Saturday, Oct 25, 2003, Jennifer Writing

This morning we all awoke with the excitement of children on Christmas Eve because there was a chance that we were going to the ice edge. I raced to the cafeteria and stocked up on bagels with dehydrated cream cheese, and doughnuts (yumm), and ran to the lab to find a note from Stacy that we were indeed headed to the ice edge today, yeah! In hopes of seeing Emperor Penguins, whales, and massive ice bergs, Rob Robbins (the dive safety officer), Stacy, Jonna, Dan, and myself loaded the Pisten Bully with snorkeling gear, the CTD, and the current meter box while Craig and Jim went off to meet the drill rig on snow machines where they would meet us later down the road. So, off we went, with our first stop being the site near the Penguin Ranch where Craig has the current meter deployed and the second stop being the ice edge!

	Jim looking spry and dapper on his Skidoo.

We noticed that it was windy on the way out but we didn't get the feel of how windy it was until we got to the site and Rob began demonstrating how the wind really can hold you upright while you lean against it.

	The mighty Rob Robbins demonstrating how strong the wind was.

After we retrieved the current meter, we deployed the CTD. While I was deploying it, Dan and Rob imitated male elephant seals belly bustin' in their ECW gear.

Impact is obtained...	Although Rob has the wind to his advantage, he is no match for Dan, who promptly pushes him away with his protruding belly as if Rob were a limp rag.

Unfortunately the weather hadn't changed in the short time it took to deploy the CTD so we reluctantly decided that it might not be a good idea to travel to the ice edge. Instead, we headed back to 'town' for lunch.

After lunch, Jim and I went diving at Cape Armitage to collect the normal array of samples: cores, counts of clams ( Laturnula sp.), and video data. This site is one where Paul Dayton has permanent transects and experiments dating back to the early 1970s, however we did not see any signs of these on the bottom. The dive was beautiful! We descended down into the blue, and immediately you could see very large white barrel sponges.

The large volcano sponge (Anoxycalyx joubini) approximately 2 feet tall and 1 foot wide	The view looking into the barrel of the sponge.

	A close up of the barrel highlighting the oscula (the round holes) where the sponge exhales water.

We have alluded that many of the dives around town have been fairly dark, but this area was quite bright because they had plowed a lot of the snow off the surface of the ice when they drilled the dive holes. Underwater, there were two beams of light emanating onto the seafloor and it looked as though there were two skylights above you. Once we had completed our tasks, I swam into the shallows where anchor ice had formed on all of the organisms. This ice formation is a type of disturbance and sometimes you see a sponge stuck to the under side of the sea ice because so much anchor ice formed on the sponge that it became buoyant and floated it to the surface.

	A sponge ( Homaxinella balfourensis) with anchor ice attached .

When we returned to the lab, we sieved the cores, then Stacy, Jonna, and Craig moved our portable dive hut to our next location and chipped out the 4 holes we are maintaining around here. THE END to another day in paradise...except for the food...