Here is a photo of a sponge about three feet across on the north side of Hut Point.

In the shallows there can be a shelf with Brincilces and, what I didn’t know until now, a wealth of amphipods living and eating the ice algae that grows underneath the ice. The storm here are the amphipods swarming. It felt much like swimming underneath a giant beehive. Thankfully they don’t sting.

The cracks never stopped amazing me and reminded me of clouds in their infinite shapes and colors.

This is one that I took many weeks ago at Cape Evan’s wall. The sea urchin in the foreground is using some bryozoan as camoflage to avoid being seen.

Rory bringing samples back to the hole at the end of his last dive in the Antarctic for the foreseeable future. The ice continues to develop into more incredible shades of green and blue and the cracks become more developed by the day.

Here is another view of the ice surface with the ice algae in bloom. You can also see where there is snow on the surface from the dark patches. This must have interesting ramifications for the algae that need light to grow.

Here is our bucket lid on a string. There is reflective tape tied periodically on the caving line to make it easier to find. Although there is still 300ft+ of visibility, when I come back in February that will drop to <10ft.[/caption] [caption id="attachment_600" align="alignnone" width="800"] Here is Rory taking off his tank for the last time in the Antarctic as he ascends into the heated fish hut.

Crinoids, at one stage of earth’s history, ruled the oceans. Now they are relatively rare to find except in a few key places. We hadn’t seen any yet this year but found a few at Turtle Rocks.

This sponge was a pretty one with the lightening ice in the back ground. Sponges are very difficult to identify, even in areas such as this that have a legacy of over 40 years of research.

I’d never seen Pycnogonid reproduction before this year and it has been everywhere. In the back you can see the silloutte of Rory. There has been an incredible increase in ice algae changing the blue hue of the water early in the season to green.

Pycnogonids are supposed to eat Cnidarians (anemones and such) and Tunicates (Seasquirts). No one seemed to have told the Antarctic pygnogonids that thought. This one is eating a gastropod (snail – likely Amauropsis rossiana) and we have seen them eating pteropods as well (another kind of mollusk – better although poorly known as sea angels.)

It can be challenging to take photos of the animals under the ice. Here’s Clint Collins doing something challenging.

The green of the ice algae and the activity of the cracks makes the sky (i.e. frozen surface) just amazing from below. This is a site where many seals have access to the air because of the ice dynamics that keep breathing holes open for much of the year.

The community is still ‘alive and kicking’ after 6 weeks of experiments.