Antarctica Unfiltered: Don Cowan on Water, Waste, and Life in the Dry Valleys

[00:00:00] Jo Burgess: Welcome to the Exec Exchange, 15 minute podcasts in which a leader from the water sector shares a story with Dr. Piers Clark to inspire, inform, and educate other water sector leaders from around the globe.
[00:00:13] Jo Burgess: Today, my name is Dr. Jo Burgess, and this is a special Christmas episode in which our guest is Professor Don Cowan from the Department of Biochemistry, Genetics, and Microbiology at the University of Pretoria in South Africa. Don is a polar explorer.
[00:00:29] Jo Burgess: Don, brilliant to see you again. Thank you very much for joining us.
[00:00:32] Don Cowan: It is a pleasure, thank you.
[00:00:34] Jo Burgess: For the folks that don't know you, who's Don Cowan and what takes him to Polar Regions?
[00:00:39] Don Cowan: I'm a professor at the University of Pretoria in Pretoria, South Africa. I went to the university of the age of 18 and never left.
[00:00:47] Don Cowan: I got to go to Antarctica first as a student, as a pack horse field assistant back in 1977 and decided then that it was such a wonderful, magnificent, awe inspiring place that I had to get back there someday. And I eventually did 20 years later or thereabouts, I got the opportunity to return as a scientist and to start asking the sort of questions that scientists like to ask.
[00:01:09] Don Cowan: We didn't just go to Antarctica, we went to the dry valleys of Antarctica, which are very special. They're deserts, very cold deserts, but they're genuine deserts. So, although there's a lot of water there, it's all frozen. And that's been my focus for the last 25 years, the microbiology of this very extreme cold desert.
[00:01:26] Jo Burgess: And when you were a scientist in the Antarctic dry valleys. What's your working day look like? Are you based in buildings? Is there a research base? Are you camping?
[00:01:35] Jo Burgess: What do your working conditions look like?
[00:01:38] Don Cowan: I work with the Americans and the New Zealanders, and their particular model is very much a field camp model. So you do a few days training in the nearest base, which is about an hour's flight away out in Ross Island. And then you get dumped with you and your colleagues and your ton of gear dumped on the sand somewhere in the dry valleys and they fly away and leave you to it.
[00:01:57] Don Cowan: And so a typical day, you set everything up, you set up your tents depending on how sophisticated you are, how long you're gonna be there. You set up your kitchen, you set up your toilet facilities, and then you live there.
[00:02:08] Don Cowan: Antartica is a difficult place to do experimental work. And so microbiologists like myself, we tend to focus very much on collecting samples that are going to go back to the laboratories for much more detailed work at things you can't do out in the field.
[00:02:24] Don Cowan: Basically a day is very often shouldering them, not too heavy pack, climbing the nearest mountain or walking up the nearest valley and returning after a reasonable breakfast, 8 to 10 to 12 hours later with a much heavier pack filled with bags of sand.
[00:02:39] Jo Burgess: Excellent. When you mentioned setting up camp, you talked about setting up the toilets, and that's one half of the water cycle that I'm particularly interested in.
[00:02:47] Jo Burgess: What do your toilets look like? And if you're working in a desert and you're pack holding everything in, does that mean you have to take water with you?
[00:02:54] Don Cowan: In the Antarctic, no, we don't take water in because there's always a source of water somewhere. You can chip ice off a glacial front. You can dig snow out of a snow pack if there's one handy.
[00:03:05] Don Cowan: But a lot of the valleys have intermittent stream flows in summer, remember we only worked down there in summer. Glacial melt produces ephemeral streams. They're normally frozen first thing in the morning, but wait for them to thaw out, and then you can get sometimes slightly salty, generally slightly gravelly water.
[00:03:22] Don Cowan: So water supply isn't a problem. If it's come from a glacier, it's a hundred thousand years old. And it's absolutely clean, so no water treatment required, which is remarkable. It's one of the few places in the world where you probably don't need to do that.
[00:03:35] Jo Burgess: Brilliant. But once you've drunk it, I mean, as soon as you give people drinking water, the first thing they do with it is make wastewater. What do you do with the waste when you're finished with it?
[00:03:45] Don Cowan: This is all bound up with conservation and environmental protection protocols that override everything when you're working in Antarctica.
[00:03:53] Don Cowan: Remember, Antarctica is so-called the last pristine continent, the one that hasn't been messed up by human activity. And although it's maybe hard to find a place where a human boot has never stood, still entirely possible, but the concept as originally established in the treaty, "a continent for peace and science", I think they said, was that scientists who work there should leave it in a form that is essentially unmodified so the next generation or the one after that, or one after that can essentially continue that work without an anthropogenic influence of any sort.
[00:04:25] Don Cowan: The implication for this then is that all waste, liquid, solid, human, gray water and any other cooking material, is bagged and shipped out. Reason that one therefore limits water use as much as possible. So, you don't really wash when you're down there. Once every two weeks I have a full bath and 500 mL of water. The reason of course is that every liter of water that you take from a stream or a glacial mass melt drink or put in your food, ends up in a container that has to be shipped out by helicopter.
[00:04:59] Don Cowan: The helicopters bring in 1600 pounds of gear. They want to return everybody to base with 1600 pounds, plus or minus. They don't want 2,600 because you've got 10 enormous barrels of water because everybody had a shower.
[00:05:14] Jo Burgess: Gray water and wastewater of course.
[00:05:16] Don Cowan: Yeah, exactly.
[00:05:17] Jo Burgess: Alright, so what do the toilets actually look like?
[00:05:19] Don Cowan: It depends on the camp you're in. If you're in a large, well-funded American camp, you've probably got a chemical toilet in a nice blue plastic box.
[00:05:27] Don Cowan: In a very simple kiwi camp, you have a orange plastic bucket, supermarket type bucket 25 liter with a wooden toilet seat sitting on top of it and a blue bag inside of it. The blue bags are very important. There's also a white plastic 22 liter barrel with a wide mouth funnel. So, solid waste in the orange bucket and liquid waste in the white barrel.
[00:05:48] Don Cowan: Solid waste. Of course, it's cold enough so it freezes pretty readily. The bags are double sealed and shipped out in the rear cargo hold of the helicopter.
[00:05:58] Jo Burgess: Brilliant. Where do they go once they're shipped? Do they get delivered to the local sewage treatment works? Do you know what happens to them once they've left Antarctica?
[00:06:06] Don Cowan: As I understand it, liquid waste can be disposed of in the sea. And solid waste is put onto the first cargo ship that comes down to the Ross Sea area and is shipped back to New Zealand for secure incineration.
[00:06:20] Don Cowan: This is part of the conservation imperative, which is zero impact, particularly zero chemical impact on any environment you work in. You wouldn't dream of pouring the dregs of your coffee cup out on the sand. It's just would never be done, or it should never be done because that would contaminate a piece of sand with some foreign material. It's going to be there in a hundred years time.
[00:06:42] Don Cowan: So very careful protection of liquids and solids, and what I always found really quite inspiring was at least the teams I worked with, buy into this concept absolutely and totally.
[00:06:53] Jo Burgess: Excellent. If anybody in the audience is an overlander, a remote camper, that's something we should all be doing whenever we go into remote regions, no matter where they're, even if they're not pristine dry valleys at Antarctica.
[00:07:05] Don Cowan: Yes. It hasn't always been that way. The conservation imperatives have got much stronger in the last 40 years. So when I was there in '77, there was a much more liberal approach to waste disposal.
[00:07:15] Jo Burgess: Oh, really?
[00:07:16] Don Cowan: Nobody really thought very much about it at that point, but the world's changed a lot in that time. Since the eighties the conservation perception of course, has developed enormously, thank goodness.
[00:07:28] Jo Burgess: Yeah. Sounds like a major improvement. Don, that was really interesting. The majority of the population of the world hadn't had the experience that you've had, and it sounds as though it's a set of insights that actually would carry through to not such special areas in a very real way. And we should take it all a bit more seriously.
[00:07:45] Don Cowan: You make a good point actually about the campsite. Undoubtedly in camps around South Africa is that people clean a camp and you don't leave anything on the ground.
[00:07:53] Don Cowan: You take that to extreme in the dry valleys. When you clean the camp, you walk around the entire campsite looking for any visible thread from your clothing will be picked up and taken away. Anything that you can see.
[00:08:06] Don Cowan: You hope to leave no footprints and the inevitable skin cells, which you can't do much about.
[00:08:11] Jo Burgess: Can't do a lot about that. Yeah.
[00:08:12] Don Cowan: Unless they make us wear Haz suits. They do in specially protected sites.
[00:08:17] Don Cowan: There's a group working right now, some friends of mine up on the top of Mount Erebus and the thermal steam heated soils at the top of a very high mountain, and they're all in hazmat suits. Not with breathing gear, but completely white suited, leaving only the face exposed.
[00:08:33] Jo Burgess: Interesting. Have you ever done that?
[00:08:35] Don Cowan: Worked in a hazmat suit? No. No. That's specific to very, very especially protected sites. Which in fact, normally people are not allowed into, or not even allowed to fly over them.
[00:08:46] Don Cowan: You can in fact get special permission for special reasons to attend, but there are sites around the dry valleys in particular and probably other parts of Antarctica, which are designed to be essentially kept pristine in perpetuity.
[00:08:58] Jo Burgess: Good. They should. That's a good thing. I didn't know that and it makes me happy.
[00:09:02] Jo Burgess: You have been listening to the Exec Exchange with me, Jo Burgess, and our guest today has been Professor Don Cowan from the University of Pretoria, South Africa. We've been talking about water use and waste management on polar expeditions. Thank you very much for joining us and Happy Christmas.