YOU’RE KRILLING ME
Published in the March 28, 2026 edition.
While most people spent the 1970s roller skating and listening to disco in bell bottom jeans, Bishop homeowner Bill Krebs was in Antarctica.
As a geology graduate student at UC Davis, Krebs spent 14 months at Palmer Station studying diatoms, which are microscopic, single-celled algae that form the base of the marine food web. His research, conducted in one of the most remote laboratories on Earth, helped shape scientific understanding of these organisms across past, present, and future ecosystems.
Krebs presented his findings Tuesday evening at the White Mountain Research Center in Bishop, where he spends his time when he’s not living in a tiny Texas town with a population of 87 people.
Diatoms, sometimes called the “grass of the sea,” are encased in glass-like shells made of silica and are responsible for absorbing roughly 20–25% of the world’s atmospheric carbon dioxide. In Antarctica, they appear as a brown stain in sea ice and shallow coastal waters.
“This brown stain right here?” Krebs said, pointing to a photograph from his time in Antarctica. “That’s not from a seal’s busy bowels. It’s diatom growth.”
Because diatoms sit at the base of the food chain, Antarctic life depends on them. Krill eat them, and everything else eats the krill.
But before Krebs’ expedition in the early 1970s, scientists knew very little about how diatoms behaved throughout the year. Few were willing and able to brave the cold, dark winter to study them.
Krebs was.
In November 1970, he traveled from Sacramento to Santiago, Chile, then onward through southern South America before boarding a World War II-era icebreaker to cross the Drake Passage. After that lengthy journey, he arrived at Palmer Station, which at the time was little more than a few buildings and some fuel tanks.
The station sits along the Antarctic Peninsula, sometimes called the “banana belt” of Antarctica for its relatively mild conditions.
But mild is relative.
Winds still whip at speeds up to 90 miles per hour on the peninsula, and for roughly 40 days each winter, the sun never rises.
Krebs’ communication with the outside world was limited to shortwave radio. Traveling between nearby points sometimes meant riding a cable across icy terrain, where you “better as hell put your feet up in time otherwise you’ll do a Wile E. Coyote into the rock,” he said.
Still, Krebs and his colleagues carved out moments of normalcy, barbecuing outside on calm summer days and celebrating Midwinter Day with elaborate meals and decorations.
When not playing clarinet for penguins or indulging in Argentinian wine, much of Krebs’ work involved collecting seawater samples from Arthur Harbor in a small boat. Back in the lab, he analyzed temperature, salinity, carbon dioxide levels, pH, and silica.
What he discovered reshaped scientist’s understanding of Antarctic ecosystems.
During the dark winter months, diatom populations nearly vanished. But as spring arrived and sea ice began to melt, trapped diatoms were released back into the water, seeding explosive blooms. These blooms didn’t occur just once, as scientists had assumed, but multiple times throughout the year.
The reason for this isn’t all that different from something familiar to the Eastern Sierra – lots and lots of wind.
Strong Antarctic winds regularly disrupted the water column, dispersing concentrated diatom populations and ending each bloom. As conditions stabilized, new blooms would form, creating a repeating, or “trimodal,” pattern of growth.
Krebs’ work was among the first to document this full seasonal cycle.
His research also showed that diatoms embedded in sea ice can accelerate melting by absorbing solar radiation, weakening the ice structure and contributing to its breakup.
By analyzing how diatom remains accumulate in ocean sediments, Krebs demonstrated that about 70% of living diatom communities are preserved after death. This high preservation rate allows scientists to use fossilized diatoms to reconstruct ancient ocean conditions and climate changes.
Later studies built on his work, using sediment cores from the Antarctic seafloor to trace environmental shifts over the past 13,000 years, from the end of the last Ice Age to modern warming trends.
What began as an “esoteric” study, as Krebs said, has since become foundational. His findings have been validated by satellite data and expanded upon with modern technology, confirming that the seasonal patterns he observed are widespread across Antarctic waters.
Not bad for a year spent staring at brown ice.
