While one of the few sites in the Antarctic that includes a view of a man-made structure, the Jetty is still quite beautiful. Seals often hide in the shadows seen to the right to keep a watchful eye on the intruders into their blue realm.

Cores for one of our replicates.

Today we did yet another dive at the jetty. The great part about it was that we collected the last of our samples for what will be the largest experiment of this expedition, harvesting mud from the site we spent the first 6 dives identifying and the next 8 days sampling. This was also important as we needed to get these samples before the sun was always on the seafloor.

Beroe just after gulping some water or food – its food is too small for me to see. The iridescent combs paddle along its so it can move.

Upon entering the water we were met by many large ctenophores (Comb Jellies – this one is a Beroe) that were around 6-8 inches long. I had never seen them feed before and this species gulps water with its mouth, very reminiscent of how a whale shark feeds, only smaller.

Rory collecting samples for microbiological analysis.

Rory decided to do some collections for a pilot project that may tie his coral reef work directly into the habitats here, in this case using a syringe to collect water from a variety of locations.

Rory taking the samples back to the dive hole. Above you can see a tidal crack which is the reason that we have to take sea ice safety classes. A hazard from above and beautiful from beneath.

Rory was nice enough to take the core rack (as we call our much-loved milk crate) back to the dive hole while I trailed along taking a few photos for the day.

A blue safety stop.

We end every dive with a safety stop right below the hole. This is the coldest part of the dive as we have been slowly chilling throughout the dive and now have to sit close to the warmth of the dive hut but still in the freezing water.

Here is our dive tender for the day, Chuck, waiting to help pull our gear out of the water.

This is the view that ends every dive – a dive tender waiting to collect our equipment and help us get out of the water. We can’t dive without them and it also allows us to meet more of the wonderful people on the station that make our science possible.

The past few days have been a blur.  The weather turned south on us (or I guess that saying should be ‘from the south’ as that is where the big storms come from here) o 50 n Tuesday night. Guests were overknots and the visibility dropped to <25ft.  We were shooed out of the lab since it was likely to set in for the night and reach ‘ condition one’ which means we cannot leave the building we are in.  There are not great places to sleep in the lab so an early night to bed sounded like the way to go.

This is the solder that had been plaguing our oxygen instrument since we arrived.

During the day however, I was able to find a solder that had come loose and had been plaguing some of the sensors that I use to measure oxygen.  After taking apart the wire, discovering the broken connection and asking the instrument technician here to solder it for me (being far better at soldering than I), we all of a sudden have three backups for our very delicate oxygen sensor.  Life is better.

It was a cold day. This is me after warming up for a few minutes. I would have pulled my neck warmer down but it was frozen in place. But we got our new dive hole in and have an excuse for more hot chocolate now.

We then snuck out in, what can only be called, bad weather to put in our new dive hole.  The wind was blowing strong and while it was ‘warm’ at -16 C the wind chill was down to around -51 C.  Rory and I were doing much better than the drill operator who had no choice but to sit face into the wind for around an hour.  We dove the site the following day and while an amazing location the worms that we were after were not there either (the photo at the beginning and end of this post are from that dive).  We have decided to spend our time from here on out looking at the community that we know where it is (the jetty) and abundant while the others remain… somewhere.

At the top of this sponge you can see a little blurry bit which is Anchor ice. This sponge is not long for this world.

Anchor ice is a prevalent occurrence in McMurdo Sound.  Anchor ice forms on pretty much anything in shallower water and as soon as one piece forms it acts as a nucleus for more ice to form.  As this continues it is the equivalent of someone blowing up a balloon very slowly (as ice is less dense than seawater) and it floats up to the surface, killing the animal that it attached to.  That’s one reason we don’t work shallow here – the ice constantly disturbs shallow communities but occasionally it extends deeper down.  This particular example of anchor ice is growing on a sponge (Homaxinella balfourensis) at 70ft deep.  The deepest I have ever seen it.  Normally it peters out around 40-50ft and very rarely goes as far down as 100ft.

The other neat thing about the site was that there was an incredible abundance of octocorals blanketing the seafloor making it look like snow everywhere.  This dive really reminded me why I love diving in the Antarctic.  Even in this time of year when there is so little light, the diving is much better than the training dives we did in Oregon to get ready for this trip.
Today’s dive:

The white along the seafloor is the octocoral Clavularia
frankliniana

This is our last training dive off of Newport, Oregon. It is quite hard to put on all the gear that we are now using in the Antarctic on a warm summer day in the states, only to get in the water to visibility of a few feet.

Today was our day off for the week. So what did we do.. worked. After a leisurely morning of too much food and great company we headed down to the dive locker. The people that we talked with at breakfast are getting ready for the south pole traverse.  This traverse is   how all of the supplies, scientific and otherwise, are taken to the south pole. Driving across an always changing, crevasse filled continent is no rapid matter. It takes them the better part of two months living on the ice and driving at… get this… an average speed of 7 mph to make it to Pole. The main discussion today by the Traverse Crew was the best way to broadcast music between the different tractors to make the drive more tolerable.  Supposedly the scenery is epic.

Our dive site was the good old Jetty. We collected the last of our cores from this site until the end of the season at which point we will take another set. Rory’s glove leaked and so we did only what we had to do and then headed back to the warmth above. It is hard to get frost bite underwater but it is easy to have a very cold painful hand. Rory toughed it out so we got our dive tasks done but if you want to know what he went through, make a bath of salt water, fill it with ice and hold your hand in it for 30 minutes. It is that much fun.

However the best news of the day came when we got the results of one of our ongoing experiments. In this experiment we are trying to identify which antibiotic is most effective against marine sediment Microbiota in the Antarctic. As one of the linchpins of our project revolves around removing microbial activity and antibiotic effectiveness is different wherever one goes, this is a important aspect to our study. To test this we added yeast extract (i.e. bacteria food) and five antibiotics into filtered seawater with 1 ml of sediment. We measured oxygen uptake as active bacteria will use the oxygen much like we do and we can easily identify those antibiotics that cause the greatest change in oxygen uptake. The more oxygen used, the less effective the antibiotic tested. We also had two controls – one with no yeast extract and one with yeast extract and no antibiotics. Clearly ever antibiotic tested worked well in the Antarctic habitat (see the figure to the left).  This is likely because, unlike most places on the planet where antibiotics from human and agriculture run off expose even marine bacteria to a suite of antibiotics allowing their populations to adapt to many different antibiotic forms.

Today started out well.  After a mad dash run in the lab to see the effectiveness of some antibiotics on the bacteria in the Antarctic we went to our local dive site to search for more high density worm beds. 

We found a good set of worm tubes and began to core (see core sample image from Sep 5 below).  They are not the best cores (a little shallow on the sediment side due to the brick wall of volcanic rubble that sits underneath the mud at this site).  Another slightly more amusing challenge was that apparently I have one core that is slightly too small for the caps, and while I knew that this core tube existed I didn’t tell Rory and accidentally took it diving. He spent a good few minutes on the bottom trying to put a cap on a core that was too small.  When I saw what was happening I realized he must have smaller core tube and pulled the core out of the sediment and handed him a new core tube.  He was so confused… not that you can tell through a mask.

After the dive we worked in the lab trying to make more progress on the lab set up, and the day disappeared with odds and ends and errands.  Some of these task were science related such as, building a core resperometer (so we can see how much the sediment “breathes”) and others were safety related like, loading up our vehicle with our survival gear bags meaning that if a storm comes in we can be quite ‘comfy’ in nothing more than our vehicle for up to three days.  I also started to look at some of the animals under the scope.  It always amazes me how things that I have looked at for years preserved look totally different in real life.

The day ended in a first for me – we saw Aurora Australis, or the southern lights.  After sitting in the -43°F wind chill air for around an hour taking photos my camera decided to call it quits and froze, we called it a day too. Electronics do not “like” the extreme cold, LCD screens freeze, batteries have a fraction of their original life, etc. which is just one of the many challenges for science in this harsh continent of Antarctica. We gladly endure these challenges for good scientific results and the added perks of new experiences, such as the Aurora Australis, always help.

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.

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.

Today was more of the same but the weather was amazing.  Here is what today looked like.

Sunrise 11am

Sunset 1pm

Ob Hill from the lab

As with every Antarctic adventure the first few days on ice are getting our new remote lab set up and lots and lots of training to make sure 1) we are safe and 2) that we do not damage the pristine environment that we study and 3) that we actually get our science done. In that order. That involves the following trainings:

Outdoor Safety Lecture
Food Room
Field Communication
Crary Lab Orientation
Laboratory Safety
Diving Briefing
Environmental Field Briefing
Protecting Antarctica’s Environment Briefing
GPS training (optional)
Refresher Snowcraft training
Sea Ice Safety
Snowcraft training
Information security awareness
Piston Bulley training (i.e. how to drive a tracked vehicle)
Small equipment training (drills, generators, and chainsaws)
Light vehicle training
Light vehicle practical
Arrival briefing
Science support briefing
On-Ice POC meeting
Waste management briefing
Propane heater training.

And all of that has to be up and running by the time we get to do science.  We have gotten most of them scheduled or completed so while we wait to get in the water to collect samples we can be all set to be ready to handle them.

Other than that we were greeted with nice weather to start the trip and get used to the cold that we get to enjoy. In addition we are thawing out some buildings that have had a rough winter. For example my bed is next to window that has some extra insulation that does not work in more gentle climates (i.e. Ice on both sides).

Airports are wonderful places to catch up on work mid travel. LAX was no exception.

The first leg of our trip takes us across the pacific and south to the lovely island of New Zealand.  Both Rory and I departed Portland Airport within a few hours of each other for Los Angeles but on separate airlines.  I flew on United and Rory on American as the later had the more cost effective ticket but the former flew directly to NZ instead of OZ and then NZ.  I was traveling with frozen phytoplankton that was not allowed in Australia so couldn’t have a layover there, and was only allowed in NZ with a permit (which I had).  My flight was a red eye that took me directly to Auckland, a wonderful flight, and then on to Christchurch where spring is starting to rear its face and the long winter is abating.

The flight was 13 hours from LAX to Auckland. MAF (the equivalent of US Agriculture) was very friendly and processed my permit right away.  However it still took them 45 minutes of a 1.25 hour layover and I made my connection with literally one minute to spare.  I lost a bag on this last flight but it joined me later at the hotel with no problems. Overall a great trip. Rory arrived later that day and we went out for a wonderful meal and then returned for a good night’s sleep.

The next day (now yesterday) we headed over to the CDC (clothing distribution center) to get out survival gear allowing us to be safe and warm in the frigid temperatures that we will face… Hopefully on Monday.   Strong winds and mechanical issues have kept the flights south behind schedule (which is part of the schedule –being delayed). However we are off to the airport with hopes of a cold reception as we land at McMurdo station.  Or not? One never knows