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Sunday's are always a good day around here, and today was no exception. Some of us heralded the new day by dancing up a storm at the Halloween party, which finally trailed off at around 2 in the morning. We all straggled into brunch at 11, somewhat the worse for wear, but managed to quickly rejuvenate with waffles and whipped cream, smoked salmon on bagels, omeletes and all the other things that make Sunday brunch a much cherished tradition.
Being nominally a day off, we usually save Sundays for scouting trips and extraneous dives. Much of the weekday diving is fairly focused, with our time on the bottom almost entirely taken up in fetching, carrying, searching and, yes, shoveling. Days like this are a perfect chance to sit back and get a better understanding of the area, either diving new sites or diving a research site without a mission.
Today's site was the Cape Evans wall; a small glacier coming off Erebus meets the water in a mass of billowing ice and cracks. The site is well-used by one of our fellow projects, the Marsh Lab, but doesn't fall into our normal work schedule. All of us set out to dive the day, including dive officer Rob, in two Pisten Bullies laden with gear, as usual.
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Cape Evans |
The trip anywhere in a Pisten Bully is a bit bouncy, and this ride was one of the worse, bouncing and rolling over the sestrugi. The site is tucked right under an ice wall and cliff, well off the main route north. A camp of Weddell Seal researchers is about 2 miles southwest, and one of their subjects was using our safety hole to breathe out of during the dive. We cleaned out both holes, always ready with the shovels and dip nets, then admired the area for a short bit before starting the suiting up.
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| (Above) Dan checks out his new camera!
(Left) A little jellyfish running away on the way down. |
We all suited up in a hurry, Dan and I going in first as the two photographers. I've been using a Canon S50 in an underwater housing, and Dan had just received a housing for his digital camera. We were all set to check out the new site. Right into the hole I spotted a new jellyfish I hadn't seen before. It darted away fairly quickly as I approached, though I managed one shot. Dan futzed with his new camera for a while, then we both headed for the bottom.
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| (Above) Fish resting in barrel sponge.
(Left) A soft coral, Gersemia. |
Getting to the bottom here involved swimming sideways. The end of the downline was hanging free at 130 feet, deeper than many of us are certified to dive, but the bottom slopes up steeply and quickly. At about 90 feet we circled around bunches of soft corals and barrel sponges, then worked our way up to the unique feature of this site, the glacier. Both Dan and I spent a lot of time trying various camera options and angles; the most spectacular views, of the natural light coming through the sea ice, are the hardest to get, but much of the beauty of the smaller organisms is impossible to miss. Despite the freezing waters, the colors and species here rival any of the tropical diving I've done.
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Jonna and Rob diving under the glacier wall. |
The glacier ice billowed out around us as we closed in, following Jonna and Rob as they checked out the caves and cracks. We finned up to and around the ice blocks, then through a large channel behind the leading edge. Ahead of me it looked as though Dan was disappearing into a gray void that went hundreds of feet; it took me several seconds to resolve the featureless wall of the glacier only a few feet in front of me. It wasn't until my dive light started picking out miniscule crustaceans in the ice that I managed to gain a sense of perspective!
 | Looking back at one of our dive holes from under the glacier's toe. |
However, as with all dives here, it came to an end too soon, and Dan and I began the swim back to the dive hole. The incredible visibility here makes it easy to see your hole from a long way away, but also easy to swim a long way, confident that your exit is "just over there". I'm frequently a bit startled by the length of my swim back to the distant blue circle and flashing lights that mark the dive hole. Once at the hole, the safety stop offers one last chance to look over the site. With hundreds of feet of visibility, the stop is a perfect chance to sit and admire the scenery around: the blue bands marking the thinner or less occluded ice, the brine channels hanging from the sea ice, and the cracks and ridges through the ice. Finally, at the lighter sites we have a panoramic view of the area out hundreds of feet in every direction.
Once we'd all been hauled out of the water and compared notes, it was time to zip back. The Marsh lab was due to pay up their bowling debt to us this night, and we met them at Gallaghers for burger night, involving a big pile of burgers and fries and more than few beers. Then Adam Marsh took off to prepare himself for the Sunday night lecture, about the formation of the oceans and the early earth processes.