October 20th

Sunday is upon us and three of us are still not allowed out on the ice. Dan, Aaron, and myself have not completed sea ice training or our checkout dive and because of this are trapped in the lab. There is still plenty of stuff to do but Stacy and Oliver went out again, checking out sites and collecting the first round of samples. Their dive went well and the first six official samples came in.

Much of our project concerns retrieving intact mud from the sea floor. We have the convenience that since we are sampling at depths that are accessible to diving this is relatively simple. We have cylindrical cores that have a removable bottom and a mesh screen on the top. We remove the bottom, push the device into the mud and the water escapes through the mesh. We stick our hands into the mud to cup the bottom of the cores and pull them out to cap them. Because of the mesh screen the animals that live in the top few millimeters of the sediment are trapped and the core pushes in easy. We then sieve the samples and preserve the animals in formaldehyde. In the samples we found a wonderfully big polycheate worm.

After dinner we went to a lecture by Donald Menihan on the Historic Antarctic explorers. This was an entertaining and yet sobering lectures that was superbly done. The day ended with a spectacular sunset, but it never gets dark the sun just dips behind the mountains.

aloha,
Andrew