1 November 2002
It's Stacy writing today -

We finished up at Cinder Cones today - hurray! Now the experiment on the seafloor runs for a year before we come back and do our first set of sampling. Of course, it did not go as smoothly as it was planned.

Castle Rock and Mount Erebus overlook our site at Cinder Cones.

Paul Dayton as a graduate student, when he began scientific exploration in the Antarctic.

The first dive was Kathy, John and me. John was taking cores inside an ice scour - a place where an iceberg, moving with wind and currents, has gouged out the seafloor. We have been sampling this particular scour for several years to record the recovery of the community. Kathy was taking photographs of our experimental setup. I was photographing settling plates that were placed in 1974 by Dr. Paul Dayton at Scripps, to record the growth rates of animals over a 25-30 year time span. In the Antarctic, adults of most species grow very slowly, and it may take a few decades to observe appreciable growth.

I notice towards the end of my dive that many seastars had gotten inside our fence, so I removed as many as I could before my time and air got low. The second dive was Dan and Aaron. They took apart the time lapse video recorder that we had monitoring seastar movement. The time lapse showed massive piles of stars attracted to the organic enrichments, heaped several stars deep - the red stars against the dark volcanic seafloor is quite striking. Then Dan finished clearing out the seastars, and discovered the part of the fence that was letting them back in. Aaron took video, including a visit by a couple of Weddell seals that were not quite sure they wanted to let him share the dive hole with them. We were hoping this would finish off our time at Cinder Cones, but because of the hole in the fence, Aaron and John came back in the afternoon to repair it. Now we just hope that it keeps the seastars out for the next couple years.

A close up picture of a pile of the seastars Odontaster validus.

Our lab is the bottom right corner windows of the closest brown building, in the third phase of the Crary Lab, and close to the aquariums. You can also see the dive locker, the small blue building on the left.

Andrew was taking a nitrogen day - a day of not diving to let the nitrogen gas that builds up in your tissues from diving escape. A non-diving day once in a while helps prevent the bends, or decompression sickness. His morning in the lab was spent trying to get the current meter ready - it's almost ready - and adding skirts to the bottom of our fences to avoid the problem we encountered today. In the afternoon, Kathy worked on photographing live animals under the microscope. Dan was mix-master, enriching the sediments we collected form Turtle Rock, so that we can place an experiment there tomorrow. I stayed with my role of loading the sediments into the containers - if I know how they are organized on the surface, I'll have an easier time putting them out correctly underwater.

Rob Robbins, the McMurdo diving safety officer, and Gogi Gwardschaladse, a commercial diver, are helping us out a great deal by using surface-supply equipment to dive in the contaminated areas closest to McMurdo Station. The surface-supply gear uses a full-face mask, so that you are not exposed to the water at all, and also includes communications with the surface that are important in areas where there are cables and other hazards underwater. Today they collected a full set of samples from the outfall site. Without their help, we would have a very hard time completing all our work!

Rob Robbins decides that perhaps his morning coffee needs sugar after all.