8 November 2003

A Full Day at New Harbor

We're settling into the routine here. The morning was spent in another trip to Cape Bernacchi, an involved process that I'm sure someone will describe. My part consisted mainly of running around trying to recall the myriad pieces of equipment that need to be loaded up before the hour skidoo ride. As an aside, the skidoos have become the bane of my existence here; they're noisy, smelly, uncomfortably small Alpine I models that only deign to start on a good day with a bit of luck. Dan has become my defacto skidoo starter, as he's the only one with the strength and patience to haul on the starter rope long enough to get them started. Of course, given that the alternative is several miles of hiking over rough ice, we do need them! Otherwise, the tending process out there is quite enjoyable, especially these last few days when the weather has been beautiful and the seals have been popping their heads out of both holes to look around. By the time we had returned to camp Rob Robbins had arrived for several days of diving with us; Rob is already an honorary member of the group, and joined in the fun seamlessly, parking himself in front of the sink and washing dishes within an hour or two of arrival.

The afternoon was my chance to dive, though! Stacy and I headed over to the Tile Hole in Explorers Cove, very near camp. The site has one of Stacy's massive cage experiments, and her task was to collect the small experimental cores from the bottom. Since all the other work at this site had been done, I got to wander around and take pictures with my digital camera again. The bottom here is mostly unexciting glacial sand, but even that has quite a few new species, and the few rocks sprout a profusion of fascinating life I hadn't scene before.

(Above) A rock encrusted with sponges, polychaetes, urchins and variety of other local denizens. (Right) A large brittle star.

The silty bottom has large numbers of scallops and brittle stars, with occasional pencil and burrowing urchins. On the rocks were a fairly recognizable collection of sponges and bryozoans, along with a large collection of crinoids, distant relatives of seastars and urchins that are more typically found in the deep ocean. Here they are fairly common, perched up on rocks with their feathery arms waving in the miniscule currents to catch the few drifting plankton. This is one of the joys of Antarctic diving, the chance to see types that typically live in the deep ocean or are rare or small elsewhere. Also at this site man creatures were surprisingly active. The little fish were frequently up wandering around, checking out the cloud of mud around Stacy and examining our lights; the brittle stars were frequently to be scene lifted a few inches off the bottom with their sinuous arms writhing as they wandered off on some unimaginable (but obviously highly important) errand.

	(Above) A crinoid fanning its arms in the current to catch dinner. (Left) A pencil urchin, perched on top of a scallop, with a variety of hitchhikers: two species of sponge, and a soft coral.

I spent quite a few minutes surveying one large rock, presumably left behind by some past glacier, then headed upward. Stacy was working diligently away on the other side of the dive hole from me, collecting cores. After checking in with her, I headed up toward shallower water where my bottom time wouldn't be as limited by nitrogen saturation. As a fairly big person, I'm usually limited in dive time by my air consumption, but the double tank rigs we pack here means that I can actually stay in deep water long enough to get in trouble. So I headed up to shallow water and spent some time examining the crystalline gardens of anchor ice and brine tubes up there, taking pictures furiously but somewhat fruitlessly. The natural light isn't enough to get a decent picture, while the flash isn't powerful enough to illuminate as far as I'd like. Almost all my pictures of the true color and visibility under the ice have been, at best, blurry. It's nearly impossible to steady a camera for a 2 second exposure while floating in water and trying to maintain balance. Lying on the bottom worked a little better, but the auto focus also has problems in this environment! Soon I was out of time, and Stacy was already waiting at the down line, so I swam back under the ice to join her, where we did our usual collection of safety stop warming dances before surfacing

The evening saw us exchanging stories with Rob and feasting on shrimp and beef burritos, created by Dan, thus fortifying ourselves for another adventure. The weather was spectacularly good, perfectly clear, windless and warm (albeit still below freezing); it was a perfect day to hike to the Commonwealth Glacier's front wall, a few miles above camp. Jim was still feeling the effects of the McMurdo crud, and stayed behind to tend the generator while the rest of us took off up the valley. The Taylor Valley extends many miles inland, including a few frozen lakes and several glaciers descending precipitously from the Asgard Range above (the Commonwealth being the nearest).

	Looking up Taylor Valley, Lake Fryxell in the middle distance, with Commonwealth Glacier coming in from the right.

This was the first hike that really brought home to me the complete absence of life in Antarctica. As one who has done a lot of hiking and backpacking all over North America, I've wandered through glacial terrain and high alpine rock fields, but the Antarctic terrain is barren in a way I have never had a chance to experience before. No animals, no plants, just rock, snow and ice. The soil is as dusty as the day the glacier left it, never having been consolidated or worked by flora or fauna, with no organic material. I have yet to even spot lichens, the almost ubiquitous symbiont of algae and fungus that has staked a toehold in other desolate places I've visited! In such an environment, I feel a little guilty for every footprint I leave behind, knowing that others will see it for years to come, as I spot the footprints of last year's hikers along the way. We carry pee bottles so as to not leave any other traces of our walk; one liter of urine in this soil is an organic enrichment the likes of which may not have been seen in tens of thousands of years.

	(Above) Stacy admiring the Commonwealth Glacier's 100 foot walls. (Left) Looking back down valley at Erebus.

The front wall of the glacier is a sheer wall, probably 100' high, of blue ice, topped by the barest frosting of this year's snowdrifts. We arrived near midnight, the sun shining on the hills around us, though we were easily shadowed by the glacier. At the base a steep 30' drift of shed pieces and last year's melt had built up, and it took a little work to scale that to the face of the glacier itself, where a little shelf allowed us to wander along, admiring the colors and icicles and looking somewhat nervously at the loose cornices over our heads. After a bit of fencing with the occasional icicle, a few pictures and some sledding down the drift, we decided it was time to head home for a meager ration of sleep.