sheet Core. The automatic weather station (AWS) project team (O-283-M, Charles Stearns) will service various stations from the camp. The Polar Experiment Network for Geospace Upper atmosphere Investigations (PENGUIn) (Lessard, A-105-M) will conduct ground based observations coinciding with satellite missions. Their ARRO instrument will monitor substorms, polar cap physics, cusp phenomena, and radiation belt particle precipitation. Prasad Gogineni-Center for Remote Sensing of Ice Sheets (CReSIS, I-188-M) and Sridhar Anandakrishnan (I-205-M) will traverse from WAIS Divide to the Thwaites glacier, conducting reflection seismic experiments to study flow dynamics and the glacier subsurface. Markus Frey (I-151-M) will study the chemical record of atmospheric gases recorded in snow, firn, and ice. The team will make atmospheric, snow and firn core measurements of selected gas, meteorological, and snow physical property measurements and model snow/atmosphere exchange. Anne Nobel (W-469) will take photographs at the camp, focusing on light.

This high elevation camp (11,700 feet with pressure altitudes commonly at 12,500 feet), with an approximate population of 40 people (10 RPSC camp staff at AGAP South), will mainly support seismic and aerial geophysical surveys of the Gamburtsev Mountain range in East Antarctica. GAMSEIS (Nyblade, G-055) will continue their passive seismic experiment, installing an array of seismometers. GAMBIT (Bell, I-160-M) will conduct an aerogeophysical survey using a USAP Twin Otter with support from G-066 (Ferraccioli) and the British Antarctic Survey Twin Otter. PENGUIn (Lessard, A-106-M) will continue installing autonomous low-power magnetometer platforms in the region.

Two camp staff will maintain the skiway and assist in Twin Otter refueling operations for GAMSEIS (G-055-M) and GAMBIT (I-160-M, G-066-M) work. PENGUIn (Lessard, A-112-M) will service the Automatic Geophysical Observatory installed at the camp.