Plan R, beta 3

October 21 2003 Working in the Antarctic with Stacy involves quite a bit of flexibility from all involved. I forget how the day's plan started, but a series of equipment failures and personnel changes led to today's title, as plans A through P fell by the wayside, leaving us to carry out plan Q, with some minor modifications, which became plan R.

Stacy, Jonna, and Dan procured a Pisten Bully to replace ours, which had rattled loose a plastic plate intended to keep drifting snow from freezing into a huge cake inside the engine compartment. Since it was shortly due for scheduled maintenance, we left the vehicle in the heavy shop, dwarfed by the other mammoth construction equipment around there. These three took the Pisten Bully and a bunch of other divers out to Cinder Cones for some sampling and diving, including Jonna's check-out dive. After a week and a half of recovery from her knee injury, she was cleared to get in and start diving, and excited to do so!

We have a program in place to give people around the station the chance to join us on dives out of town. While we spend much of our days on and beneath the ice, driving madly around, many people work long hours for low pay back on the station to keep everyone fed, the roads cleared and just generally do a lot of the grunt work that allows us to function as efficiently as we do. We take volunteers who want to help our operations and see the off-station areas with us almost every day. Sometimes this means they get a full day trip out to the scenic Cinder Cones hut and sometimes they haul lines and shovel ice at the sewage outfall outside of town!

	(Above) A Weddell seal basks in the comfort of our newly created hole, note the recently abandoned shovel. (Left) The drilling rig drilling one of our Cinder Cones holes (WARNING-these are big files--don't open them unless you have a fast internet connection). (video clips of the drill 1) starting the hole (19M AVI, sideways) and 2) breaking through into the water (24M).)

The dive tender for this day was Rianna, though she actually never tended a dive! She and I spent the morning following the drill rig around and shoveling the ice shards out of the freshly drilled holes. Stacy has described the drilling operation from the 16th; our day was very similar to that except for a few noxious smells that oozed out of some of the holes drilled nearest the town sewage outfall. We got some excitement on the last hole as a seal poked its head up the hole just as I turned away to dump my net full of ice. I was alerted by Rianna's scream, turned back to see an empty hole as the seal had bobbed back under. It quickly returned, though and slithered onto the ice, breathing heavily. It finally slipped back in after a few minutes of recovery.

Since I'd monopolized the dive tender all morning, Jim and Jen didn't get their dive done, and further we missed our chance at the afternoon dives because we hadn't drilled safety holes (secondary escape holes) on the two primary holes we'd just drilled. So it looked like a good day to head out and check out our oceanographic instrumentation.

	(Above) Using a chainsaw to clear 4 inches of ice from the Instrument Hole. (Left) Ice crystals form on the cable at depth, but are peeled off by the winch as it comes up.

As a secondary project down here, I'm in charge of sampling water properties and currents. As has been briefly mentioned here, I've been having some troubles with this, but managed to get the S4 current meter placed on Sunday. Today's mission was to check on the S4 and try the first deployment of our CTD (Conductivity, Temperature and Depth), a SeaBird SBE19+. In the past, when I've assisted with CTD deployments, they've been from ships in a variety of weather conditions. This is the first CTD cast I've seen done from the back of a Ford Truck! Rather than a winch over the side, we used a small tripod with a battery driven winch.

	(Above) The S4 current meter returns safely from its first deployment (Left) The CTD is sent down to measure temperature and salinity of the water.

The first order of business here, as with any other work through the ice, was to clear the newly frozen ice out of the instrument hole. In this case I decided to go straight to the chainsaw, something I've been itching to try out on sea ice, and was soon hacking away, wary of slicing the cable off but otherwise quite happy with the results of my efforts! After this we hauled up the S4, pleased to find it still on the end of the line; oceanographic dogma has it that any instrument put into the water is lost until proven recovered. Whether or not we get any data, I'd qualify this as a successful deployment. The CTD line was encased in beautiful ice crystals that had formed onto it underwater, coming up as a column of crystalline ice that crunched away as it fed through the block.

The CTD went down and came back up without problems, and soon we were off to flag the route back to the main road. We'd had problems driving back on Sunday, so a few extra flags on the route will help keep us from wandering too far off track until we get back to the heavily used main sea-ice road. Between these and a GPS with lots of spare batteries, we're pretty confident on getting ourselves to and from almost anywhere we've been, even in Condition Fun.