November 8, 2002

This is Dan reporting on the first full day of work at New Harbor. We started the day off with a beautiful snowmobile ride up the coast to Cape Bernacchi with dive safety officer Rob Robbins. We traveled the whole way along a track of smooth ice formed by a moat of meltwater from last summer. Since the sea ice didn't break out last year, melting along the shore resulted in long thin winding lakes of water running parallel to shore.

The divers working here last summer had to use a small boat to cross over to the sea ice where they could travel more easily to their dive holes. Whatever difficulty it caused them, it created a beautiful winding, smooth track for us amidst the ice pressure ridges and tidal cracks. The reason for our journey was to take advantage of a small hole melted in the ice by a previous group so that we could sample and set up experiments at an additional site on the New Harbor side of the sound. Benthic communities are quite different here from those around McMurdo; water currents here come predominantly from the South from under the Ross Ice shelf and are thought to carry less of the nutrients that benthic organisms require, also the sea floor is made up of much larger areas of silt and sand which was been carried off the continent in glacial moraines, so there are fewer hard substrates for sessile invertebrates to settle on. In order to get started we first needed to widen a 1 foot wide hole through 8 feet of ice into a 4 to 5 foot wide hole that a diver could fit through. To do this we brought out a machine called, strangely enough, the "Hotsy."

An electric generator drives a pump which sends propylene glycol which has been heated by a diesel furnace through a coiled steel pipe that is left dangling through the hole. Over the course of 10 to 20 hours the hot coil heats seawater enough to melt the sea ice around the hole to the required size, except every few hours someone had to make the 45 minute drive up the coast to pump more fuel into the generator and the furnace and to relocate the hot coil so that we didn't end up with a funny shaped hole. Back at the camp in New Harbor we were able to do 2 dives at a site called the "Tile Hole" which is going to be the other of our sampling and experimental locations. We were able to collect all the infaunal, chemistry, sediment, photo and video samples we needed as well as collect the buckets of sediment we will use to set up organic enrichment experiments. In the evening we had a visit from some New Zealand and Finnish scientist/divers who had been in New Harbor for a few days and were heading out to do a transit of McMurdosound in the morning. No sissy helicopters for them, just 60 or so miles across the sea ice towing a dive hut behind a tractor.