Now that we are finished with all the sea floor sediment sampling for the big experiment we can to go back and dive our Cape Armitage dive hole, which I’ve been looking forward to revisiting for quite some time.

Sampling sea-ice interface at our Cape Armitage dive hole.

I’m not saying that our normal dive site at the Jetty isn’t cool, but for a majority of the dive we’re focused on 5 X 5 foot section of mud. Well… I think Andrew’s focused for the majority of the time, but I’m still in awe and easily distracted. We have had SEALS swimming around us and calling back and forth to each other while we’re working on our past three dives! How cool is that? I mean you’re not going to NOT try and swim off and play with them…

Today was zero sediment collection and the only goal for the dive was for me to collect three syringe samples in order to determine if there are any of the bacterial predators I’m studying for my PhD research in the Antarctic. While I sampled Andrew photo documented the dive site. My sampling is super quick, just a syringe from the sea-ice interface, another at 15 feet and one just off the sea floor, which leaves a lot of time to explore. Cape Armitage is such an amazing dive site. I can’t write the exact words to tell you how incredible this site is, but I can show you what it looks like through the lens of Andrew’s underwater camera.

Giant vase sponge on Dayton’s Wall.

The sea floor at the Armitage dive site is very steep almost like a wall or a cliff with all sorts of life clinging to it. Above is the shot Andrew got looking almost straight up, and you can see our dive hole and down line off to the right.