I heard about Clinton and its popular lakes, Pavillion and Kelly, only a few months ago when I approached Dr. Greg Slater about beginning a Masters project under his supervision at McMaster University.  Little did I know my interest in geochemistry and astrobiology would lead to a wonderful experience in a small town across the country.  When I was offered the opportunity to come to BC to see the field site for myself, collect my own samples, and meet the rest of the Pavillion Lake Research Project (PLRP) team, I was ecstatic.  Most Masters students aren’t fortunate enough to do all this before they even start their project!

My research over the next couple years will involve identifying a potential biosignature associated with the precipitated carbonate that makes up the microbialites in Kelly Lake.  Biosignatures are mineral, organic, or isotopic characteristics that are unequivocal evidence of life. Microbial biosignatures have been found in similar systems such as Pavillion Lake, and so I’m interested in understanding how these compare to biosignatures that are hypothesized to exist in the Kelly Lake microbialites. The results of this research may have implications in the use of biosignatures in the search for extra-terrestrial life.

When I arrived in Clinton, I had no idea that such a small community would show so much support for the PLRP and be so genuinely interested in our research.  Our community day on July 23^rd had an exceptional turn out and exemplified the desire of the community to be a part of what we are doing.  Tours were given through the Mobile Mission Control Center (MMCC) during the day, where the Science Backroom Team, CapCom, and the Flight Director communicated with one of the deep submersibles while watching a live feed of their underwater mission.  I couldn’t believe the number of people who were waiting anxiously to see inside this NASA trailer that was parked by the Cariboo Lodge all week.  Later in the day, BC Parks hosted a gathering down by Kelly Lake to celebrate their 100^th Anniversary and their collaboration with the PLRP.  The Minister of the Environment, Terry Lake, made and appearance and everyone seemed to have a great time. Check out the community day photos here.

I would like to thank the Clinton community once more for being such gracious hosts as our large research team overran their town and studied their lakes.  Talking to everyone about this project has made me really excited to start my research in September and has given me a much better perspective on the overall project.  My experience here has been invaluable and I hope to return one day in the future!

By: Sarah Soles

Most days I do science in a bright, cluttered (yet clean), indoor laboratory. Right now, I am sitting on the shore of a pristine lake in British Columbia, waiting for samples of microbialites. Long days and late nights in lab is what you pay the piper for sample collections in beautiful, remote locations.

What I knew of British Columbia was what I saw during the Vancouver Olympics and a handful of nature shows. It was beautiful, with tall mountains, good skiing, and killer whales. What I didn’t know was how diverse and rugged the landscape would be. I flew into Vancouver and drove a rental car up to our field site along with my advisor, Dr. Jen Biddle. We passed through the city into tall snow-capped peaks covered in conifers. Beautiful, but about what I expected for BC. My expectations were quickly dashed. Lush forests spit waterfalls down into the Fraser River. Within an hour or two, the conifers gave way to more rock outcroppings, and eventually huge, sheer cliffs with rocks of all different colors. The vegetation changed to more bristly, desert flora. Winding streams worked their way through distant pastures, dotted with gnarled trees, horses, and cows; eventually all spilling into the Fraser, a constant throughout our drive. As we approached the town of Clinton, our base of operations for this expedition, the conifers returned, although this time in different arrangements. The dense coastal firs, spruces, and hemlocks gave way to more sparse cedars and ponderosa pine forests that populated steep, rocky canyons. Tucked away deep in the folds of these ancient canyons are two very unique and exciting lakes.

Pavilion Lake and Kelly Lake are home to a fantastic display of microbialites. A fun, quirky, inspired (from what I’m beginning to see) group of scientists with a variety of backgrounds have descended on these lakes to study these structures because they may hold answers to some of the most profound questions we can ask. What did some of the earliest life on this planet look like? How did it survive and evolve? The fossil records show that for a couple billion years of our planets history, life existed similarly to how it does on the microbialites of Pavilion and Kelly Lake. If these structures were such an important first step in Earth’s life history, might they also be something to look for when we eventually explore other planetary bodies in our solar system and beyond? As a microbiologist, with a strong interest in astrobiology, these questions floor me. To be here in this beautiful countryside searching for answers is what some refer to as “pinch me” moments.

My role here is to help understand the bacterial communities that live on the surface of the microbialites, and from what we can tell, drive their formation. I have spent the past few days taking part in planning and execution of submersible dives and sample collection. Once samples arrive at base camp, I extensively document what I see. Interesting features such as curious green and purple nodules that may be the site of carbonate formation on the surface of the microbialites are sub-sampled and examined under the microscope. Larger chunks of microbialite are carefully bagged and frozen for shipment back to the lab at the University of Delaware. There, I will extract DNA to study the microbial population of these structures on the genomic level to determine which members of this population are most important at different depths. This study highlights one of the unique attributes of Kelly Lake and Pavilion Lake. Microbialites are found in a handful of places around the globe yet these lakes are the only environment where they are found at such a variety of depths (thus differential access to light). It is our hope that these varying growth environments within the lake will be able to highlight distinct attributes of microbialites that made them so successful on early Earth and could possibly aid their formation on other planetary bodies.

Written by:  Joe Russell

One of our tough divers - water is not very warm.

Diving for Samples

Jenn Biddle - Science backroom

I’m so excited to be officially joining the PLRP team this year as part of the science team. I got excited about astrobiology in graduate school and after my PhD, was a NASA Astrobiology Institute postdoctoral fellow. When I became a professor, I kept looking for ways to stay involved in NASA and astrobiology science. I collaborate with the NASA Astrobiology Institute at Penn State University and now am part of the PLRP team!

I typically do deep sea research, so the PLRP approach of using manned submarines is not too unusual to me. What is unusual is that we’re taking an analog mission approach to the science and exploration – complete with a mobile mission command center. I’ve been really impressed with the amount of infrastructure that the team has had to create in order to do their work, including setting up wifi in remote places and running video feeds across miles. Typically my research done on a ship has communications already on it – we just hop on and do science. Coming to a remote (and beautiful!) site in British Columbia certainly presents challenges.

Today I got my full immersion into PLRP science and headed up the science backroom team for the third dive in Kelly Lake. One disadvantage of a single manned sub is that only one person is seeing and observing things in real time. Maybe they can take a video, but the rest of us might wait hours to see it. That means decisions are slowed and science might be impeded. So this year the team designed a way to have a sub tethered to a cable, sending video feeds to the surface – and then the coms team has been able to shoot video back to the mobile mission command center. What this means is that many of us scientists can sit in comfort and see and hear what the pilot of the sub is observing. That way we can confer on what we are seeing immediately, add extra sets of eyes to a busy pilot and give advice or opinions on what is happening. Really what we did was sit back and go “Cool!” when a lovely microbialite would pop up on the screen.

We additionally got a true mission-feel when we started doing delayed communications. If an astronaut is off of the Earth, it takes a while to talk to them! So even though our sub pilot was only a few kilometers away, we gave ourselves a delay to see how things would go. Not surprisingly, it did seem easier – doesn’t your job go better when your “boss” stops interrupting you? But we’ll see how well it works when we actually want samples. Maybe 10 brains are better than one – maybe not! It’s part of this week’s experiments. My final experiments won’t be done for a while. We are collecting samples from Pavilion and Kelly Lakes to continue to describe the microbial communities that are in the microbialites. My group is specifically interested in the phototrophic (light-harvesting) communities, who we expect are driving the distinct shapes we see in these structures. Our work is in progress, so now updates yet – but watch for later updates as we start to unravel the mysteries of these beautiful and mysterious microbialites!

Written By: Jennifer Biddle

Inside the MMCC

Inside the MMCC

Bill keeping - comunications, MMCC

Darlene Lim (PI) - Inside the MMCC - there are million ideas going on inside her head right now

We’re up and almost running. A 16 km drive down the Kelly Lake Road with crane, barge, DeepWorker submersibles and Nuytco crew in tow – the barge is assembled and ready to go! The Nuytco and PLRP crew worked hard piecing together the barge, which will serve as a platform to launch the DeepWorkers. Subs due to launch around noon tomorrow. Check the barge assemble process in the photos below.

Mars life crew went back to Pavilion Lake to confirm preliminary data from last season. The divers sampled surface water in the central basin of the lake, and the 3 poles transect at 85 feet; both water and microbialites. These samples will be examined for total community analysis, metabolic potential and metabolic function. Check out the sample collection photos below. The Sea Monkey’s are a favorite.

[Show as slideshow]

Hello from the Johnson Space Center, home of human space flight operations. I am Lauren Rush, this year’s mission planner, and this my first Kelly Lake blog entry for the 2011 deepworker operations. You can read my bio here. First of all, I am so happy to be a part of the Pavilion Lake Research Project (PLRP)… or are we changing the name to Kelly Lake Research Project for this year? Better yet, how about Deepworker Research Project? I guess it doesn’t matter what you call it. This is a super neat science and exploration project that I and my team are psyched to be involved in this year. Allow me to introduce the rest of my team in today’s blog and explain what we do for PLRP. My team coordinates the planning and operations efforts between the mission planning team and the PLRP scientists and experts. For the last 5 or so years at Johnson Space Center, I’ve been mostly focused in the shuttle world, planning the days of shuttle missions. But you would be surprised to learn there are similarities between a day on shuttle and a day at Kelly Lake. I hope to blog about this in the next couple of months.

I am joined by Matt Fox, an expert in International Space Station mission planning. Matt has worked so hard to put together this year’s mission plan, a timeline for each activity that happens both at the lake and the base camp. The mission plan is a highly integrated, logistical illustration of how each day lays out and how mission objectives are accomplished. Basically we coordinate where the project participants should go and when they should be there. That is a lot of work considering there are about 80 participants this year and all kind of activities going on, including submarine operations, boat operations, dive operations, barge operations, data analysis, mobile Mission Control Center (mMCC), community and media events, and base camp activities.

Ron Stueber, Matt Fox and Lauren Rush

Lastly, Matt and I are accompanied by Ron Stueber, who is both an expert in analog missions, like PLRP, as well as the software tools we are using to plan this mission. A little background about the scheduling tool that you will see me mention in the future is that it is called Score. And surprisingly enough, Score is not an acronym for anything, as we use lots of acronyms around here at NASA. Score is being developed by Ames Research Center (ARC) for planning use on International Space Station and future exploration programs. Score leverages the scheduling capabilities created by ARC and Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) for missions such as the Mars Exploration Rovers (Spirit and Opportunity), Phoenix Lander and the upcoming Mars Science Laboratory (MSL) mission. The JPL and ARC development teams have created an “Ensemble Suite” of software (plug-in tools), based off of the open source Ensemble Integrated Development Environment (IDE), that can be added to/removed from the core planning software. This allows new functions and capabilities to be added to Score so that it can be used to support other missions, such as NASA Extreme Environment Mission Operations (NEEMO), Desert Research And Technology Studies (DRATS) and Pavilion Lake analog missions. Our team will be using Score to support the Pavilion Lake Research Project (PLRP) by providing a visual representation of the highly complex, integrated multi-disciplinary science and exploration mission. The capabilities of Score will allow the team to easily identify relationships between the science and exploration teams and the impact of unexpected schedule delays while maintaining mission cognizance. Hope that was enough about Score to confuse all of you reading this blog entry! I am looking forward to sharing my team’s planning experiences during the upcoming Kelly Lake mission, and I hope you will share your experiences and comment on my posts.

- Lauren (aka. Engineeringirl)

Today was my first research dive of the 2010 PLRP season, starting a project on microbialite morphology. I am a geology graduate student from UC-Davis and, while I’m not a true microbiologist, my thesis work is focused on the potential signatures that their communities can leave in the rock record.

Side view of the MOUS showing vertically oriented growth structures (note lasers are 10cm apart)

Growth processes in the Pavilion Lake microbialites may give insight into the significance of ancient microbial carbonates. I’m particularly excited to join the PLRP crew because of the wide range of microbialite morphologies that are present here. In the course of the next two weeks, I will be diving on one particularly large microbialite, affectionately dubbed the MOUS (microbialite of unusual size). The carbonate structure is apparently templating a boulder from a rockslide. While today was mostly an exploratory dive to photograph and survey the structure, I will mostly be investigating the relationship among light regime, microbialite morphology, and invertebrate grazers.

Above the MOUS with blocks of microbialite

Locating the MOUS underwater was our first task of the day. We dropped down near its recorded location and then followed the lake bottom down along a landmark rockslide until we reached 85 feet. From previous dive records, we knew that the top of the structure was at 87 feet, so we swam parallel to shore until we intersected it. The visibility in Pavilion Lake is great (particularly as I’ve done most of my training off of Northern CA) so it was pretty easy to spot.

Sediment deposit with surrounding growth on the top of the MOUS

While my dive buddy, Mike Delaney, worked putting in a temporary transect line to help us more reliably locate the structure (particularly during night dives), I photographed some of the major regions. Large blocks have spalled off the side of the structure throughout its growth, forming an incipient conglomerate of sorts at its base. I’d love to see this in the rock record!

Mike Delaney installing temporary transect line

One of the aspects of modern analogues that really fascinates me is time-averaging. What we see here on the surface of the lake is a geological instant, and over time the current growth surface will be incorporated into the microbialite subsurface. What would this look like? Outside of this project, one of my broader research questions is determining what sort of paeleoenvironmental record might be left in a microbialite, and how that signature is altered with preservation, or lack thereof.

I’m excited to learn more about the interactions between these microbialite structures and their surrounding environment as the field season progresses. There is always room for the unexpected in fieldwork, and I look forward to seeing what future dives will uncover in the lives of these microbial communities.

-Tyler

Editor’s note: Tyler’s boyish good looks have earned him the affectionate nickname “Boy” among the science team – resulting in the title of the blog entry.

As I near the end of my doctoral studies, I reflect on how different my thesis is from what I actually started four years ago but at the same time how much things come full circle. My involvement began when I started using UBC-Gavia, an Autonomous Underwater Vehicle, to map the bottom of the lake. Unfortunately, as a result of the slope steepness in this lake, we found it very hard to accomplish and so the focus of my thesis is on water temperature and physical transport. That said, I’ve maintained a soft spot for image mosaicing.

Gavia, the Autonomous Underwater Vehicle (AUV)

Just recently, we have been working with people from the Center for Coastal and Ocean Mapping (CCOM) and the University of Delaware to mosaic not only the images we have been collecting but also those Deepworker images. The first, and easier dataset to work with, was the flat sections in the middle of the lake which has been of interest due to the microbialite mats that have been observed there. These are easier to process as don’t have roll and pitch errors that are introduced. Below is just a very small sample of what the final product that can be generated.

Mosaic of images collected by UBC-Gavia of microbial mats from the central basin (length of image is about 10 m long).

In addition to running AUVs, I am also lucky enough to participate in PLRP by being a Deepworker pilot and I was able to have my first flight yesterday. After finishing my mission yesterday and completing all my objectives, I was told that I had a bit of extra time left over so I leaped at the opportunity at testing my new found mosaicing skills. As I was coming back to the barge, I passed by what people around here call ‘microbiliate roads’; long straight lines of microbialite that are aligned along the slope. Lining up the camera, I tried to film a long straight line up the slope. Although the mosaic still has some error resulting from vehicle pitch – you can see this in the image by the fact that it begins to ‘pinch’ out – but I was still pretty happy with the first attempt.

So now the next step is to refine the processing so that we can start using these images for our mission planning for both AUV and Deepworker flights. Part of doing this is to clean the images to remove the roll and pitch effects and then we can drape these images over the bathymetry data that we are collecting. This will allow us to start creating a georeferenced map of the photos.

- Alex