When Chuck Amsler arrived at Palmer Station in February 2007, he was coming back to a place with many fond memories. Amsler, 48, is a marine algal ecophysiologist, meaning he’s a biologist who studies, among other things, the physiological adaptations of algae to their environments. That includes macroalgae, large marine plants also known as seaweeds.
Amsler made his first trip to Palmer from December 1985 to March 1986 as a volunteer field assistant with a team of researchers from the University of California at Santa Barbara. That team included Amsler’s wife, Maggie, a biologist who was then making her fourth trip to Antarctica. She is also a member of the current UAB team (her 16th field season on the Antarctic Peninsula).
"I wanted to find out why my wife kept leaving me for three months a year," Amsler joked. Besides giving him a common ground with his wife, Antarctica grabbed the young researcher's imagination. "I became excited about the scientific opportunities there on that trip and immediately began trying to get back to do my own work."
He returned to Palmer in 1989 at the behest of the National Science Foundation to assess the damage caused by a shipwreck and oil spill close to the station. Since then he has co-lead four expeditions to Palmer Station between 2000 and 2004 (a total of over ten months) looking at the chemical defenses of marine organisms and endeavoring to understand exactly how they use these chemicals to defend themselves. On two of those expeditions, he has also served as the overall Station Science Leader, which is a post he holds again during the 2007 expedition.
In the 11 years between his second and third visits to Palmer, Amsler was part of three research expeditions to McMurdo Station Antarctica. Two of the trips to McMurdo, in 1997 and 1998, studied the chemical ecology of invertebrates, algae, and bacteria, The third trip, soon after Amsler came to UAB in 1994, studied the ecophysiology of microalgae that live in sea ice. He was back diving at McMurdo in November-December 2005 as a member of the US Antarctic Program's Scientific Diving Control Board, the authority that oversees all scientific diving by US Antarctic scientists.
Amsler looks forward to this seventh season back at Palmer. With about 35 to no more than 44 researchers and support personnel in residence, Palmer is "another world from McMurdo," a station with sometimes more than 1,000 people living there.
"Both Palmer and McMurdo are wondrous places to live and to do marine biology," Amsler said, "but they are about as different from one another as two places can be."
One difference is the sea bottom near Palmer, which is dominated by macroalgae. Phycology is the formal name of the scientific study of algae. Amsler noted "Palmer and the area of Antarctica it is in are a true wonderland for a phycologist because of the large biomass of macroalgae and the dominant role they play in the marine communities. There are forests here, forests of macroalgae beneath the waves. It is such a special place to be and study."