We had a visitor to our dive hut just before hitting the water today. A Weddell Seal!!!

Weddell Seal (Leptonychotes weddellii) Not the one we actually saw.

As soon as we  stepped into the hut and closed the door a Weddell Seal pup popped up in our dive hole for a breather. The little guy splashed around for a bit and seemed to be just as interested in us as we all were in him, peering up at us with his big doe eyes. I should clarify the Weddell Seals can easily weigh over 200lbs just 6 months after birth (and this guys was over 200lbs). He didn’t linger much longer than 30-45 seconds before disappearing back down the dive hole.

We could hear him calling out to his buddies through the ice as soon as he passed out of sight. A great start to the dive trip.

We followed shortly after down the same hole and collected all 9 of the samples we needed to start testing our experimental design. Fingers crossed that all goes well and we can start gearing up for the big experiment without delay.

Today wasn’t a bad day by any stretch of the imagination.  We got in the water to do our first science dive, got trained on our vehicle and issued it, and obtained our first samples.  However even though we got all that done, few things went as planned.

Our vehicle is a Piston Bully.  Normally found on ski slopes grooming the steep hills, this tracked vehicle can cross ice, snow, rock, and just about anything else that one throws at it.  However it is also delicate and doesn’t like the cold (?) so must be babied.  The lesson on how to baby it took 2.5 hours this morning.  I’m not bitter about this long lesson as it is a very different vehicle than most and I learned a lot.  For instance, I learned that the heater in this particular one was broken.  A broken heater in the Antarctic?  Not going to work.  Thankfully there is a great group of mechanics here that got to fixing it and fixed it right away.  

We had planned on a post lunch dive at the Jetty (the only dive sight that is open.)  1:30 seemed pretty civilized however at 1 the wind kicked up to 50 knots, the visibility went to <10ft, and walking became difficult.  Although the weather underwater would have been nice it meant we had to postpone our dive.  While that would normally be a bad thing it meant that we discovered a large leak in the aquarium and helped another science team catch the water overflowing from their aquarium onto the floor (someone else accidentally turned up their water pressure and knocked a hose spraying seawater onto the floor without noticing – flooding entailed from both).

This was the wind – the building in video is ~25 ft away.

Then the weather cleared and off we went.  This dive went OK.  I forgot a key piece of equipment in the vehicle and had to stop mid dive to get it and continue the dive.  Both Rory and Rob stayed down and then I went looking for the community that we planned on studying with little luck.  All in all we got three samples.  They are the first three samples of the season but a few less than the 9 planned. So tomorrow we go back in search of more.
 

An Anemone and Soft Coral on the sea bed.  You can also see the siphons of clams right next to the base of the anemone and little tubes.  In those little tubes are the worms that we are after, but this community is no where near as dense as the community that we are down here to study.

Like most of my days thus far, today was another day of firsts.

I:
•    Took my first walk on the frozen ocean
•    Took my first ride in a piston bully (snow tracker of sorts)
•    Saw my first ice hole being drilled
•    Took my FIRST SCUBA DIVE UNDER THE ICE!

The ice dive was a clear favorite. ABSOLUTELY GORGEOUS! (For those of you who know me, you know I don’t use all caps and exclamation points unless I’m really excited.) More on that later.

Don’t get me wrong, some of those other firsts were pretty amazing, like the creation of our ice hole. We drove out onto the ice on our piston bully. When we arrived, I took that first step onto the frozen ocean, my back facing McMurdo Station and my eyes fixed on the half lit snow covered mountain peaks of White Island, glowing red in the distant morning sun. After a moment it hit me, I’m standing on the ocean right now. I don’t think I can find the words to do it justice. It was such an incredible sensation to know that you are standing on a solid sheet of frozen sea and somewhere 60-100 feet below in the icy waters there is an amazing community of sea creatures to be explored.

The rest of our ice drilling team showed up with three enormous trackers pulling our massive drill and ice hut. The sheet of ice is as solid as ice comes; I mean they can land planes on it. However, the new drill team assembled a massive 4-foot drill on an equally enormous tracker and cored that dive hole in no time at all.

Drill baby drill

The slowest part was all shoveling we had to do to clear the ice shavings from around the hole.  This probably took longer because I was standing there leaning on my shovel utterly stunned by everything. For example: the water temperature under the ice is – 1.8°C or 28°F, but I’m standing there watching steam, yes STEAM, rising off the water as if were a hot tub. It is just that cold down here that below freezing ice water steams like a hot evening bath…

The portal is now open

Fast forward a bit to the early afternoon, and our ice hut is centered over the hole with us inside and ready to go. We were all suited up and gathered around the ice hole testing equipment and reviewing our dive plan. Then one by one we slipped into the icy water, descending into the narrow ice tube made by the drill team earlier.

Going Below

Once below I was amazed by what I saw in every direction I turned. The ice ceiling above us created a soft soothing blue glow decorated with occasional Mini Cooper-sized ice chandelier. The visibility was unlike anything I’d ever experienced SCUBA diving. I could see clear to the anchor ice at the coast and then follow the sea floor straight down to 100 to 200 feet deep. The amount sea life totally shocked me–giant vase sponges, sea stars, fish, nemerdians (1-3 foot tape worm looking creatures), ctenophore, jellyfish, and more.

Sundays are slow days here.  Everyone works a six day work week if not more and the big day off is Sunday.  The main focus of the day is an amazing brunch of everything a heart could desire.  Rory and I took a few leasurly morning and then headed up observation hill to get a better view of the world around us.

The hike was essentially a straight up trek for 800ft in <.8 miles to the spot where Robert Falcon Scott’s crew waited for his return from the South Pole in 1912.  While he made it to the pole (within a month of being the first to ever do so) he never made it back to meet here crew.  A cross is perched upon the top of the hill in his and his fateful teams honor.  One of the amazing things about Scott is that his dedication to science never faltered.  When he was discovered by a search party he still had geologic samples that he had man hauled (i.e. pulled on a sled) all the way to the poll and back after picking them up on the southern trip.  Even running out of food and freezing to death did not deter his plan to return the samples in the name of science.

By climbing up to this historic point we also got our first view of Mount Erebus. We live on the flanks of this active volcano, and you can see the steam rising from its maw.

In addition we got a great vantage of the big john crack and the challenges that may present themselves to those scientists traveling north.

The day ended with a wonderful sunset and an evening in the lab getting sampling gear ready for the week.  Tomorrow we make our first hole in the ice and then go for a dive.  This week should bring samples as well.  Something I am greatly looking forward to.

The wind chill makes this a better day for the ice and a less appealing day for us to be outside. Although not too cold at -32 C including the wind. For scale those are helicopters in the right hand corner of the image.

One of the challenges of arriving at Winfly is that the station is just getting ready for science.  Winfly is a series of five or six flights that come in during a weather window right before the last hurrah of winter.  One of the great challenges is that we arrive at the same time as everyone else and all the people that make our science possible are going through the same rigorous training schedule that we are, and in many cases learning new jobs.  At this extreme edge of the earth our research would not be possible without their support which means that things sometimes move a bit slower than hoped.  Today was a big turning point in this regard.  Not only did we fulfill most of our last training courses but we also got all of the gear we shipped down and many of the items on station that were sent on our behalf.  We’ve been waiting for this since we arrived and it means we can get setup to actually do science, thanks to the wonderful people here getting caught to up with their training and then making out science a priority.

The other challenge that we have is the sea ice.  The sea ice is a bit over 1m (3ft) thick and will be thickening for the next month to three.  With thickening we also get less movement of the sea ice and cracks in the sea ice are a major factor to track.  Because of this the sea ice is not yet ‘open.’

This is the transition. Both sea ice and fast ice look the same, especially in flat light days like today.

The main link between land and the ocean is called the transition.  It is the transition from the fast ice (the ice that is frozen to the land – i.e. made ‘fast’ to it in sailing vernacular) and the sea ice which floats on the ocean and moves up and down with swell and tidal action.  The tides here are small (a 0.5 m (1.5 ft) is a big tide here) and swell are rare but even this small constant moving means there is always a crack that could be an issue for those traveling over it.  Making this as safe as possible the transition is constantly reinforced and checked for this connection between sea and fast ice. We have hopes that it will be ready for our dive check out on Monday but it is warm today which is a bad thing.  It is a balmy -19 C with predicted -16 C as the high for the day. At the moment I want COLD weather for better (thicker, stronger) sea ice.  The wind is trying to help by bringing the wind chill down to -30 which is more in line with my hopes.

This experiment in the Florida Keys ran for three years before being destroyed by Hurricane Isaac last week. The ice here in Antarctica protects the water from the hurricane force winds that are relatively common so experiments that were put up in the 60s and 70s are still in place even though we get winds up and over 100mph.

Better sea ice is imperative as one of our dive sites is in a place that can have cracks due to a shallow shoal that causes more cracks than other places.  However the largest crack (the ‘big john’ crack) is currently un-crossable is baring any research to the north and thankfully our research is south.  We monitor these cracks every day that we are on the ice and the vehicles that we use can comfortably cross a crack just over 2 ft but sea ice cracks are like many things in the Antarctic – there is the ability to do something safely or it is not done.  Constant Vigilance is the only correct approach.

The other news from the day is that we found out today that a project that both Rory and I helped with in the Florida Keys took the brunt of Hurricane Isaac.  This ended three years of manipulative research in one fatal (to the science) swing.  It was a great few years of research and somewhat fitting that as we sit in the coldest, windiest place on earth a storm destroys a wonderful tropic reef experiment.