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Trip report # 1 Date: Oct 14, 1999 Weather: Condition 3; temp -18 deg C, wind 0 knots |
Our team this season is similar to last. It is headed by a friend of mine, Norbert Wu, a well known underwater photographer who is here this season to continue working on a National Science Foundation project to photograph and document the marine life under the Antarctic shelf. Additionally, this year he will be shooting an underwater documentary film for PBS Nature on life under the ice. My role will be similar to last time; I'll act as a scientific liaison for Norbert's project, help with the U/W still photography, and do some additional sampling of glass sponge spicule mats for myself. Also along is Christian McDonald, as a support diver (a veteran of previous Antarctic dive projects), and D.J. Roller as secondary underwater cinematographer (DJ has worked on numerous underwater film projects, for CNN, freelance work and for Bob Ballard's Jason Project). An additional team member, Peter Brueggeman, the intrepid Scripps Institution librarian, will be arriving in a few weeks when DJ leaves (Peter was present on our previous trip as well).
On our first full day in Christchurch, we spent the morning at the International Antarctic Centers clothing distribution center (CDC) to be fitted and receive the field clothing for this season. Most important was the ECW gear (extreme cold weather gear); a heavy down parka, fleece jumpsuits, bunny boots, underwear, thermal pants, gloves, mitts, hats, goggles etc.) that we would wear on the plane as well as carry with us as survival gear whenever we work out on the ice. We were scheduled to fly out the very next day. Alas, we didn't fly out the next day, or the next, or the next 6 days in fact. A series of storms in McMurdo prevented any flights from landing at the ice runway. Also, they prevented any flights from leaving McMurdo in an attempt to make an emergency landing at the South pole station to retrieve the physician stationed there who had contracted breast cancer while over-wintering (you may have heard about it in the news -- they have been waiting for the temperature at the pole to climb above -50 deg, so they can attempt a landing). Despite the aborted flights, we still had to get up very early every morning, arrive at the Antarctic center at 4 AM, get dressed, then sit around waiting to hear about the weather and status of the flights. When we were lucky the flight would be canceled before we made it to the airport, and we could stay in bed. After the aborted flights we would wander around the town in a groggy daze, eating endless souvlaki sandwiches for late lunches and stocking up on Thai food at dinner (there would be nothing so exotic down on the ice, so we decided to enjoy it while we could). Since we had to stay around Christchurch in case of any change in flight status, we were unable to do much sight seeing around New Zealand while delayed.
We finally made it to the ice the day before yesterday. We packed onto the C141 Air Force jet cargo transport like sardines. There were over 100 of us now waiting to fly so we were all jammed in with the cargo. It was once again very uncomfortable, but fortunately, in the jet, we only had a 5.5 hour flight, compared to the 8 hour flights we had previously in the LC130 Hercules. It really is a terrible flight. You sit shoulder to shoulder and with knees touching others seated in the webbing jump seats facing you. There is absolutely no place to stand, except for on top of your nylon seat (which does provide a bit of a stretch, but makes it difficult to read while wobbling back and forth trying to keep from falling onto your fellow passengers). Going to the bathroom (a funnel behind a tarp near the rear of the plane) required climbing over the tops of everyone like sheep. It was incredibly noisy even with earplugs on and the heating pipes were a bit wonky. It was freezing cold near the front of the cargo area, and we recorded 87 degrees back where we were sitting; which started a frantic struggle to remove layers of clothes before we were cooked. But, we made it all in one piece and landed on a bright, crisp, windless evening. The next day we spent doing a sea-ice travel and survival refresher course and started unpacking our 30 cases of equipment. Today, we have continued to get settled, finished quick classes on radio coms, Spryte tractors and snowmobiles. We are almost all set to get out diving. We will be traveling in the field tomorrow to check out possible dive hole locations and test the ice for the drill rig. Monday we hope to make our first dives.
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Antarctic Trip Report #2 Date: Oct 18, 1999 Weather: Condition 3; temp -22 deg C, wind 22 knots |
Our first full day in the field was the day before yesterday. Christian and I traveled in our Spryte (a strange looking tracked vehicle used for traveling, albeit slowly, on snow and ice. You might have seen similar vehicles around ski slopes) out on the ice about 1 hour north of the base to Little Razorback Island. We are fortunate this year to have been given 2 'newish' Sprytes to use -- the infamous Spryte #666 (the anti-Spryte) from our last season, is not in the lineup for this year. It is still around though, I saw it yesterday buried in a snowdrift behind the diesel mechanics shop.
We had traveled to the island in order to scout the route in to the island from the main ice roadway. We had to make sure there were no large cracks in the ice or other hazards that might prevent the drill truck from making it to where we wanted to put in a dive hole and hut. Once we reached the island, we made a few exploratory test drills by hand Kovacks drill to measure the ice thickness where we wanted our hole (it was about 2 meters thick) and check the depth of the water under the ice (about 33 meters). We didn't find any cracks too large for the drill rig to cross, and the large pressure ridge system was similar in appearance to what we had seen previously. We did see a few pregnant Weddell seals around; they should be having their pups over the next couple of weeks.
After checking out the area we started the long, laborious process of 'flagging' the route across the ice. This would make it possible for us to find the main ice road when visibility drops during stormy conditions. We would drive the Spryte a little ways, toss out a pile of long bamboo poles with bright red flags tied onto the top, and then walk along with our hand drill and take turns drilling a few feet into the ice, inserting the poles and then packing snow and ice around the pole to hold it tight. We placed flags every 40 paces and it took us the entire afternoon to mark our route out to the main road. We made it back to the base in the early evening, just before the galley closed, tired but satisfied with a long day's work. Tomorrow the drill rig will follow our flags and drill our dive holes.
Yesterday we returned to the same area, this time on snowmobiles and with a pile of camera equipment. D.J. wanted to film the snowmobiles scooting across the barren ice, with just the Royal Geographic Range of mountains in the background, as well as film the snow blowing across the ice in long sinuous snakes. It was only a partial success - we hadn't brought along a special "polar bear" bag to insulate the camera, and after a while the batteries started causing problems, and the blowing snow was threatening to jam the controls. It wasn't too bad a day, but the wind was very gusty. The remainder of the day was spent preparing our equipment for upcoming dives, and getting supplies for our dive huts (it is nice to have them stocked with soups and snacks for between dives, and each hut has to have shovels, ice scoops, picks, first aid kits etc.). In the evening we attended a lecture by Dr. Sam Bowser. His team (the only other large dive group at McMurdo this season), will be stationed across the sound at Explorer's Cove, New Harbor, and will be collecting and studying benthic Foraminifera. Foraminifera are one-celled organisms that are very common in deep sea sediments (and also in the New Harbor area). We will be spending a few days using their dive holes later in the season, so I'll babble more about benthic Forams' then.
This morning we went for our first dive of the season. We loaded up the Spryte with all our equipment and chugged the short distance to the Arrival Heights dive hut, about 1 km from the base. This was our 'check-out' dive with Rob Robbins, the station's diving safety officer. We went over a few diving and emergency procedures and then got wet, or at least as wet as you can get wearing a dry suit. You feel incredibly clumsy on the surface and a little stressed, particularly on the first couple of dives. You are not very mobile in your suit and insulating undergarments. I just had a new neck seal and hood replaced on my suit, so that felt extra tight and constricting. It takes a separate dive tender to help you into your gear and fix the dry gloves onto your hands. Then finally, you can fall into the small hole (about 1.5m in diameter), sink through the ice tunnel and pop out under the sea ice with hundreds of meters of visibility in all directions. At last all the heavy equipment feels weightless and you can move without feeling constricted. And you remember just how cold this water is; -1.8 degrees! My body was pretty warm during the short period of the dive (about 30 minutes), but I had forgotten about those first few moments of pain when the water hits the bare skin around your mouth and regulator.
The underwater scenery at this location wasn't too spectacular, just a steep gravel slope, peppered with large orange sea anemones, but the water was brightly lit (most of the snow had blown off the ice in this area, so the sun could shine through) and there were lots of jellyfish hovering in the mid-water. I will be going back tomorrow to take photographs of the jellys as they occasionally collide with the gravel slope, become damaged, and then are slowly devoured by the anemones. Nature, red in tooth and claw.....
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Antarctic Trip Report #3 Date: Oct 24, 1999 Weather: Condition 3; temp -27 deg C, wind 30 knts |
We have just finished a series of dives at Little Razorback Island, situated about an hour by Spryte north of the base. And despite this location being one of my favorite sites from our previous season here, the diving this time began with a rather inauspicious start. The first time I cinched my dive backpack to my tank, the buckles shattered in the cold prompting some quick field repair, and after entering the water, my trusty dive computer conked out (sorry Bruce -- I found out later that a bit of moisture entered the main battery compartment threads when I switched batteries. When I got in the cold water, it froze, expanded and broke the watertight seal, flooding the compartment and causing the batteries to leak and corrode the contacts). Once all the equipment problems were sorted away, I ended up making 8 dives at this location, and they were all wonderful. Tomorrow we will be moving our dive hut and drilling new holes in an area south of Cape Evans, where a glacier icefall from Mt. Erebus crosses a rocky cliff and plunges into the sound.
The past few days since I last wrote have been crisp and bright, with hardly a cloud in the sky. The horizon looks razor sharp and the sky bright blue. We are starting to see mirages when we travel on the sea ice to our dive sites. Fata morgana -- a famous polar mirage, appears as a series of ice cliffs off in the distance and is formed when a temperature inversion occurs in the air just above the ice. Light rays are bent upwards from a distance, reflecting a distorted image of the snow and ice into the sky where it meets the ground. Polar explorers have been tricked into thinking that these false images are actually cliffs of islands or glaciers in the distance. With a couple hours of commute across the sea ice, the mirages are an interesting diversion. It is amazing how spoiled you can get when every day being faced with magnificent scenery. Erebus, the resident active volcano juts into the sky out our right vehicle window, ringed in spectacular ice fields. Out the left, across the sound, is the Royal Society Range of mountains and the mouths of the Dry Valleys. And on the way to Little Razorback, we pass the jet black mound of Tent Island, and the black rocky spines that make up Inaccessible and Big Razorback islands.
I wasn't the only one who has experienced a few mechanical difficulties. The day before yesterday we drove out to our dive hut in 2 separate teams. When Norbert and I arrived, we found one of our team, Christian, sitting at the surface with soaking wet drysuit undergarments. His watertight zipper wasn't closed correctly, and his suit flooded with icy water just as he sank beneath the ice ceiling. His particular suit is designed such that the zipper travels diagonally across his chest from shoulder to hip -- it flooded through the hip end, and the first part that got soaked was his groin -- as he said later, "I decided I had to get out of there real fast...". D.J.. surfaced a few minutes later with a face covered in blood; X-rays back at the base would reveal an acute case of sinusitis, with one facial sinus completely blocked and full of blood-- he will have to remain topside for a few days to heal.
Then it was our turn. I entered first and while waiting on the bottom under the hole, I looked up and saw Norbert dropping rapidly while struggling with something at his chest and trying to keep hold of his camera. I swam over to help and he motioned at his drysuit inflater, it wasn't working properly -- not at all in fact. As he sank, the increasing pressure crushed all the air out of his suit, making him heavier still. I fiddled with the valve and hoses trying to free it (it was hard for him to move with his suit crushed down like that) but we kept slipping down the gravel drop-off, trying to juggle hoses, lights and a 100lb movie camera. In the end, I took the camera from him and he was able to swim over to the safety line and pull himself up it to the tenders above. They found the inflater hose frozen solid, so they swapped it out for a new one, and he was quickly back under the water again and we continued on our dive without further incident.
Despite these few difficulties, we are all feeling comfortable in the water again and are routinely making dives over an hour in duration. It takes a few dives to get yourself used to the heavy gear and awkward suits, as well as used to the idea of working under the ice and being a long swim from the dive and safety holes. To be honest, there is no way to really feel 'comfortable' after an hour in the water -- you are quite cold. I emerged from our second dive this afternoon, 71 minutes long, with numb hands that quickly felt red hot and incredibly painful when I got to the surface and warmed them over our dive hut stove. We were quite chilled since we had been spending our time on the shallow shelf surrounding the island, and to control our buoyancy in the shallow water we had to dump most of the insulating air from our suits. Norbert said he felt like his lips were going to fall off....
The underwater scenery in this location is among the most amazing on this side of the sound. Down deep, there are craggy drop-offs and deep gullies, coated in starfish, hydroids and sponges. These steep slopes are a reflection of the island topside-- all steep slopes and rocky cliffs. Razorback is the perfect name. However, in stark contrast, in the shallow water at the east end of the island, there is a broad flat shelf, with water at most 7 meters deep and about the size of a football field. Up above, there are huge pressure ridges, where the sea ice has been smashed against the side of the island, up into the air and then deep into the water below. In most places, the ice formed a low ceiling, about 1 meter, or less, high. Just enough that we would squeeze through, tanks rubbing on the ceiling and bellies scraping along the bottom. All along this narrow slot, there were still thousands of starfish, urchins, isopods, amphipods, and juvenile fishes.
In a few areas, the ice moved upwards again, under the highest pressure ridges, and formed long parallel tunnels and rooms that we could comfortably swim through, and that we were sharing with 2 Weddell seals, that would cruise past like curious, eyed and finned zeppelins. We named the major tunnels, 'A', 'B' and 'C' to aid our pre-dive planning and help navigation. The 'C' tunnel was the shortest, it ended in a small low room, lined with ice crystals, with a circular tunnel that looped along one wall with a seal breathing hole in the roof. The 'B' tunnel was much longer, also ending in a small room, that had bright blue walls and a triangular tunnel off to the side that lead to the 'A' tunnel.
The 'A' tunnel could also be reached through a larger mouth-like opening. It was much longer than your lights could penetrate and it was about 8 meters wide and maybe 6 meters tall. Swimming through it, was like swimming along at twilight, with just a hint of light penetrating the roof. It went all the way across the shallow shelf and opened up on the drop-off at the other side of the island. There, the ice arched far up overhead again, like a huge domed ceiling, and there was a single, 5 meter long brine tube hanging down which D.J. had nicknamed 'the fang' ( brine tubes look just like a stalactite, and form from super-cooled brine that freezes the surrounding sea water as it seeps down from cracks in the ice above).
I had been engrossed in examining the anchor ice on these past few dives. Because the sea water is right at the freezing point, it often spontaneously crystallizes along the bottom in shallower water, forming saucer sized, wafer-like crystals. There are often big beds of it, thousands of crystal platelets stretching along the bottom for hundreds of meters.
Many of the sea urchins here are covered in a cap of red algae fragments that they hold in place with their tube feet (wearing them as camouflage perhaps, and as a mobile buffet table -- they can then graze on their own algal covering). This algae is quite often the starting point for anchor ice crystal formation. The anchor ice is buoyant and if enough builds up on the algae, and the urchin loses its grip of the substrate with its tube feet, it is slowly lifted off the bottom and then rises up to the ceiling of sea ice where it is frozen in place amongst the platelet ice. In some areas above large beds of anchor ice you can find clumps of the bottom, stones and mud and hapless victims; urchins, starfish and other invertebrates all slowly getting entombed under the ice ceiling when torn free. The marine life here is really in a very delicate balance.
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Antarctic Trip Report #4 Date: Oct 30, 1999 Weather: Condition 3; temp -18 deg C, wind 5 knots |
Several days ago, two large caterpillar tractors, one towing a drilling rig behind it, the other towing the huge dive hole drilling bit, followed us out towards Cape Evans. Along the way, the convoy stopped by Little Razorback Island, and our dive hut was hooked up to a tractor as well (the huts are built off the ground on sled-like runners to facilitate towing across the ice). We then dragged all this equipment towards the Southern side of the Cape, right next to a small rocky cliff and adjacent to a huge glacier wall that was spilling into the sea. The huge drill rig managed to chew 3 dive holes (1 main hole for the hut and 2 safety holes, all about 4 feet in diameter in ice 7 feet thick) in short order. The hut was then towed into place and snow packed around its base to keep the wind from blowing through the hut. We were all finished putting in the hut in less than 2 hours. Then we went for a dive.
This location turned out to be one of the most amazing we have encountered on this side of the sound. The rocky cliff continued underwater, slightly decreasing in slope, but still very steep and dipping way out of sight. The huge, blocky, rocks were dark brown and black coloured, volcanic, and rather sinister in appearance. What made the slope spectacular was the incredible profusion of invertebrates living on the rocks, some in bright colours that contrasted spectacularly with the dark rock walls. There were lots of large starfish, anemones and, most amazingly, large numbers of 1 meter tall deep water soft corals. These were in muted colours, pink, white and purple --that looked almost identical to the soft corals more commonly encountered on tropical South Pacific reefs. Down here, they had only previously been seen over on the other side of the sound in New Harbor (which sports a benthic fauna more characteristic of the deep sea).
In the shallows above the wall, the sea ice dipped down in a couple of jutting ridges, all peppered with chandeliers of platelet ice. In between the ice crystals we could see thousands of juvenile Pagothenia borchgrevinki ('borchs') fishes, all flashing between the crystals and hovering around the ice in small schools; again giving the location a tropical feel.
Swimming much farther from the dive hole, and far away from the last safety hole (unfortunately) we could swim along the face of the glacier that had finally ground its way down Mt. Erebus into the sea. It is hard to adequately describe the sensations swimming next to this towering wall of ice. It was as smooth and flat as a pool table, and if you swam directly towards it, it was difficult to tell where the milky surface of the ice began and the water ended, until you crashed your hands into it. Swimming along the wall, it progressed outwards into deeper and deeper water and eventually fell away in a vertical wall, beyond the reach of our lights, way, way, way, beyond diving depths. At the shallower end of the wall, at about 100 feet, the bottom was also composed of white glacial ice. From above it looked like white rivers, running through a dark land composed of black sand, and small blocks of glacial till. Here we were seeing the terminal moraine of a glacier being deposited, but in this case, underwater. Looking down on divers swimming above the rivers of ice, made it look like they were floating above the surface of some alien, glaciated planet.
Unfortunately diving around the glacier wall was a bit hazardous. It was a very long swim from the closest safety hole (and even farther still to the primary dive hut hole), prompting us to be extra careful in watching our air supplies. Additionally, the icy walls and bottom were incredibly slippery. Anything placed onto the bottom wanted to quickly slide away into the deep, whether a camera or a slightly over-weighted diver. We actually had a few close calls, with frozen suit inflators, and frozen regulators, but careful planning before the dives, with double tanks for extra air, extra tanks hanging at the safety hole and close buddy attention made potentially lethal situations merely inconvenient.
We have also just experienced our first stormy day this season. Last time we were here, the weather was the worst on record; 5 large blizzards and Condition 1 weather on base. This season has been relatively benign so far (touch wood). Crisp and cold and slightly breezy perhaps, but nothing that has stopped our working. However, 2 mornings ago we woke up to winds gusting over 50 knots, -25 degree temperatures (much colder with wind chill), and limited visibility on the sea ice. After things calmed a little bit, we loaded up our gear in our Spryte and went diving anyway. In case the weather deteriorated further, we only traveled the short 10 minute distance to Cape Armitage and dove out of a hut there. It was pretty strange; we quickly dragged our gear through the storm into the warm hut and got suited up while looking out the hut windows into the swirling snow. Once in the water you had no idea it was so awful up above the ice. It was very dark down below due to all the snow cover and cloudy skies, but under our lights, the colourful benthic community stood out vibrantly. As quickly as the storm had appeared, it then disappeared. By early evening the sun was shining brightly.
Life at the base is very surreal. McMurdo base is a busy place because it is the hub for all scientific work on this half of the continent as well as at the South Pole station. It supports the New Zealand, Italian, American and occasionally the Russian bases -- you often hear a half dozen different tongues being spoken in the galley. It has all the squalor and charm of an old mining town. Most of the equipment and supplies are left out in the open (tied down of course), and all the electricity, plumbing, sewers etc. are all laid above ground within insulated conduits that crisscross all over the base. The buildings are a rag-tag bunch of old military barracks, steel huts and more modern buildings (like the new Crary laboratory). And all are built on dark volcanic cinders that quickly gets tracked into the snow making everything look incredibly grimy. You never know what you will see. Just last night I walked out of the main building #155 (which houses a small 'ships store', the galley, some dorm rooms, radio rooms, some computer facilities, and some administrative type offices) and looked down into a series of large metal dumpsters. The one marked "Construction debris", was filled to overflowing with dozens of old, upright vacuum cleaners. They looked like relics from the 1950's, all shiny steel and bright red hoses. The recycling program here is extensive. Over 90% of the material waste of any sort is recycled and returned to the States at the end of the season. We have to sort our trash into 14 different categories. But vacuums? How could they have all died at once?
Tomorrow we are going to travel out to "Weddell World", the sea ice camp of Dr. Randy Davis and colleagues. They are studying the diving behavior of Weddell seals by strapping instrument packages onto the seals' backs. We hope to get some pictures of the seals as they start their dives. Then we will be scouting out our next dive location. We will be moving our hut to a large iceberg frozen into the sea ice just off the base of the Barne Glacier. We will have to check the area for any cracks and test the thickness of the ice to be sure the tractor and drill rig can work safely where we would like our dive holes. It will be a long day, but without having to dive, it won't be nearly as exhausting.
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Antarctic Trip Report #5 Date: Nov 3, 1999 Weather: Condition 3 |
Bad Dreams (a.k.a. "it's go time")
This is going to be a difficult report to write, but let me start by putting peoples minds at ease; everyone is ok.
Almost a week ago, the day after my last dives at the glacier ice wall, I awoke in the night with symptoms of decompression sickness ('DCS' or 'the bends'). Partial paralysis in my legs, left arm, hand, that then spread into the left side of my face. My left shoulder started to feel like it was being crushed in a hot vice and pain in my thoracic vertebrae spread to shooting pains through the rest of my back. Not good. Even though the last dives I made were relatively routine, bubbles of the inert gas, nitrogen, had come out of solution in my body and collected at points in my spinal column and shoulder joint causing pain, and ultimately tissue and nerve damage. Lying down was particularly bad, as inflamed tissues in my spine were crushed by gravity into the surrounding bone and pinched spinal nerves. I was fortunate that the research base has an excellent hyperbaric treatment facility. The recompression chamber has been used for a few diving incidents in the past as well as to treat pilots who make high altitude flights around the pole. The doctor (a military flight surgeon) is knowledgeable and, the diving officer, Rob Robbins is very experienced in chamber operations. Within the hour I was being prepared for treatment and the medics here were in constant contact with hyperbaric medicine specialists back in the States.
Thus started many days of treatment in the chamber. (For the diving wonks out there, 5 modified Table 6 treatments, followed by 3 modified Table 5's) Initial compression back to an equivalent depth of 60' provided almost immediate relief of most symptoms, but these would slowly return (to a lesser degree each time) as I was slowly brought back up to atmospheric pressure, and rested between the treatments. The treatments would last as long as 6 hours, during which myself and a medic would sit or lie in the cramped metal chamber (with 3 view ports which gave us, the occupants, a wonderful view of the ceiling of the hospital, but allow the doctors outside to look in), and which would become alternately warm or cold depending on the pressure change. I breathed pure oxygen through a mask strapped on my face but was allowed a 5 minute 'air break' every half hour. The mask breathed with considerable resistance, which was annoying at first, but after 4 or 5 hours it would have become exhausting, and a mental struggle to keep from tearing it off my face feeling suffocated. The treatments sometimes ended in the middle of the night, and I would crawl out of the chamber and be helped straight into bed in the infirmary to try to sleep. It was very exhausting, and I needed 12 hour breaks to let my lungs recover from the effort of breathing pure oxygen at high pressure -- which becomes poisonous after long exposures and tends to burn your lung tissue. At the end of it all I felt like I had been run over by a fire truck. My face was pretty bruised and chaffed from the breathing mask, my chest was killing me, and my ears tender from all the efforts at constant clearing. I was a pretty sorry sight, with the look and feel of an extra from the movie "Das Boot". But it worked....Now I just have to 'recover from the treatment.' I have the medical and emergency staff here to thank profusely. They worked almost round the clock for many days to help me recover. Who knows what would have happened if there wasn't a chamber available. I would have had to have been flown to New Zealand, which would have exasperated the symptoms, and continued bad weather this week has delayed flights down here by a week.
Unfortunately this isn't the first time I have had to 'get squeezed' in a recompression chamber. Previous diving work in Florida on a colleagues' reef project over the last few years has lead to members of the team needing recompression for DCS, myself included. Diving carries inherent risks. Every dive is a decompression dive and the tables and computers that we use to calculate our allowable dive times at different depths are statistical in nature. There is always a slight chance of a problem, and because as scientific divers we tend to be doing heavy work, under more stressful conditions than recreational divers, the risks are slightly higher than normal. It is an occupational hazard we have had to accept, but we make efforts to dive as conservatively as possible. Several years ago, after thousands of dives, the statistics caught up with me, and despite following the rules, I was hit. The damage done at this initial time was then the seed for further trouble later on. Despite a full recovery, the nervous tissue was damaged and hence more susceptible to further injury. Now, with this incident, the doctors and myself are wondering whether further diving might lead to more permanent paralysis. At the very least, I will not be allowed to dive for 3 months, and then it is questionable whether they will let me ever dive again, at least professionally. A depth restriction of 30 feet, where the risk of DCS is minimal, might be recommended, which would be ok for a lot of my current work in California, where diving is primarily in the near shore and very shallow. However, no final decisions have been made.
Imagine being told that you can no longer do the activity that is one of the most important to you in the entire world, something that has been a large part of your life since you were a young child. That is what I am coping with losing right now. I do feel rather selfish for being depressed about losing what some may consider to be a frivolous and potentially hazardous pastime -- which compounds the guilty feelings from having to leave a job unfinished. What makes it particularly bad is that, after a complete recovery, there is apparently nothing wrong -- you feel fine, but you can't go back into the water. I have now spent days (and previously months) recuperating, while my buddies were out working on the reef, or in this case, returned to diving under the ice. I have in the past and will this time, continue to help out topside, but will burn with envy since I can't return to diving this season. We will soon be traveling to Granite Harbor, where we last time found some of the most spectacular diving on the planet. I will have to live vicariously through my dive buddies, retain a positive attitude while walking on the top of the ice knowing that just below they are seeing incredible things and content myself with sharing the pictures and stories that they bring back.
What is next? There was some talk of my having to return stateside for more testing and possible MRI of my spine; but my hyperbaric treatment has gone well, so we don't think that will be happening. My current plan is to stay here through our planned season. I will be able to help topside with the diving and for support at our camps farther in the field. I can also begin to do some of the topside filming both outside and in the laboratory (close-ups of marine organisms). I will also be able to get back in the water at the ice edge (where we will be mostly snorkeling to film penguins) and perhaps around the cape as well, once I have recovered my strength. So, I shall be staying very busy -- I will just have to focus my attention on some of the topside scenery for a change.
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Antarctic Trip Report #6 Date: Nov 10, 1999 Weather: Condition 3; temp -10 deg C, wind 30 knots |
A few days ago another real zinger of a storm came through keeping everyone indoors and on the base. The wind speeds topped 90 km/h and there was lots of blowing snow. Interestingly enough, the temperature felt fairly warm (if you didn't have any exposed skin), and it might have even been amusing because you could almost lean all your body weight into the howling blast. Unfortunately, visibility was only 10 meters or so, and almost zero out on the ice.
I talked with a friend who was out at the "Penguin Ranch" (a remote field camp about 1 hour by Spryte out onto the ice) during the storm and he had some great stories about having to get up and shovel snow every hour to keep things cleared. Most importantly, they had to keep the snow from filling up their "penguin corral", a large fenced pen where they keep about a dozen Emperor Penguins to monitor them as they do their dives. If too much snow accumulates within the corral, the penguins can just walk over the top of the fence and escape. So, they spent their time frantically digging a moat around the inside of the fence, while getting blasted by the storm, and the penguins apparently looked on with stoic calm. These birds spend the winters down here, incubating their eggs, during storms much more severe than these, and with the temperature dropping to below -100. They were yawning, and stretching, preening their feathers, and no doubt laughing at the scientists as they ran around in a shovel-wielding frenzy.
As I have mentioned before, the storms here are very different from the ones I was familiar with in Northern Ontario. There, there was considerable warning before the weather turned sour. Here, in addition to the storms being of much greater ferocity, they can also appear with startling swiftness. Within an hour, the weather can turn from relatively nice, to a raging blizzard. And then, a few hours later, just as rapidly disappear. This isn't just due to the limited long-range weather forecasting ability at the base. You can actually look south along the sea ice towards Minna Bluff (many km distant) through what is known as 'Herbie alley' and see the storms come barreling along. I am not exactly sure how they have become affectionately known as 'Herbies'. When you lose sight of the bluffs, you often have less than an hour before the storm hits the McMurdo area.
Since I haven't been able to dive, I have been placating myself with helping to drill dive holes and moving huts around to new locations. I have had to delegate some of the heavier tasks to the G.A.'s (general assistants) who often come with us out into field to help tend, or, in this case, help dig through snow drifts. I have also been busy with the logistics of getting organized for our field camp at Granite Harbor next week. There are hundreds of little niggling details that go into setting a camp in the field, and a zillion more when there is diving to worry about as well. We have to arrange with the helicopter crews the flights of our cargo, gasoline to be staged, getting our snowmobiles into sling loads and moving all our equipment to the Helo pad. All our hazardous materials have to be 'Dash-2'd', cleared for flight, which means moving all our tanks, oxygen kits, fuels and batteries up to science cargo and then back down to the helo's. All our equipment has to be individually tagged and weighed and listed on flight manifests....Hmmmm, I still have to help arrange the food -- 5 people for a week, adds up to a lot of 'noodles 'n sauce', cup-o-soups, and dehydrated meals. I'll keep everyone posted..
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Antarctic Trip Report #7 Date: Nov 20, 1999 Weather: Condition 2; temp -15 deg C, wind 35 knts, gusting to 55 |
We have just returned from our week's stay at Granite Harbor/Cape Roberts. We had spectacular weather most of the time; it was clear, sunny and warm (relatively) almost the entire stay. The bay is located about 150 km north of McMurdo, just north of the dry valleys on the continent proper. Returning this afternoon, we left bright sunlight at Cape Roberts and flew into degenerating weather, with high winds,clouds and blowing snow. "Mac Town" (another local name for the base), looked uncommonly dreary after our trip.
Granite Harbor was the location for some of our most spectacular dives during our previous season. This time, because we had no camp at the Harbor proper, we staged ourselves out of Cape Roberts, about 5 km south of the Couloir Cliffs (one of our favorite sites). At Cape Roberts was a large encampment to support the international drilling project and we were able to depot the fuel for our snowmobiles there, set up our tents nearby, and use some of their facilities (power for charging batteries, freshwater for showers, and we were able to take dinner with the drill team between their shift changes). In return for their hospitality, we gave them our extra fuel and flew in extra supplies, including 80 meals.
The population at the base hovered around 40 people, with two separate drill teams of about 15 persons that worked round the clock, traveling 10 km out over the sea ice to their drilling platform. There, the scientists (geologists and micropaleontologists) and the drillers were collecting rock and sediment cores from out in the sound primarily to study the past climatic and geologic history of this region of Antarctica. They had already drilled to over 850 m, and were well on the way to their goal of 1000 m by the end of this season at which point they will have run out of drill string. Drilling in water over 150 m deep is quite a technological achievement. To imagine the scale of things, picture a piece of dental floss hanging from the ceiling of your room, and then guiding it through a tiny hole in the floor below. The drill team guides a long drill 'string' through the sea ice, down through the water, and into a tiny guidance cone on the sea floor where it starts boring its way through the sediments beneath. They are hoping to continue drilling at a new site in the future, that promises an even older historical record, but to reach the seafloor they will have to pass through over 350 meters of water. Actually, as amazing as it all sounds, marine geologists have been doing this for quite some time, and they manage to also do the drilling from a ship in the middle of the ocean, rather than the stable sea ice.
Most of our first day was spent setting up our tents and anchoring them into the ice in case of any high winds. After a few hours of drilling holes, tying things down and unpacking crates of cameras and dive equipment we set off by snowmobile to search for possible dive locations. Since we didn't have a drill-equipped tractor on this side of the sound, we had to look for thin spots in the ice, around large pressure cracks and around seal holes that we could enlarge to provide access to the water. All around the Cape were large icebergs that had broken off the surrounding glaciers and ice caps, some had grounded in the shallows, while others were locked into the ice farther out to sea. Our first goal was to find an entry point near enough to one of the bergs to allow diving.
The icebergs were quite spectacular, I don't think I have ever seen so many different shades of blue and green all in one small area. The one that we thought had the most promise had touched bottom then become frozen into the ice at the beginning of last winter. At some point it had then become unstable, and part of it had tipped upwards, ripping through the surface ice, pushing it into a jumble of bright blue fractured blocks, and then splintered into several house-size fragments. There was a seal at the base of it so it had obviously come from a hole nearby. When we did find the hole, it was only just big enough for a seal to squirm through, and opened onto a shallow ice shelf less than a meter deep, that would not allow a diver to pass through to reach deeper water. However, while poking around the seal hole, we found a thin section of slushy ice in a sloping side gully that looked promising, and we started work on our other dive hole option....
What could be more frightening than standing on a slippery ice ledge, above a slushy pool of sea water, in the lee of a recently collapsed iceberg and wielding a screaming chainsaw with a blade more than a meter long to try to cut blocks of 2 meter thick sea ice to make a hole big enough for divers to enter? I couldn't think of anything, so, I graciously let Christian manage the chainsaw and I helped drag the cut blocks out of the water. Rob Robbins, Christian and I worked for about 3 hours and managed to open a small hole, and make an enormous mound of ice chunks beside it. Unfortunately, when we got Christian into the water to check it out, (in his dive gear of course) we were once again defeated. There was a tiny passageway that allowed our test line to reach open water and then the sea bottom some 28 meters below, but any motion in the water would dislodge large ice blocks and fragments from beneath that would float up and block the hole. A diver could possibly enter, but the chances were too great that the ice would shift and he would not be able to exit again.
We searched for possible locations around all the icebergs in the bay with little success, even cruising along the length of a massive tabular berg more than 1km long. We abandoned our search after a long day and returned to our camp. In my case, to a tent almost completely stuffed with gear and warm clothing; pile jackets, down sleeping bag, 2 sleeping pads, ECW gear, stacks of dry socks, heaps of long underwear and down clothes. It was a very comfy, brightly coloured, pile-lined nest and home for a week.
The next day we made a high-speed run across the ice to Couloir Cliffs, the site of our previous camp, and we had the good fortune to find a large crack in the sea ice almost in the identical spot as before. Some quick work with the chainsaw, some shoveling and hole clearing with nets and we had a hole big enough for divers to fit through. We had similar success at Discovery Bluff, located on the other side of the bay. We found a hole that seals had enlarged (big enough for 2 divers), and most importantly, it was situated next to the bluff in shallow water (many of the seal holes were over water 100's of meters deep).
The area around Discovery Bluff was a great place to get a real sense of the power of the ocean and of the sea ice. With your back to the bluff, a 2 meter thick slab of sea ice, stretched off into the distance as far as you could see while ringed in by the rocky cliffs and bluffs of the bay, and by the icefalls of the McKay and Wilson Piedmont glaciers. As enormous as this slab of ice was, millions and millions of tonnes of ice, you could still hear it groan and scrape when large ocean swells from across the southern ocean collided with the ice sheet and sent ripples through the ice sheet into the bay. The ice also lifted and fell, over a meter each day with the tide and this constant motion created the long cracks parallel to the shoreline that both the seals and us, were able to use.
Much of our time was spent traversing across the sea ice between our camp at the Cape and the dive holes by snowmobile and towing a large sled heaped with dive gear. With all the equipment, we ended up spending many hours of the day driving (wrestling might be a better term) the snowmobiles across the ice at a snail's pace for fear of tipping our loads on the bumpy sections. Between the bone-jarring sections of sastrugi (small, hard, drifts of snow) there were long open sections on smooth polished ice like a skating rink. These were often the size of football fields, and rather hazardous since they would lull you into attaining high speeds and just a little jostling of the handlebars could then cause a crashing sideways skid (a similar accident injured two people the last time we were here).
The need for intense concentration was made more difficult with the surrounding scenery. Who can concentrate on driving when faced with such views! We would pass huge icefalls and towering glaciers and weave between icebergs. Crossing Avalanche Bay, we could see huge rivers of ice spilling from the high mountain sides and swirling around protruding rock cliffs like an enormous river rapid, a thousand feet high and frozen in place.
The weather we had during almost the entire trip was amazing. There often wasn't a cloud in the sky, and the sun was so intense that our number one concern became sunburn. With 24 hours of continuous daylight, a high albedo environment with reflection off the snow, sea ice and surrounding glaciers and not to forget the ozone hole above our heads, we took great care not to get fried. I spent most of my time with my face cocooned up like a mummy, until it felt too suffocating, at which point I switched over to a thick Kiwi sun block cream. It went on our faces like white tar, and I would find out that it was next to impossible to remove. Soap and water seemed to have little effect (perhaps paint thinner or acetone applied with some steel wool would have worked) -- after a week, it felt like it had to be carved off with a putty knife. But, it worked, and we returned not too badly burned up.
The diving at our Granite Harbor sites this year has also exemplified how difficult it is to specifically plan things around Mother Nature. We arrived this season with a specific agenda based on our experiences two years previous, and from the observations of other scientists in other years. It turned out that 1997 was a special year. There were not as many cracks this year (although the ones that were present were in the same location as before), however, a relatively calm winter didn't produce storms violent enough to really fracture and move the sea ice sheets. Not only were there fewer places to gain access to the water, the large and spectacular pressure ridges were not present this season. Also, this year it appears as though the plankton bloom is arriving early in the Sound and visibility is already starting to drop, particularly in the north, closer to the open sea. If we had waited longer in the season for the cracks to widen for easier diving, the visibility would have not been very conducive for filming. So, it appears as though there is only a narrow window for optimal diving conditions in the Granite Harbor area, and in 1997 we were fortunate enough to be there at exactly the right time.
When I closed my journal entry from Granite Harbor in 1997 I reflected that after the dives there I considered my life underwater complete, and that I would be content to not dive again. I now suppose those were musings based on then eternal optimism. When I was topside this past week and helping my colleagues to enter the water, I really ached to be able to join them. At the large crack at Couloir Cliffs, I entered water with my snorkeling gear and could peer down through sun beams at my buddies disappearing over the drop off to the deep benthic community below. The crack was fairly interesting, with cathedral arched sides already thick with a golden-coloured diatom and microbial film and swimming along the channel I could just see the frozen subsurface freshwater icefalls at the base of the cliffs. It was interesting for a while, and it was nice to get in the water again, but not quite the same as my previous experience.
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Antarctic Trip Report #8 Date: Nov 25, 1999 Weather: Condition 3 ; temp 2 C degrees above freezing!, wind 0 knts |
Yes, it is above freezing this afternoon! A real change, and now McMurdo base resembles its other nickname "McMudhole". The base is constructed on dark volcanic cinders, so it doesn't take much to melt off the surface snow on the roads and turn everything into a muddy mess. After the temperature drops again tonight, everything will be locked up in ice...
Just the other afternoon, Norbert and I headed out to the Penguin Ranch located about 1.5 hours NW of McMurdo in the middle of the sea ice. We had just been commenting on the good luck we had been having with our two, less-than-trusty, Sprytes this season (the 2-tracked vehicles we drive around out on the snow and ice), and we shouldn't have spoken. This turned out to be the start of a series of Spryte follies, akin to problems last time we were here.
We hopped into our wonderful Spryte #242, with a mountain of camera equipment and tried to head out of the base. As soon as we made it over the sea ice transition, and out onto the ice, we were assaulted by a horrible thumping noise. Some of the grouser bars (long metal cleats on the tracks) had broken loose from one track and were trying to tear a hole through the chassis, hence the noise. The rest of our group was diving at the hut at Cape Armitage (right near the base), so we traded Sprytes with them to continue. Alas, on our other Spryte, #241, the left brake had started to fail (you use the brakes to steer ), so we could really turn only to the right, a manageable albeit awkward problem. Worse still, the inside window fans were broken, so the windshield constantly fogged up under the blowing snow. Driving became a 2 person operation -- I handled the controls, while Norb constantly wiped a viewing hole with a towel so we could see. The wind picked up, and out by the Mt. Erebus ice tongue there was lots of blowing snow which made it difficult to navigate. On top of this, we generated our own little traveling white out, because of the wind direction, all the snow we were kicking up as we drove, was blown in front of us and around the vehicle. At times there was almost zero visibility and we had to slow to a crawl to let the snow settle, wipe a new peep hole and then drive to the next marker flag (on one occasion I found the next flag by driving over it. Oops).
We finally did make it to the penguin ranch, where Dr. Paul Ponganis (also from Scripps) and a few SIO post-docs are studying the diving physiology of these remarkable birds. At their camp, they have about a dozen Emperor Penguins and a single dive hole that is located about 20 km from the ice edge. The birds can't possibly swim away, so they have to enter and exit this one hole, making it easy for the researchers to study them as they go about their foraging dives. Topside, they are rounded up and marched across scales buried in the snow for daily weight measurements, they have blood samples drawn, and some of them carry miniature instrumented backpacks with them as they dive. It is a pretty slick set up. One of the penguins, carrying a miniature video camera on its back, video-taped itself catching "borchs", an icefish that lives just under the brash layer of platelet ice. They were also rather humorous to watch (as all penguins are); they stood around in small groups inside their corral, rather like at a dinner party. Now and then casting glances at the scientists, no doubt wondering what on earth they were going to have to do next.
I climbed down into the observation tube situated beside the birds' diving hole. It opened into a small, 1 person, viewing chamber about 5m down and I had a complete 360 degree view beneath the ice (the next best thing to diving) and into the inky black of water a thousand meters deep . Here you could really see what is truly special about penguins. Topside they waddle like clowns, in the water they fly like the most graceful of rockets. They dive for as long as 10 minutes, and to more than 100 meters in depth. I could watch them glide out of sight below and then shoot up from the depths leaving bubble trails and blast out of the hole like little tuxedoed missiles.
The next day, the Spryte with the track problem went into the shop, and we were given a replacement (not #666, the antispryte of last season, but, #756 -- which turned out to be Beelzebub, or some other demon incarnate). I waited for a G.A. to arrive and then we left in #756 and roared out of the base at about 5 km/h. (A G.A. is a general assistant, someone who is assigned by the science office to help when an extra pair of hands is needed, i.e. particularly for something mindless, repetitive, and/or backbreaking, but what the heck, it gets them off the base so nobody complains)
The Spryte was painfully slow!-even slower than a regular Spryte (which really makes you wonder what bozo named them in the first place). It made lots of noise. The engine bucked and screamed in fact, but hardly moved. We had to meet the drill rig to move a dive hut from the Cape Evans glacier wall back to Little Razorback Island and then drill some new dive holes. It quickly became obvious we were not going to make it in time to meet them. We roared along! About 0.5 km from the island, and 45 minutes past our meeting time, we could see the hut already being moved into position (the drill team started the move without us), and with a sudden lurch, the Spryte rolled to a stop, engine still roaring. Then the glycol coolant burbled out of the heating coil at the front of the driving compartment, puddled at my feet around the pedals and ran down into the engine proper, where it quickly turned into smoke and steam. I switched off the engine and we swung open the doors to clear the cabin of smoke and then called Mac Ops (the radio communications center) to inform them of our good fortune. We got in contact with the drill team, and we decided to finish moving the hut and drilling holes, and then worry about our demon-possessed vehicle.
When we were finished, Tom, the head of the drill team and a very good mechanic, crawled under our Spryte and discovered that the linkage between the throttle and foot pedal had broken, hence the rolling stop. It seemed that bouncing over rough snow and ice had finally torn a joint apart. He quickly jerry-rigged a fix with a pair of vice-grips. The glycol leak was a bit more tricky. Nothing short of a full mechanical exorcism would work. So, we were forced to limp back to the base at less than half our original snail's pace to keep from overheating the engine and with all the doors and windows open to clear the fumes (the compartment filling up with blowing snow wasn't too big a deal). So, 2.5 hours later, we made it back to McMurdo and back to the heavy shop. "Thanks for the loan of the Spryte. We busted it."
The next day we were off to start filming at a large grounded iceberg off the Barne Glacier located north of Cape Evans and about 2 hrs from the base. The iceberg was a huge, towering piece, split down one side into 2 azure blue and white halves. We thought it should have been hanging in open water, at least hundreds of meters deep, but it turned out that it had run aground against the side of a submarine pinnacle that reached within 30 m of the surface. So, it was stuck in place and had ploughed its way into the pinnacle sediment. At its base was a spotty field of soft corals and sponges and the pinnacle sides sloped away into the depths. A stunning place to photograph.
To reach Cape Barne meant that it was time to procure a new Spryte for the day. Another loaner from the Heavy Shop. This time it was #758, a "pick-up" Spryte with seats for 4, and an open back platform for equipment. We loaded up all the bulky equipment on the back and followed the rest of the group traveling in the other Spryte. There were 3 of us in #758; myself, Kevin Hoefling and Terri McGerran (both are graduate students working on the antifreeze glycoprotiens in Antarctic fishes. Kevin was going to make a dive to look for any ripe females or any fish eggs). Everything was fine for the first few minutes, the infernal machine was even moving at a good clip, for a Spryte that is (about 12 km/h). And then when we made our first turn to head north along the sea ice our bad luck continued. It seemed that the exhaust manifold was no longer connected to the engine, it had corroded and broken away I suppose (don't they check these things at the shop?). The exhaust fumes billowed up into the main cabin as soon as the wind was at our backs. Since Beelzebub, yesterday's loaner, was still being fixed, this was our only vehicle to make the trip, so we decided to cope with it. At first we drove along with all the doors wide open, even the ceiling escape hatch, and wearing all our cold weather gear. But, soon even that was intolerable. Our eyes were watering and Terri was getting a splitting headache. So, for most of the 90 minute journey Kevin drove with his head poking out of the escape hatch (he could just reach the steering handles with his finger tips), Terri stood behind him on the drivers seat, and I sat clinging to the top of the roof. With our heads outside, at least we could breathe and it looked somewhat like we were on a jaunty African safari. It is a good thing that Sprytes don't go very fast, or the wind-chill would have been unbearable. Imagine driving around sitting on the roof of your car in the middle of winter -- the view is great, but it gets a little chilly.
Today we returned to the Barne Glacier with a new vehicle, Spryte #755. In a way I am unhappy to report that it performed admirably. There were no problems at all, which made for a less stressful day, but is certainly less fun to write about.
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Antarctic Trip Report #9 Date: Nov 28, 1999 Weather: Condition 3 ; temp -5 deg C, wind 5 knts |
Just the other afternoon I spent a few hours hiking up to the top of Observation Hill, a steep pile of cinders and rock about 275 m tall directly behind McMurdo Base. In a backpack I was carrying about 25 kg of batteries, tapes, a tripod, and a $100,000 high-definition video camera to film the view from the top. The dollar value of the camera in the pack made it a nerve-wracking, as well as exhausting ordeal. I felt like I was overheating on the way up due to the exertion, but I had no space left to stash my parka so I had to wear it. I knew I would need it at the top, because I would be standing around in the high wind, so I did my best to keep from getting too sweaty. And, I climbed up very slowly for fear of slipping on the ice and loose rock with the camera. At the top is an excellent view of both the New Zealand research station "Scott Base", a small cluster of bright green buildings on the south side of the peninsula, and the sprawling McMurdo base on the opposite side. A recent dusting of snow made both bases look rather picturesque, rather than like grubby mining towns with most of their supplies piled up outside.
Also at the top is "Scott's Cross", a massive 4 m tall wooden cross that is a monument to Robert Falcon Scott and his team. They accomplished so much under unbelievable conditions just after the turn of the century, with no Goretex, no synthetic pile underwear, down-filled jackets, fancy boots and by pulling all their gear by hand. They also perished on their return from the pole, and this cross was constructed at the top of Observation Hill by the remaining members of their expedition who had stayed behind. In fact, all around McMurdo base (which was built at "Hut Point", a location central to many of the journeys during the Heroic age of Antarctic exploration) are a series of monuments to various people who have been killed, one way or another, in this area over the years. The most recent were two people from McMurdo who fell down a crevasse after straying from the flagged route just outside the base a couple of years ago.
We have been busy making use of the recent clear, calm weather to continue to film and dive around the Cape Barne iceberg. There is no hut directly over the dive hole there, just a "Polar Haven" fabric tent which does block the wind while changing, but then you still have to waddle up a snow drift and then slither through a seal hole to get into the sea. It is a much more pleasurable experience when the sun is beaming down and the wind isn't howling.
This afternoon I jumped into my drysuit , grabbed my mask, and then ducked down through the hole to get a glimpse of the surroundings and to help put into context the stunning footage that Norbert has been shooting around the iceberg. The hole opened onto a narrow shelf, squashed from the sides by the iceberg and a jutting ridge of yellow- gold ice starting to drip with algae. The cracks continued like bright lightning bolts off into the distance. Below the shelf the ice veered away onto the sloping shelf of the iceberg proper. Here the ice was dimpled like a giant golfball; each individual cup starting to collect algae. Here and there on the ice I could see juvenile fishes darting around, between the cups and under hidden cracks and ledges. The iceberg sloped away on all sides obscuring my view of the deeper water, except when I craned my neck and I could just make out the dark blue water beyond.
As far as I could see my view was dominated by ice. The immense scale of the iceberg below water is highlighted in the camera footage. It is a huge towering mass above the soft corals and benthos, and dwarfs the tiny divers swimming alongside. At one end it was possible to swim the camera underneath the berg and shoot directly upwards. From here the ice loomed overhead and looked eerily like the bow of an enormous ghostly ship. The ice ceiling beyond was a crazy mixture of blues and greens and gold spots and splashes. Tiny dots of light looked just like stars in the night sky, and the ceiling reminiscent of the Milky Way.
Working around the icebergs has a certain special charm that is tempered with a healthy dose of wary reality. Just last year, a group of filmmakers from TV New Zealand were filming an iceberg on the Antarctic peninsula. They were documenting the disturbance to the benthic community as the iceberg gouged its way across the bottom. Their divers were underneath the iceberg when it became unstable and suddenly overturned. On the surface the tending boat, which was anchored to the side of the 'berg, was dragged up on top and had to be cut free by its occupant and then left to drop back into the water. What happened below was truly the stuff of nightmares. The iceberg rotated directly above the divers, who were filming alongside a large boulder directly underneath, and, as it flipped the iceberg swung just a few feet above them before grinding into the bottom. It was pure luck that the shape of the iceberg was such that a more concave section passed above the divers instead of crushing them beneath a million tonnes of ice. We heard this story at the Antarctic Center in Christchurch, from the fellow who was tending the boat, and has always been in the back of our minds whenever we have worked around the icebergs.
The following day started out cold and blustery, but it cleared up and the winds died in the mid-afternoon and it turned into another stunningly beautiful day. We had been dropped by helicopter to film along the ice edge, and the brilliant sunshine couldn't have been better. We landed close to a group of about a half dozen Emperor penguins. Within an hour we had attracted a few dozen Emperors and a bunch of Adelies, all curious to examine this huge noisy red bird that dropped from the sky. They would slowly walk over and examine us as we organized our gear along the ice edge -- they would cluck and squawk a bit, crane their necks to look over our shoulders as we sat on the ice, and then mill about in small groups, just kind of "hanging out with the divers."
We were going to snorkel around in the open water and we tried to quickly strip out of our foul weather gear into our drysuits. It was still extremely windy and cold, so it wasn't a very fun process. When I spit into my mask to defog it, the spit froze into a disgusting lump during the few seconds it took for me to stoop to the ice edge and try to rinse it in the water. In the end I sort of had to chip it all out. Ugh. A minke whale swam past, some penguins dove in from the edge, and then we slid into the water.
There have been a few experiences down here that will stay vivid in my memory hopefully forever. The submarine icefalls and cavernous rooms of golden ice at Granite Harbor, and swimming along tunnels with Weddell seals and above a bottom peppered with soft corals and sponges around the Razorback Islands are still intense visions. And now this day at the ice edge. The sky and water looked like they had been lifted from a Caribbean postcard. Blue! Intensely vivid blue water. The entire spectrum of blues, from silver and azure to the darkest navy when looking far under the ice edge. And all around us, "god beams" of light, (or crepuscular rays) danced about and cast shadows of our bodies into the deep. The water surface rippled with the wind and made crazy reflections of the sky and objects floating on the surface. It was great to be back in the water and to be able to swim around. It was much warmer in the water (-2 deg) than it was topside, and I wasn't just ducking down a hole for a quick peek, or squirming along narrow tidal cracks. I was back zipping about, helping film, and happy as a clam.
Then there were the penguins. Once we were in the water for a while, more of the penguins entered the water (I guess we no longer looked like a threat), and many more joined the group from out in the open sea. They bobbed along at the surface in little packs and rocketed beneath us like schools of fish. They flapped their wings and did barrel rolls, and dove out of sight beneath the ice leaving contrails of bubbles. Then they would approach the sharp edge of the ice sheet (only about 1.5 meters thick here) and blast from the water to land topside, sometimes turning around immediately to go back in, maybe just for fun. It is a terrible misconception to think that penguins don't fly -- they do, they fly through the water like the most graceful beings you could possibly imagine. I have seen nothing else in the water that comes close. We were in the water for quite a long while and I was spellbound the entire time. The penguins would come and go. One second they were there, and then they would be gone for a while. Just when you thought they had all left, dozens would appear and bob along beside you. And just looking at the ice edge stretching out of sight, and gazing into the blue water thousands of meters deep was a treat. We saw huge jellyfish, with tentacles stretching 20 meters behind it, tiny ctenophores and siphonophores, but alas, we never saw the Minke whale again.
I climbed out of the water to help Peter suit up and to film Norb from the surface and my drysuit started to freeze solid in the wind. After 30 minutes and everyone was topside it was like hard cardboard and a real struggle to remove. It was a cold, frantic dash to change back into our ECW gear and parkas. Then, almost as soon as we were dressed, the wind stopped. Almost instantly it felt warmer and we spent the rest of the day lazing about in the sun with the penguins filming them as they worshipped the helicopter, stately walked around, preened their feathers, and then all lay down to doze. The flight back treated us to glorious views of the Erebus icefalls and glaciers. Off in the distance we could see Cape Bird shrouded in clouds, where we spent a week last time we were here. From above we could see the zigzag geometry of the cracks in the sea ice, and small groups of seals hauled out where cracks had widened. We even saw our friends in a slow moving Spryte creeping down the ice road, returning from a day of diving at Cape Evans.
Yesterday afternoon was a quiet day around the base with people recovering from over eating and the festivities of Thanksgiving the night before. Christian and I drove our Spryte out to Little Razorback Island to pick up a large gel-cell battery that required recharging and to make some more hydrophone recordings of the Weddell Seals living there. It was easy to forget we were traveling across a frozen ocean. The air was perfectly still, and the sun felt warm, even without heavy clothes on. Topside it was silent except for the crunch of our boots on the snow and the occasional snort or groan from the seals sunning themselves. Underwater my hydrophone revealed a raucous symphony of sounds. Emulating the seals, we sat around listening through headphones to the trills, slide-whistles, thumping barks and hoots that the seals make as they define their territories, and interact beneath the ice. They are quite haunting sounds, some loud, and some soft. Our hydrophone is very sensitive and we could hear the faint sing-song notes of seals far away in the background as well as the blasting hoots of seals much closer to the island. After listening for a while, we walked around the perimeter of the island, weaving a path through the pressure ridges and snapping photos of the mothers and pups lying on the ice. Most of the pups had lost their downy looking fur, but were still suckling. It was quite a perfect afternoon on the ice for everyone.
Tomorrow we leave for Cape Crozier where we will be camping in the field alongside an enormous penguin rookery. I'll write when we return.
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Antarctic Trip Report #10 Date: Dec 6, 1999 Weather: Condition 3 ; temp 0 deg C, wind 5 knts |
December 2nd
Antarctica is known as the coldest, driest, highest and windiest continent on the planet, it can also be the most frustrating. We have been waiting for 4 days for the weather to cooperate in order to fly to our field camp at Cape Crozier. Unfortunately we have been continually delayed due to heavy snowfall, high winds or low clouds (or all three). Actually it hasn't been so much the ferocity of the weather, but its direction.
The Cape lies almost directly to the east across Ross Island, and while conditions at McMurdo have at times been rather clement, the bad weather and cloud cover has been streaming in from that direction, sometimes making it all the way to the base, but more often the front just stopping at the center of the island. We would be able to load up and take off, but there would be no way to navigate and land near Cape Crozier. As a frightening example of what can happen under such conditions, the New Zealand helicopter left Cape Roberts 2 days ago, and on the journey back to McMurdo, it ran into the low cloud and heavy snowfall blowing in from the east. They flew north towards the ice edge, followed it for visual reference across the Sound and then located the flagged road route on the ice near Cape Royds and tried to follow that back to base while flying low. Unfortunately they were then blinded in a white out and crashed into the ice. Luckily nobody was injured, but the helicopter suffered heavy damage and had to be towed by tractor back to the base. I am sure somebody will be looking into why they pushed ahead with the flight under such bad conditions instead of turning back to Cape Roberts.
While all this was happening, we would dutifully load up about 500 kg of gear in the morning, stage it at the helo hanger and then wait through the delays and then, finally, the canceled flights. Afterwards we would make frantic preparations to dive locally, or, sometimes, if it was already mid-afternoon, we would cancel the day's plans and head to the library to relax, or to our rooms to catch up on sleep.
The visibility in the water is continuing to decline. Diatoms and microbes have thickly colonized the bottom of the sea ice and a fine, brown sludge rains down on the divers at the merest brush of their exhaled bubbles. Down on the bottom, this algal rain feeds the benthos but is also easily stirred up by the kicking of fins. Just looking down the dive hole the water is starting to look green rather than crystal clear. Soon the visibility will be less than 30 meters, then quickly less than 10 meters and then down to about 1 meter at the peak of the plankton bloom. It will stay like pea soup for weeks, and then slightly improve by the end of the summer (Feb.). It doesn't recover its spectacular clarity until after the winter, when 6 months of darkness will have killed many of the algal cells and the prevailing currents have advected the water far under the Ross Ice Shelf.
December 6th
Our plans have been changed. Instead of traveling immediately out to Cape Crozier, we are now heading to New Harbor (across the sound at the head of the Taylor Valley) this evening. This was to be our next stop, however, time is running short and we have to take advantage of the clear weather to the West rather than just waiting in McMurdo for good weather that might not materialize.
This was my second journey to New Harbor, I was there in '95 with Brian Stewart, an ecologist friend from New Zealand. We placed a larvae settlement experiment through the ice and then had some spare time to do some hiking along the shore of Explorers Cove and into the valley. I could swear it hasn't changed a bit. This time we stayed at the camp of Dr. Sam Bowser, a biologist from the New York Department of Health who is studying the foraminifera that are easily collected from the cove sediments. These single-celled animals construct tiny houses (a few mm across) around themselves by fusing sand grains together with a special glue. It is hoped that if the glue can be isolated it would have important medical uses. They are also studying the ecology of these organisms which are more common to deep sea sediments beyond the reach of Scuba.
They and their colleagues have discovered that the forams produce long extensions of cytoplasm (pseudopods) that extend in a web-like net outwards from their sand-grain houses. Anything that lands in this net is slowly entangled, dismembered and then digested by the pseudopods. Neat-o! Very grim, at least to plankton and tiny animals on the bottom. They collect the forams with a diver-operated suction dredge on the bottom that is connected by a pipe to their dive tent above. On the surface the sea-water / sand slurry is sieved on metal screens and the forams collected for culture in plastic tubs. Their team has been doing a dive or two a day for over a month and most of their work is now finished. It was interesting to note that their internal circadian clocks have been free-running, and were slightly out of synch with our own. Morning for them, was about our noon, so it was easy to stagger our team's dives with theirs to keep the hut from getting too crowded.
The diving in Explorer's Cove is not what I would call very exciting, so I didn't feel too badly sitting on the surface (although it would have been nice to poke my head down there at least once). The ice in this area was about 4 meters thick, and to put in a dive hole required blasting a big hole, fishing out the broken ice chunks, letting it freeze over again, and then cutting by handsaw a more manageable hole about 2 meters square. A large, heated tent was then constructed on top of the hole. Underneath, the hole looked like a mine shaft, with craggy sides and then a sharp, rectangular opening into the tent. The water was about 30 meters deep above an almost flat sand plain and because very little light could penetrate the thick ice above, it was almost as black as night. On the sand (in addition to the foraminifera) were lots of scallops, a few urchins, a couple of crinoids, at least 2 species of brittle stars, and the occasional soft coral 'tree' (the same as we saw at the ice wall on the other side of the sound). All in all, very barren, and looked like some pictures of the deep-sea floor.
The camp proper was situated on a gravel and sand beach about 300 meters away from the dive tent. It consisted of two war-era Jamesway tents (olive drab tents, shaped like oil-drums cut length wise, about 8 meters long and with springy plywood floors) joined side by side. One half was the working and cooking area, while the other was the sleeping quarters. Hanging from the ceiling in the center of the sleeping area was a pink, plastic flamingo wearing a pair of purple woman's underwear. What that was all about, I am not exactly sure, but it certainly did add to the atmosphere of the place... Beside the tents was a small wooden, "lab module" building with tables for microscopes and storage space for chemicals etc., and behind that a small shack that housed the generator. It sounds spartan, but was actually rather luxurious compared to some of the places we have set up field camps. They even had a radio-telephone link back to McMurdo and a microwave oven.
When we arrived, I was the last one in, and all the canvas cots were taken. We had already set up a separate mountain tent for Norbert to stay in (outside and far away from the camp -- he is an infamously loud snorer) so I opted to sleep outside as well. I managed to secure a tent fly to the side of a couple of cardboard storage boxes and then folded the material over and around my sleeping bag like a giant burrito to try to block the wind. I managed to stay warm enough, however the wind was relentless. When it really started to howl, I would wake up being slapped silly by the fly, and with the sand blasting along the sides of my little yellow nest. In the mornings, everything was coated in grit. On the last night, there was space in the Jamesway and I managed a blissful, sand free, sleep.
Traveling the distance between the camp and the dive tent was always an adventure. The transition zone here was split by large tidal fractures, and because of recent warm weather, the surface was starting to melt as well. Sea water would gush up through cracks with the tide, and run in rivers along the ice and sandy shore. The melting surface ice formed large (and sometimes deep) pools that had thin ice coverings on top that wouldn't support body weight. In fact, Sam's team had a snowmobile plunge through one up to its handle grips the day before. The ice was also very dirty, completely covered in places by wind blown dust and sand from the valley. Between the sandy sections, melt-water pools and rivers, were sections of smoothly polished blue ice that routinely caused skull-cracking "Three Stooges" type falls with both feet suddenly zipping out and flying overhead. Hysterically funny, but only for the first 7 or 8 times it happened. So, the traverse to the dive tent consisted of splashing along the muddy beach onto the edge of the ice. Then a period of cursing and swearing while trying to tip-toe through the mine field of melt pools and channels while crashing through and getting soaked. And finally the slippery dance with arms windmilling to keep from landing on your butt. We did that two, sometimes three times a day.
I managed to get out for a couple of long hikes in the Taylor Valley during the afternoons while the divers were resting. On the first, I made the 16 km round trip walk from our camp to the shore of Lake Fryxell, one of the famous Dry Valley Lakes. The Dry Valleys are so named because they have very little snow in them, only the occasional wind-blown drift. It is incredibly dry, with next to no precipitation year round and they are blasted by Katabatic winds from the high-polar plateau. These gravity-induced winds roar down from the high-Antarctic ice cap and reach speeds over 150 km/h through the valleys -- often blowing non-stop for days on end. So, the valley floor is rock, dust, sand and gravel.
In a few places, enough melt-water from surrounding valley glaciers (which hang along the mountainous sides of the valleys) has trickled down over the centuries to form fairly large (and moderately deep) lakes. These have curious water chemistries beneath their thick ice covers, and are populated only by a few species of bacteria and algae. One lake in fact, is so hypersaline at its bottom that it acts like a large solar battery. Sunlight easily penetrates the clear ice floating on top and has managed to heat the water below. The heat is trapped in the brine, and the bottom of the lake stays an almost constant 19-20 deg. C!
The terrain was a very deceptive one to hike in -- enough to make you weep. It was difficult to judge distances, and sense the relief. There was always another invisible hill or gully beyond the one I had just climbed. The ground was also tough to walk on. The substrate was often very unconsolidated, so you would slog your way through dust and fine sand beneath gravel about ankle deep. But what a view! Rolling rock hills and steep mountains sides rimmed the valley and there were 4 hanging glaciers along the way (The Wales, Crescent, Canada and Commonwealth glaciers). I walked to the center face of the Commonwealth glacier which was a solid wall of ice, maybe 30 meters tall and stretching a kilometer or so in either direction. To the east I could see Mt. Erebus and Mt. Bird, over 75 km away in a vivid blue sky. The sun was so bright I found myself squinting behind my dark glasses. Along the ground were hundreds of millions of ventifacts (rocks that had been sand-blasted and polished by the wind into smooth, streamlined shapes -- some graceful, others into weird gargoyles, often standing 2 meters tall).
Another long hike took me along the northern shore of New Harbor. It was very windy and with my parka hood cinched tightly I had unconsciously adopted a rather narrow view of my surroundings. I had to stop in order to look up and gaze around at the marvelous scenery, and then go back to watching my footsteps along the shore. Again, Erebus was bright in the distance, but this time my gaze was across jumbled spires of sea ice and a few icebergs locked in center of the bay. Unfortunately despite the tremendous view of either the sea ice and distant Ross island, or the mountains along the sides of the valley, it was always the same view due to the large distances involved. I would walk for hours across moraine hills and gullies, or strike out across gravel pavements and the distant picture was always the same. Spectacular yes, but I feared I was getting tired of New Harbor. The gravel and sand was almost the same in all directions....a region perhaps best enjoyed by quickly skimming over huge areas by helicopter. I was getting jaded, and bored, and tired of helping the divers without being able to dive myself. I said it was almost the same in all directions...
I did happen across more than just ventifacts and wind-blown gravel slopes. I found the remnants of an old geological experiment from 1960; with steel posts and anchors fixed into the ground around a series of stone hexagons of frost-patterned ground in the run-off delta of the Commonwealth glacier. They were in incredibly good shape for having been there for almost 40 years. I also came across an old food cache from a New Zealand expedition in the mid to late 1950's. Some of the food (candies, meat bars (?), canned goods) was probably still edible. Most remarkable were the mummies. I saw the remains of about a dozen seal mummies while hiking in the valley. I had heard about them from others, and seen other seal remains around McMurdo, but these were something else. Some were close to shore, while others were farther inland. I found a pair of Crabeater seals about 5 km inland from the coast. They were horrible, yet still fascinating to look at; like gruesome driftwood. Their skins were cedar stained, their eyes eroded away and their teeth showing in a grimace. Some even had their whiskers still intact and bones protruded beneath shrunken flipper skin like x-ray images.
In addition to the well preserved remains, there were often more scattered bone piles, again some where remarkably far from the sea. Nobody is really sure why the seals head inland at times. Researchers have seen them slowly worming their way over rocks and sand away from the coast. Perhaps they get confused, and just start heading off in the wrong direction, following some distant mirage or spying some distant glacier, thinking it will lead them to open water or a new set of breathing holes.
We flew back to McMurdo this afternoon, in a helicopter stuffed to the top with so much gear we couldn't look out the windows. We were all pretty tired and in need of showers, laundry and rest. I can't imagine what it was like for those first explorers here. They spent at least a year at a time, often through the winter for an early start the next spring. With all the modern conveniences available to us, we are getting tired after only a couple of months. Oh well.
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Antarctic Trip Report #11 Date: Dec 12, 1999 Weather: Condition 3 ; temp -12 deg C, wind 21 knts |
Our team has finished all the diving for this season and we have been doing some last topside filming in the laboratory and close by McMurdo. In the lab we have been doing a last series of time-lapse camera sequences in the aquarium facility inside a large 1000 gallon tub. Most of the benthic invertebrate 'drama' in the polar seas happens very slowly. The attack by starfish on a dead sponge, or jellyfish takes days and days. By shooting time-lapse we compress the time and can see the advancing 'red menace' of Odontaster starfish swarming over their victim like the ruthless carnivores that they truly are. The pycnogonids (sea spiders) usually walk in painfully slow steps, but this way we can see them march around and poke into anemones searching for food. Likewise we filmed the giant linguini-like nemertine worms streaming across the bottom like serpents and hand-sized isopods walking across the bottom, attacking a long-spined polychaete worm and sucking the insides out leaving behind an empty husk.
We also spent two days working at Cape Royds, a 2-hour Spryte ride north of McMurdo. This was the location of Shackelton's Hut that he built in 1907 during the Nimrod expedition, a wonderfully preserved monument of that era of exploration. Inside it is still full of food stores, clothes, papers and equipment all perfectly preserved (although with quite a funky smell).
Outside was an Adelie penguin rookery of about 6000 pairs managing to create quite a din (and another even funkier smell -- whew!) while incubating their eggs. The little Adelies have to walk about 10 km to reach the rookery from the ice edge (the pairs take turns incubating and feeding at sea) and once back at the nest seem to spend most of the time squabbling with their neighbors over the choicest stones for nest building and then hissing and growling like angry cats when the circling Skuas try to attack and steal their eggs.
Skuas are large, seagull-like birds that nest around the periphery of the penguin rookery and eat just about anything they can grab. Penguin eggs and chicks are their primary food sources at this time of year. They are larger than the penguins, but the penguins sort of gang up on them when they dive into the nesting area. It was an incredible scene with the Adelie rookery on a light brown soil composed of old feathers, dust, bird excrement, and dead penguins, surround by contrasting black volcanic rocks and the white snow and ice.
One evening, after a long day out at Cape Royds, I walked through the upper level hallway of the Crary lab building. Most of the lab lights were out and the building was mostly deserted. I could hear a violin playing -- it sounded like Mozart. The music got louder and louder as I walked down the hall until I stopped in front of a lab door nearly at the end. I turned to look through the door window, expecting the hustle-bustle of a late-night experiment in progress and with a stereo playing loudly in the background. Instead I could see a figure playing the violin while gazing beyond their outside windows. They appeared only in silhouette against the bright image of McMurdo Sound and the Royal Society Mountains in the distance. I couldn't tell who it was, and I didn't want to disturb their peaceful practice so I listened quietly for a minute or so, and then wandered off to my room and to sleep. It was the perfect coda to a tiring day. You just never know what to expect around here.
The day before yesterday we helo'd out for a days filming at Cape Bird. At least I hoped it was only going to be for a day. Last season I wound up stuck there for a few days in bad weather, waiting to get out and then fly to New Zealand. So, once again, like some bad movie cliche, I was winding up my Antarctic season at Cape Bird. Fortunately, the weather was fantastic -- warm and sunny the entire day. We had no problems on our flights back and forth to the Cape and we even managed to do some fun flying over the surface of the Barne Glacier to get aerial shots of the gaping crevasses, and the icebergs beyond.
We returned to Cape Bird to film at another Adelie penguin rookery, this one much larger than at Cape Royds. Here there were over 60,000 nesting pairs of birds making a ruckus and 'doing what penguins do'. We were specifically filming them as they traveled across a thin strip of sea ice between their nesting sights and the open ocean. On this thin strip they would all pile up in little curious, squabbling groups waiting to see who would be the first ones to enter the water. Cruising the edge down below were Leopard Seals, rather ferocious beasts waiting to make a meal out of the penguins. The penguins would gather around the edge, peering over, looking for any Leopard Seals and sort of pushing and shoving. If they saw other penguins in the water, returning from feeding at sea, they would sense that it was safe and all quickly flop, tumble and less-than-gracefully dive into the sea. If they didn't see other penguins in the water, they would finally push and shove enough that one hapless bird would fall over the edge. Then, the remaining birds would gather around and peer over the edge to see what happened. If the 'test bird' made it, the others would quickly jump in. Quite funny to watch, although deadly serious for the Adelies. They are most vulnerable to attack when getting into or out of the water, and you could tell they were pretty anxious.
Around McMurdo, science teams have been wrapping up a lot of the work on the sea ice as it slowly becomes more unstable. For these groups, the season is ending with the warmer weather, for other science groups, those who are working inland on the higher, colder plateau, the season is just beginning. (There might be a few problems with some of the field work this season, because just this afternoon the NSF Twin Otter airplane crashed out in the field while flying back from an AGOR site. The plane was blasted by a violent wind gust on take off that caused it to twist and catch a wing on the snow. The wing was torn off, but fortunately nobody was hurt.) The dive and fish huts are being packed up and moved off the ice and camps being broken down. The transition zone between the land and the ice is very broken and now has a fairly wide water filled moat. Tractors are constantly pushing snow and dirt into these cracks to keep it passable for vehicles, but soon they will stop doing even that and movement on the sea ice will be restricted to travel on snowmobile, then on foot, then not at all as the sea ice breaks up (sometimes completely) at the end of the summer season.
We too are getting ready to leave and have been very busy packing bags, cleaning gear and returning field equipment. We have had a great season, despite a few ups and downs. The footage that we have collected so far is quite spectacular, unfortunately it will be a couple of years before it reaches its audience. As well it is unfortunate that, due to the timing of my diving accident, I was unable to do much sampling for my own work, but I do not regret remaining for the rest of the season. I was able to busy myself helping with the topside filming, and I was still able to get out to see some amazing sights.
Leaving McMurdo might prove to be as difficult as our trip down. Already there are problems. Three days ago, a C-130 (Hercules) enroute to the South Pole Station aborted take off at last minute and wound up sliding off the end of runway into soft snow. They did some slight damage to an engine I believe, so they are down a plane until it is repaired. Also, the base now depends on a new runway on the permanent ice shelf in order to land ski-equipped aircraft as the sea ice runway has degraded in the warmer weather. Because there is now a push for some scientists to leave the base, and due to the limited number of flights available (many of the flights are dedicated to field camp support), there is now a backlog of people waiting to fly to Christchurch. The last flight to make it out was 2 days ago, and they had to bump personnel in order to put more cargo on the plane (the broken Kiwis helicopter parts for example), so now those people are also waiting. Even though we are scheduled to fly out tomorrow morning, there is a good chance that we will be delayed. C'est la vie.
I have already mentioned that on top of Observation Hill is a memorial cross for Captain Scott and his men who died on their return from the South Pole. Inscribed below their names are some of the last words from Tennyson's Ulysses; "to strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield." I can think of no better words to honor those men who came here almost a century ago. They were explorers and they were scientists and they pioneered the way for all of us who have since followed. Compared to the incredible challenges that they faced, our modern travels are relatively tame and we can hardly claim to fill their footsteps. I feel very fortunate to have been able to see and work in those places that the early explorers visited and sometimes lost their lives. And it has been a special privilege to dive and explore under the very ice that those first men struggled to cross not knowing what fantastic sights lay just beneath them.
