Happy Holidays From Antarctica

Astrobiologist Dale Andersen from the SETI Institute is currently on his way back to the U.s. via a stop over in Capetown, South Africa. Dale and his team spent a month or so at Lake Untersee in Antarctica. This photo was taken shortly before Christmas. Dale is shown holding a patch for the Challenger Center for Space Science Education. Larger view.

While there they conducted a number of research activities including diving underneath the ice into cold dark lakes. Many of the odd life forms they have encountered provide clues as to what might once have lived – or maybe still live – in similar condtions on Mars or elsewhere in the solar system.

Dale has conducted similar astrobiology research across the world from other regions in Antarctica, to Axel Heiberg near the north pole and in Siberia to name a few. He is a Fellow National of the Explorers Club.

Dale and I first began to work on website “The McMurdo Dry Valleys Long-Term Research Project Life in Extreme Environments; An Antarctic Field Journal“ back in 1996. We belive that this was the first – if not among the first – to be updated from Antarctica itself.

In essence (back in 1996/1997): “Dale accesses his mail account at NASA Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, California via FTP from a server located at McMurdo Base. Email is sent from the NASA ARC mail server to me at the Reston Communications mailserver, a Mac Classic II, in Reston, Virginia. Dale sends images to me via FTP by depositing them on a FTP server in Maryland.”