Abigail Jackson, MSc Student, Biology Department, Brigham Young University; BSc Colorado State University

Abby will discuss impacts of COVID-19 on Antarctic fieldwork and the unexpected opportunities. During the 2021/22 austral summer, Abby spent 4 months servicing stream gages and collecting soil samples with the NSF Long Term Ecological Research program in the McMurdo Dry Valleys of Antarctica. A quarantine period prior to reaching the US McMurdo Station required channeling her “inner nematode” (microscopic worm-like animals)that exist in extreme and isolated pockets of the ice free region. Abby’s research is a story of soil nematode populations isolated for thousands of years due to past climate change.