Last month the PERMANTAR team drilled a new borehole in bedrock in Barton Peninsula, which will be part of the Global Terrestrial Network for Permafrost. We used a "portable" Weka drill powered by an electrical generator and after some hard work carrying all equipment up to 120 m asl by hand, we succeeded in installing a new observatory down to 13 m. The field team was Gonçalo Vieira, Daniel Vonder Mühll, Carlos Neto and Joana Baptista, with excellent support of Pedro Pina and Vasco Miranda from the VEGETANTAR project and Alper Gürbüz of the Niğde Ömer Halisdemir University. The drilling campaign was a collaboration between the CEG/IGOT - University of Lisbon, ETH, CERENA/IST-University of Lisbon and KOPRI. Funds were provided by the Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia through the Programa Polar Português, CEG/IGOT and the Swiss GCOS Office.
PERMANTAR was also active this season in Livingston and Deception Islands, as well as in Cierva Point. More info on these soon.

Mohammad Farzamian (IDL/ULISBOA) has now started the Electrical Resistivity Tomography surveys at Deception Island. Mohammad and Miguel Angel de Pablo (UAH) are also maintaining the observatories of Crater Lake, Irizar, Alluval fan and Chilean hut.

This year, the applied geophysics group of IDL (Prof. Monteiro Santos, Dr. Mohammad Farzamian and Miguel Esteves) developed an automated Electrical Resistivity Tomography system with a solar panel-driven battery and multi-electrode configuration to install at Deception Island, associated to the existing Crater Lake site of the Circumpolar Active Layer Monitoring Network (CALM) and corresponding boreholes of the Global Terrestrial Network for Permafrost (GTN-P) in order to study the long-term climatic trend on the ground thermal regime as well as to investigate the impact of the short-lived extreme meteorological events on the soil horizon. 

PERMANTAR activities in 2019 are just starting, with the maintenance of the observatories along the Antarctic Peninsula and the South Shetlands being conducted by 4 field teams, and also a new borehole to be installed in Barton Peninsula (King George Island) and new electrical resistivity surveys to be conducted in Deception Island:

- Deception Island - Mohammad Farzamian (IDL/ULISBOA) and Miguel Angel de Pablo (UAH) will maintain the observatories of Crater Lake, Irizar, Alluval fan and Chilean hut, and will install a new monitoring electrical resistivitimeter in Crater Lake, as well as repeat surveys to compare with observations one decade ago.

- Barton Peninsula - Gonçalo Vieira, Carlos Neto, Joana Baptista (CEG/IGOT-ULISBOA), Daniel Vondermuehll (ETH), Pedro Pina and Vasco Miranda (CERENA/IST) in collaboration with the Korean Polar Research Institute (Soon Gyu Hong) will drill a new permafrost borehole.

- Hurd Pensinsula (Livingston Island) - Dragomir Mateev, Oleg Vassilev  (Bulgarian Antarctic Institute) with the support of Nuno Pereira (IPB) will conduct the maintenance of the permafrost observatories Ohridski Station, Ohridski 1 CALM and Ohridski 2 Papagal, and conduct GNSS survey of terrain deformation at the PERMANTAR solifluction monitoring sites and Hurd rock glacier.

- Cierva Cove - Pedro Almeida (UBI) will do the maintenance of the two active permafrost boreholes.

- Amsler Island (Palmer archipelago) - Support provided by the National Science Foundation for downloading borehole data.

Miguel Ramos, Gabriel Goyanes and Sara Ramos departed to Antarctica to conduct the maintenance of the PERMANTAR borehole network in Livingston Island and Cierva Cove. Sites in Deception Island have been maintained this season by Miguel Angel de Pablo.
This season activities also include high resolution surveying of the PERMANTAR sites using Unmanned Aerial Vehicles and the annual measurement of Hurd rock glacier deformation in Livingston Island.
The PERMANTAR 2017-18 campaign is a collaboration between the CEG/IGOT - Universidade de Lisboa, the Universidad de Alcalá (Spain), the Instituto Português do Mar e da Atmosfera and Krummholz - Biogeosciences for Society.

In a long and beautiful summer day, Gonçalo Vieira and João Ferreira, have collected the data from all the shallow boreholes installed in Cierva Point and upgraded the 15 m borehole with a new Geoprecision datalogger and temperature string.

After problems that affected the string inside the borehole, in February 2017 the Amsler Island permafrost borehole (9 m) was upgraded using a new Geoprecision logger and temperature string, allowing for higher accuracy, longer battery life and higher memory, thus reducing maintenance costs. The field team was composed by Gonçalo Vieira and João Ferreira, which counted with the help of Pedro Guerreiro and Carmen Sousa, and with the logistical support of the Spanish vessel Hesperides.