A brief bit about my field site using only the thousand most common English words

To say a lot with a little is harder than you may think. 

Words are important, but what if you only had
a small number of known words with which to speak?

Chris Trivedi (right) and Graham Lau (left) at Borup Fiord Pass in 2014.

The Up-Goer Five Text Editor, created by Theo Sanderson, is a web-app that challenges you to type using only the one thousand most common words in the English language. It's intriguingly far trickier than you may think. I gave it a go, in an attempt to explain the reason that my colleagues and I went to Borup Fiord Pass to conduct our field research in 2014. What d'ya think?

On the top of the round world where we live, lies a land with ice and cold. In this land there is a piece of ice, long and thick, and covered in a color that does not seem right in such a place. This color let us know that something important was on or in or around that colored ice. We went to that place to find the colored ice and learn more about what made the color, to learn about why this place is just so cool. In the ice I found something important about fire's friend in the book of one god. This friend of fire as spoke upon before, was to be found in new forms within the ice, and of this I wrote with my friends. Now we know more about the stuff that causes the colors of the ice in that land with ice and cold that lies so far to the top of the round world where we live.

Some Chemical Properties of Sulfur, a Learning Video from FuseSchool

Sulfur is one the coolest chemical elements. It's crucial for life as we know it, has more solid allotropes than any other element, produces a lot of the scents that we recognize with our sense of smell, was one of the few elements in pure form that was known by ancient people (it's even mentioned in The Odyssey), it's yellow in its natural form but melts into a beautiful red and burns blue, and it's become part of the highlight of my graduate research (okay, that last bit probably only makes it super important to me). 

I recently discovered two rare allotropes of the mineral form of elemental sulfur (also, technically called polymorphs) at Borup Fiord Pass, a glacier system in the High Arctic. One of those allotropes, known as beta-cyclooctasulfur (ya, cool name), usually only forms in warm environments and wasn't expected to be found on an Arctic glacier. 

I'm working on some videos to share information about my work with sulfur and Borup Fiord Pass. However, in the meantime, here's a fun video from FuseSchool that explains some of the awesome chemical properties of sulfur. Check it out:

Carbonate Rhombohedra and Arctic Sulfur

Here's a beautiful image that I took of one of my samples from Borup Fiord Pass. As I write up my dissertation, I'm going back through all of the data and trying to synthesize everything into one report. This image won't be used in my dissertation, but it's still pretty awesome. The image was taken using a scanning electron microscope (SEM). The scale bar is 10 microns (about one quarter of the width of one of my beard hairs!). The blocky looking structures in the middle are rhombohedra of carbonate minerals while the globular looking things around the top and right of the image are globules of elemental sulfur. This material was collected from the surface of some fresh snow and ice that had been blown out of a glacial crevasse while we were at our field site in the Arctic. I'm kind of sad that I don't have a good way to use this image in the dissertation, but glad that I can share it here!

Where in the World is Graham Lau?

I've been travelling and doing so much lately that I haven't been keeping up with my blog. Last week, I traveled to Washington D.C. to compete in the Season 3 national final of the Famelab USA science communication competition. I didn't win the competition, but it was so much fun and I learned a lot more about sharing my passion for science and knowledge with other people. Here's a pic of me on the stage during my final talk, titled "This Thing is Older Than Your Mom":

I took a much needed stop back in Pennsylvania to see friends and family after that. It was refreshing to hit up the ol' stomping grounds again. Here's a pic of my little sister, Kelsey, and I, along with my long time buddies Nick Ison and Ben Doyle:

Sadly, I only had one day back in Boulder after all that travel before leaving on my next trip, a stop to the Canadian Light Source in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, Canada. The Canadian Light Source (CLS) is a synchrotron particle accelerator where researchers can use the x-rays produced for a wide range of scientific endeavors.

A panorama looking down at the ring of the CLS synchrotron

My lab mates, Jena Johnson and Julie Cosmidis, and I use the Canadian Light Source to do something called STXM. STXM stands for Scanning Transmission X-ray Microscopy. The technique allows us to use x-rays to produce nanoscale to microscale images of our samples and to collect spectroscopic information about the materials. For instance, we're using STXM to figure out what kinds of sulfur and carbon molecules are in our samples and how those sulfur and carbon molecules are related. I'm currently sitting in a lab at CLS preparing more samples for our last evening of experimentation and data collection. 

A scanning transmission x-ray microscope at CLS

Tomorrow, it's back to Boulder for a good week of rest and catching up on work before I head off on the next adventure: the University Rover Challenge (URC). The URC is a three-day robotics competition held in the desert of Utah, where undergraduate university teams compete against one another with robotic rovers that they've designed and built (usually over the course of an entire year). The event takes place in Utah to simulate a robotics competition on Mars. The teams will use their rovers to look for signs of life, to assist astronauts in their work, to perform maintenance or servicing tasks, and to scout out terrain in the desert environment. I've been to the URC many times, serving as a volunteer and Director of Logistics. I always learn a lot about robotics and have a great time seeing these teams in action, but I also love the back-breaking work and camping out in the desert. Here's a picture from the Cornell Mars Rover team, showing off their Ares rover from last year's competition:

Hopefully, after I return from the URC, I'll have some serious time to get deeper into writing up my dissertation. It's scary to say it, but I'm looking to wrap up my Ph.D. program late this year, so there's a lot of work ahead making all of that happen. However, sometime in June I'll be coming back and writing posts about all of these adventures I've been on and sharing the best photos and videos, so stay tuned!

Ad Astra Per Aspera!

Enjoying A Clean Shave and a Haircut at The Rook and Raven Pub in Saskatoon (no, I'm not shaving off my beard. But I am enjoying a fun drink made with Kraken rum, cola, Guinness, and hibiscus syrup. Yum!)

The Yellow Sulfur Pyramids of Canada

Alberta, Canada, has some of the world's largest pyramids. But these weren't megastructures built by ancient peoples for the honor of their leaders, to connect the afterlives of pharaohs with the gods, or to provide a special place of worship for their people. These pyramids are made entirely of yellow elemental sulfur!

Sulfur is currently being harvested in large quantities due to its recovery from tar sand oil and gas in operations in the northwestern U.S. and western Canada. Once the sulfur is removed, the oil and gas companies can try to sell it, but sulfur is down in the markets right now and that means a lot of sulfur is just being stored, in a process called "blocking", where large blocks of elemental sulfur are produced and then stored.

Blocks of sulfur, 25 feet tall (credit: Gord McKenna)

One place where blocking has gone rampant is near the tar sands of Alberta, Canada. As of 2012, oil and gas extraction of sulfur in this region accounted for roughly 1.5 million tons per year of sulfur. At that time, 600,000 tons were being blocked each year. That led one company, called Syncrude, to start building The Great Sulfur Pyramids of Alberta!

These giant pyramids of sulfur blocks can be easily seen in satellite images. Andrew David Thaler, writing in Southern Fried Science, calculated from images and data that the largest of the sulfur pyramids was at 2,840,000 cubic meters in volume back in 2012 (it's continued to grow since then). In comparison, the Great Pyramid of Giza is only 2,580,000 cubic meters in volume. With the current rate of growth of the Great Sulfur Pyramids of Alberta, they're on track to become the largest human-made structures ever (by volume). Here's a comparison of bases of the Great Pyramid and the largest of the sulfur pyramids:

Comparisons, from Southern Fried Science

Those are some huge pyramids! I think I'll have to throw a visit to these pyramids on my travel list. Just to see those large, yellow structures of sulfur would be intriguing, even if their presence is due to the fact that we're now pushing the limits on extraction of hydrocarbons from the Earth.

Sulfur in Yellows, Reds, and Blues, Oh My!

Sulfur burning at Kawah Ijen (image: Oliver Grunewald)

Sulfur is most certainly one of the coolest elements. Sulfur was one of the few elements that ancient people knew of (back in a time when it was known as "brimstone", and before people even knew what elements actually are). Sulfur is the 10th most abundant element in the universe and the 6th most abundant element on Earth by weight (although most of it is in the core, along with lots of iron and nickel). Sulfur causes our flatulence to smell bad and allows people to perm their hair (due to the disulfide bonds that are broken are reformed between the amino acids in the hair). 

Sulfur also presents itself in some awesome colors when it's in its elemental form. For instance, here's a picture of solid elemental sulfur at room temperature from my book shelf:

Elemental sulfur is a beautiful yellow color in its natural solid form. However, when it melts, it turns various beautiful red colors:

Red molten sulfur at Kawah Ijen volcano (iamge: Photovolcanica)

Yellows and reds are cool, but elemental sulfur also burns in a beautiful blue color. Here's a video from scientificpages on Youtube which shows powdered elemental sulfur burning in open air:

In the video you can see the sulfur turning red as it melts, but you can also see the blue flame forming over it. 

Burning sulfur is something that anyone can try at home, but finding large amounts of elemental sulfur melting and burning in nature will only happen in a few places. One of the best known places where this occurs is in Kawah Ijen volcano, in East Java, Indonesia, where the elemental sulfur extruding from the volcano is harvested by a local company (the image at the top of this post is from Kawah Ijen). Some of the best pictures of the sulfur in Kawah Ijen have been taken by Oliver Grunewald. Here's one of Grunewald's photos of the sulfur being harvested at night:

It's truly a beautiful location for seeing elemental sulfur in all of its various colors.

Sulfur X-Ray Spectroscopy at the Stanford Synchrotron Radiation Lightsource

The Stanford Synchrotron Radiation Lightsource at dusk (credit: SSRL/SLAC)

My lab mates and I are once again back at the Stanford Synchrotron Radiation Lightsource (SSRL), a synchrotron particle accelerator in Menlo Park, California. We're here to conduct some x-ray microprobe mapping and x-ray absorption spectroscopy on samples from our various research projects (and to sleep very little while working all day and night, but that's just how we roll at synchrotrons). I've been to three synchrotrons so far in my life: the Swiss Light Source (SLS) at the Paul Scherrer Institut near Villagen, Switzerland; the Canadian Light Source (CLS) in Saskatoon, Canada; and, of course, here at SSRL.

SSRL is a particle accelerator where a storage ring (the rough shape of which you can see in the image above) holds electrons that are traveling at close to the speed of light. Synchrotrons are awesome laboratories full of a wide array of instruments that make use of the infrared, visible, ultraviolet, and, especially, x-ray radiation produced when these relativistic electrons spin around the ring. Each of the individual experimental stations at synchrotrons are called Beamlines (BLs). Four of us from our lab group, the Templeton Geomicrobiology Lab, are working on three of these beamlines here at SSRL this weekend. Two of our beamlines are made for x-ray microprobe mapping and microscale x-ray spectroscopy while the other beamline is designed for bulk x-ray absorption spectroscopy.

I wrote a post entitled "Sulfur X-Ray Microprobe and XAS at SSRL: A First Look Into My Beamline Science" back in 2013 where I first introduced some of the work that I've done here at SSRL for my graduate research. That's back when Beamline 14-3 at SSRL was first getting up and running. I'm now conducting more of that work on BL 14-3 (actually, this may be the last time I come to SSRL, at least as a graduate student).

BL 14-3 is an x-ray microprobe beamline. An x-ray microprobe is based on the concept that each element can absorb x-rays of a very specific energy. When the x-rays are absorbed, one thing that can happen is the emission of light. With the sulfur x-ray microprobe on BL 14-3, I'm scanning across polished surfaces of material that I collected at Borup Fiord Pass last summer. The x-ray microprobe can tell me how much sulfur is present in an area that I've mapped this way. Here's an image showing a rough map that I just collected:

The image on the left is a reflected light micrograph (a microscope image) of one of my samples. The inset is a tricolored map image showing where sulfide (red/orange), elemental sulfur (green/yellow), and sulfate (blue) can all be spatially resolved in this sample. Pretty awesome!

Once I've mapped the sample, I can conduct x-ray absorption spectroscopy on the most interesting spots in the sample. This will allow me to figure out not only what kinds of sulfur are in my sample, but also how those types of sulfur are distributed throughout the material. Fantastical!

Of course, being that I'm at a synchrotron, I imagine this has not been my best writing. There's this thing about synchrotron work, where many of us will be working most of the day and night and taking our sleep in little bouts when we can get it. The time we get on synchrotrons is always limited and we like to make the most of it, so we end up driving ourselves into a bit of zombie mode toward the end of our time at these facilities (especially for those of us who caffeinate heavily while here).

I'm very hopeful for the data I'm collecting this weekend. These data, along with the rest of my work from this summer, should drive my research into its last leg as I look toward the last year or so of my graduate work. Using sulfur x-ray micropobe mapping and x-ray spectroscopy here at SSRL should give me some of the key pieces of data that will help me to build my dissertation.

My research talk for AbSciCon 2015

I'm traveling off to Chicago tomorrow morning to attend the 2015 Astrobiology Science Conference (AbSciCon). AbSciCon is a scientific meeting for researchers, educators, and science communicators who work in the diverse realm of astrobiology, the scientific pursuit to understand the origins, evolution, and radiation of life in the universe. This is my first big science conference, so I'm pretty excited. I'll be giving a research talk this coming Tuesday, the 16th of June, to share a little bit of my graduate research. My talk will be part of a conference session titled "Habitability of Extraterrestrial Analog Environments" and it will allow me to talk about my current work on samples that I collected last summer at Borup Fiord Pass in the Canadian High Arctic. If you're interested, here's a little introduction to what I'll be talking about on Tuesday:

My field site, Borup Fiord Pass, is a valley in the Canadian High Arctic where there resides a very special glacier. Near the toe of this glacier (the glacier's edge) you can find large accumulations of yellow elemental sulfur on top of the ice. These deposits of sulfur form from sulfide-rich springs that emerge on the glacier or just at its edge. The sulfide carried by the springs is derived from the reduction (electronation) of sulfate by microorganisms that thrive in the subsurface. The yellow sulfur that appears at the surface may be partly formed through the activity of microbial life and also may feed microorganisms that are capable of oxidizing (de-electronating) elemental sulfur. This unique sulfur-dominated system may serve as an ideal analogue for icy environments in our solar system and beyond, especially those where subsurface fluids may emerge at the surface of an icy system (like maybe on Jupiter's moon Europa!).

I had the wonderful opportunity to visit this remarkable site for two weeks during the summer of 2014. Here is an image taken by John Spear, of the Colorado School of Mines, while flying over the glacier in a helicopter:

The image shows the region at the toe of the glacier where yellow sulfur staining was visible. The large sulfur covered area in this shot is about 100x100 square meters (about the size of a couple of American football fields). Interestingly, during our time at the site, we did not observe an active spring. Instead, what we found was that a very thick structure of ice had formed at the edge of the glacier. This icing is not only covered in sulfur, but is loaded with sulfur in various states (sulfide, elemental sulfur, and sulfate). We took samples from various regions on the sulfur icing, on the glacier, and in the melt water streams that ran down the valley. Below is a ternary diagram showing some of the data I've now analyzed for major cations in the samples as compared to some samples from previous years:

What this figure is showing is that there is a range of cation chemistry that can be observed in samples collected at the site. There are data here for active springs from previous years, sulfur deposits from 2009 and 2014, as well as melt water and stream water from around the site from 2000 and 2014. Most importantly, these data show that the sulfur icing is really similar to the sulfide-rich springs, which is part of why we reason that the spring was flowing and then that fluid was frozen in place to make the sulfur icing.

Sulfur bubbles on a melt pool on a sulfur icing

One of the coolest things about the sulfur icing during our time at Borup Fiord Pass was the active thawing and refreezing of the ice each day within melt pools on top of the icing. Hydrogen sulfide gas that had been locked within the sulfur icing would gurgle its way up through these melt pools, forming bubbles on the surface of the fluid. In several places these bubbles became encrusted in yellow sulfur and formed sulfur bubbles, like those shown to the left here.

I was so intrigued by these sulfur bubbles that I had to know more about them. I took some of the material and ran x-ray diffraction (XRD) on it. XRD allows us to determine what minerals or other crystallized material is present within a sample. The XRD data revealed something very interesting. The data show elemental sulfur present in three different forms, known as allotropes. Usually, in nature, sulfur is most stable as eight-membered rings of sulfur atoms that are packed in a certain arrangement that is known as α-S₈. (a.k.a. alpha-cyclooctasulfur). However, there are two other mineral forms of cyclooctasulfur that can also form in nature. These are known as the beta and gamma forms. β-S₈ is a form of cyclooctasulfur that
forms when α-S₈ is heated above ~96 C. It's extremely bizarre to find this form of sulfur in a sample from Borup Fiord Pass, where the fluid forming the sulfur icing likely never reached a temperature that high. Likewise, the gamma form of cyclooctasulfur, γ-S₈ (which is also known as the mineral Rosickyite), usually only forms in high temperature environments. That said, Susanne Douglas and Heixong Yang published an article in the journal Geology in 2002 where they reported finding Rosickyite within an endoevaporitic microbial film. They hypothesized that processes of microbial sulfur metabolism that formed elemental sulfur favored the formation of γ-S₈ over α-S₈. If that's not exciting enough, Damnhait Gleeson, who was once a member of our lab at the University of Colorado Boulder, also previously reported finding rosickyite in a microbial sample, this time it was within a sample of sulfur collected at Borup Fiord Pass in 2009 by Katherine Wright (also a former member of our lab). Since rosickyite was previously detected at our site, it wasn't a huge surprise, but it's definitely exciting. 

During my talk at AbSciCon, I'll be showing some images of the sulfur bubble material that I recently collected using an electron microscope. There's some really interesting structures to be found within these samples. I'm now hot on the trail of figuring out if I'm seeing the representation of gamma and beta cyclooctasulfur or perhaps something else all together. I don't know yet if these unique forms of sulfur and strange things that I'm seeing under the electron microscope are indicative of the biological processing of sulfur or if they've formed through an abiotic process at Borup Fiord Pass (which would also be very interesting), but it's nice to find new and exciting things when doing research.

There's a bit more that I'll be presenting at my talk at AbSciCon, however the talk is only supposed to be 10 minutes in length (which is a very short time for a talk). Fortunately, for the stuff that I don't get to cover in my talk, my colleague Chris Trivedi of the Colorado School of Mines will be presenting a poster with information about his work on our samples from Borup Fiord Pass. Hopefully, if people find our work interesting and want to know more following my talk, they'll then have a chance to check out Chris' poster as well.

This is me saluting the sulfur stained glacier and the valley that holds it

I'm definitely looking forward to the experiences I'll be having in the coming week at AbSciCon 2015. There's going to be a lot of great science to hear about and to talk about. I'm going to serve as a judge for student posters at the conference and I'll also be serving as a Meeting Mentor, spending half of one conference day with a high school student shadowing me at the conference. On top of all of this great stuff, on Monday evening there will be the final preliminary heat of the 3rd season of the NASA Famelab science communication competition. In case you don't know, I won the first preliminary heat of the competition in August of 2014, when I shared a story about my first day in the field at Borup Fiord Pass. I'm looking forward to watching a new line-up of scientists and science communicators as they compete in this final heat for Famelab. I have a feeling there are going to be some awesome talks and a lot of great stories.

I'll be adding more posts in the coming weeks that detail my experiences at AbSciCon, so look forward to those. I think I'll wrap this post up right now by sharing the video of the talk I gave when I competed in NASA Famelab in 2014. Here's looking forward to great science and good times at AbSciCon 2015!

Borup Fiord Pass: video from the 2011 expedition to this unique Arctic environment

Science on the ice at Borup Fiord Pass in summer, 2014 (Photo: John Spear)

Borup Fiord Pass is a truly unique and intriguing field site. The deposition of elemental sulfur and microbial processes at the surface of a glacier at Borup Fiord Pass may provide clues we need in our search for life on icy worlds like Jupiter's moon Europa, and strange circular structures in the valley near the glacier may be the remnants of past springs which could inform our future exploration of Mars. I got to travel to Borup Fiord Pass in the summer of 2014 and it was an incredible experience.

My current graduate research is focused on characterizing the materials that form at the surface of this Arctic glacier. Much of that material is rich with sulfur in various chemical forms. I'm now using various instruments to perform my characterizations of the sulfur-rich materials from the site. For instance, I get to use a particle accelerator to conduct x-ray spectroscopy to look at the sulfur!

In 2011, Bob Pappalardo, of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, and Steve Grasby, of the Geological Survey of Canada, made the trek north to visit Borup Fiord Pass. They took some samples that we've now been using to better understand the geochemical and biological processes that have occurred at the glacier. They also recorded a lot of video. Some of that video was recently edited into B-roll by JPL. The video shows Bob and Steve collecting sulfur on the ice beside a sulfide-rich spring. Take a look and see what you think about the sulfur that forms on the ice at this strange Arctic site:

B-roll: Astrobiology Field Research on Ellesmere Island, Canadian Arctic from JPLraw on Vimeo.

For more information about this strange glacial environment in the Arctic, check out an earlier post on this blog titled "Borup Fiord Pass: An introduction to how an Arctic glacier may aid in our search for life on Jupiter's moon Europa". You can also find articles about Borup Fiord Pass science that have been posted by sites like Space.com and Popular Science.

We'll soon be putting together videos that show our work during the more recent field expedition in 2014. Stay tuned to this blog for those videos and for more of the science and awesomeness of Borup Fiord Pass!

Borup Fiord Pass: An introduction to how an Arctic glacier may aid in our search for life on Jupiter's moon Europa

Standing on the glacier at Borup Fiord Pass and looking down-valley (Photo: John Spear)

Borup Fiord Pass. I've said that name so many times that it almost feels like the name of a good friend. Last summer I had the opportunity to visit this remote place on the planet, far north of the northernmost cities of North America. The experience was incredible and something that I will cherish forever. My research team and I spent two weeks at Borup Fiord Pass, and when we left we brought back the samples that I'm now studying to better understand the relationships between living organisms and the chemical element sulfur.

Borup Fiord Pass is a valley in the Canadian High Arctic where yellow staining of the surface of a glacier is caused by large deposits of sulfur in its elemental form. This site gives us the opportunity to study the chemical and biological cycling of sulfur through various forms in a unique icy environment. Borup Fiord Pass also gives us a chance to study some of the biological processes we might expect to find on icy worlds with subsurface oceans, such as Jupiter's moon Europa, if life ever came to exist there.  

Europa, one of the most intriguing places in the solar system (NASA)

Watch out where those huskies go...

Borup Fiord Pass is located on Ellesmere Island, very near the North Pole, at the northern extreme of the Canadian territory of Nunavut. To get an idea of where this is, if you hold up a globe and point the North Pole directly toward yourself, then Borup Fiord Pass will be within the first 10 degrees of latitude from the center:

Looking at the world with the North Pole at the center

Benoit Beauchamp, of the University of Calgary, was the first person to see the yellow staining on the glacier at Borup.  At least, that's what I've been told. There are military flights that pass overhead quite often. I wouldn't be too surprised if one of the pilots of a military plane was flying low and happened to see some large yellow patch on the white of the ice. Maybe that pilot thought, "huh, that's interesting." Or maybe some explorer decades ago chanced upon a glacier with a yellow icing that smelled of hydrogen sulfide, but the same explorer didn't see need to note the occurrence. 

We really don't know how long this yellow staining has been happening, though we know it's been active since Benoit first noticed it during a helicopter fly-over in 1988. Once Steve Grasby, a geochemist with the Geological Survey of Canada and my collaborator, learned from Benoit about the yellow coloration on top of the glacier, he knew something special was happening and had to check it out.  

Steve Grasby sampling a sulfur deposit on one his earliest trips to Borup Fiord Pass

Steve Grasby and his earliest collaborators on the Borup Fiord Pass project published the results of their initial findings after multiple visits to the site in an article published in the journal Astrobiology in 2003. In this article they detailed some of the basic characteristics of the yellow sulfur materials and the processes causing their existence on the glacier.  

The sulfur is deposited by springs that emerge on the glacier and which carry high levels of sulfide, the most electron-rich (reduced) form of sulfur, with a formal oxidation state of -2. In considering the chemical composition of the spring fluids and the isotopes of sulfur at the site, Steve Grasby and his colleagues determined that the sulfide is likely derived from sedimentary sulfate deep in the subsurface. Sulfate is the most electron-poor (oxidized) form of sulfur (since the sulfur atom in a sulfate molecule shares it's electrons with four oxygen atoms, giving the sulfur a formal oxidation state of +6). The transition from sulfate to sulfide implies that there must be microorganisms somewhere below the glacier which are using sulfate reduction (making sulfur more electron-rich) for their metabolisms.  

After sulfur in groundwater has been processed by organisms in the subsurface, it then flows up through the glacier or along its base and emerges as springs at the surface. Many years, the springs are still quite active when researchers have arrived to investigate. Last summer, in 2014, there was no apparent spring activity, but rather an earlier spring had deposited a large sheet of sulfide-rich ice. 

Where this icing dropped over the sides of a small canyon, we called the deposit "Sulfur Falls" (see image below). Near the glacier, in the middle of the icing, was a large circular structure that we called "The Blister". This structure may be the remnant of a sulfur-rich plume which had burst its way out from the subsurface and could possibly have formed the icing.

This is me kneeling on a pile of glacial till in front of the toe of the glacier at Borup Fiord Pass.  The yellow coloration of the ice behind me is caused by the deposition of elemental sulfur at this site. (Photo: John Spear)

The sulfide-rich water and ice that forms at the surface then provides the material for the oxidation of sulfide (stripping of electrons from sulfur) to form elemental sulfur (sulfur with a formal oxidation state of 0 and which only forms bonds with other sulfur atoms).  Elemental sulfur forms one of the most beautiful minerals on Earth:

Elemental sulfur: the mineral is yellow in solid state,
turns blood red when melted, and burns a bright blue (Image: Volty)

There are a lot of scientifically intriguing questions that remain with regard to Borup Fiord Pass. For one thing, cells of a certain type of microorganism that our lab has isolated from the field site have the strange capability of forming unique biominerals when grown in gradient cultures of sulfide and oxygen. This was first reported in a paper by Damnhait Gleeson and our colleagues in the journal Geobiology in 2011. We've learned a good deal about these biominerals since that time. Specifically, Julie Cosmidis, a postdoc in our lab, is now working on characterizing these unique structures. I'm also now in the process of looking at the samples from the field to see if any of these unique structures can be found there.

Another interesting question comes from the presence of the yellow sulfur itself.  Given the chemistry of the fluid at the ice surface and the presence of oxygen from the atmosphere, the sulfur should be oxidized the whole way to sulfate, yet the yellow staining persists throughout the summer (at least until the snow begins to fall at this site). Much of my work is now focused on quantifying the different chemical forms of sulfur at Borup Fiord Pass. Expect more posts from me in the near future that details some of the various types of instruments and methods that I'm using in this endeavor.

Using the Field Microsensor Multimeter from Unisense to measure sulfide (Image: Alexis Templeton)

The Connection to Europa

There's been a lot of buzz in the press and social media lately regarding Europa. Europa is one of the four Galilean Moons of Jupiter and is definitely one of the more intriguing places in our solar system for astrobiologists. Europa bears a deep subsurface ocean, and that ocean might have been in recent communication with the surface. If life ever came about in the ocean of Europa, we might have the potential to find signs of such life near the surface of that moon. We're now working on the next spacecraft that will explore Europa.  

Europa's awesome surface textures and deep subsurface ocean are enough to scientifically justify a mission to that moon, but the possibility for life detection in materials at Europa have bolstered scientific and public support together and now it looks like we might soon see a Europa mission on its way to Jupiter. For us to better understand what signs of life we may find on Europa, it's a good idea to study life in icy environments here on Earth. Places like Lake Vostok and Blood Falls in Antarctica and Borup Fiord Pass, my field site, in the Arctic can aide in this type of research. Indeed, Borup Fiord Pass has gotten its fair share of press as a Europa analogue site. Here are articles from Wired, Space.com, Popular Science, and CBC News that report on the importance of Borup Fiord Pass in our search for life on Europa.

With Lake Vostok and other ice-covered Antarctic lakes, as well as some recent research on a drilling project to study the organisms living under the Ross Ice Shelf, we can explore ecosystems in lakes and oceans deep below icy environments. Research in these areas may highlight the techniques we'll need if we ever want to get through the ice on Europa and explore the ocean below.  However, that ice is very thick (probably at least 1 km but maybe more than 10 km in thickness), and it will take us a long time to build a spacecraft with the right technology to get down there. In the meantime, there's a lot that we have to learn about Europa's ocean and the possibility for signs of life to be found in the near-surface of the ice through an orbiter mission and our first lander mission. That's where our work at Borup Fiord Pass comes in. By studying the connection of subsurface microbial processes to the chemical and biology processes that occur where fluids make their way through the ice and to the surface, we might be able to highlight some key signs of life to look for near the Europan surface.  

I was recently at NASA's Ames Research Center for the Workshop on the Potential for Finding Life in a Europa Plume. There are a lot of us who are now trying to figure out what the best instrumentation is to send to Europa to capture signs of life.  You might have read recently about the potential discovery of water plumes coming out of Europa.  Although some of us are highly skeptical of the data in that study, if there are water plumes at Europa, they may offer even more insight into the processes that are occurring in the subsurface ocean.  Even if the plumes are not there, we still have a lot to learn with the mission that we'll be sending to Europa. If we can get data about the chemistry of the surface or, better yet, the near subsurface, then we may be able to find signs of life from the subsurface ocean.  This of course requires that fluid from the ocean has made its way through the ice and to the near surface. There's a lot of "ifs" involved, but that's part of the fun of science.

In the coming months, I'll be writing up posts that detail the importance of sulfur for astrobiology as well as the importance of Borup Fiord Pass in our exploration of Europa (and other worlds). These are important topics for me, especially since they'll be included in my Ph.D. dissertation.  Before I leave you, though, here's a sweet infographic from NASA regarding Europa, one of the most intriguing worlds in our solar system: