 I'm a soil scientist based at Lincoln University and I'm fascinated by the movement of carbon dioxide into and out of soils in the dry valleys of Antarctica. The dry valleys are a fantastic part of Antarctica as you know most of the continents covered by ice but we have these small parts of the landscape that are essentially ice free. In these ice free areas there are incredible microorganisms that exist basically at the limit of life. It's really cold, it's really dry, it's windy, it's salty, all of those things that make it difficult for life to exist. So what we're looking at is putting in long term monitoring stations to look at how the activity of these microorganisms changes over time. And by doing that we can then compare those sorts of records with records that we get from other locations and basically set up some way of predicting how these communities might respond to future climate change. What I've discovered is that there are natural physical processes going on in these soils that also produce carbon dioxide. So just like you and I when these microorganisms eat digest food they respire CO2. But at the same time in these dry valley soils which have a very unusual chemistry we have a natural physical process that also produces CO2. What we're trying to do in the system is to disentangle the biologically produced CO2 from the non biologically produced CO2 so that we can get a true signal of how active these communities really are.