31 October Stacy Writing It’s Halloween here, but it’s the day before Halloween back home.  And we won’t be celebrating Halloween until tomorrow, because parties here are generally only on Saturdays, as Sunday is the one day off.    So today was a regular work day for us. Marco and I dove at one of the [...]

Today the team worked separately on different tasks: dives in front of the station for SCINI and Stacy, and more development work in the lab.  At the end of the day, we all joined for dinner and a visit to the New Zealand Antarctic base called Scott Base for a little shopping and socializing. The labwork [...]

29OCT08 By Marco Flagg   Where is this?   Accomplishments of the day: Stacy and volunteer Patrick spent most of the day on the ice and shoveled three dive holes.  DJ was called for help when all hope appeared lost.  Despite the Herculean effort, Stacy still got chewed out:  A hole was marked with only [...]

We spent most of today in the lab. SCINI performed very well yesterday but there are still many improvements that we can make. On the electrical engineering front, DJ and Bob worked on tuning the motor controllers and reducing electrical noise. On the navigation front, Marco spent most of the day testing his equipment, in [...]

Monday October 27, 2008 Differences and Similarities in Antarctica, DJ writing Relative to the last few days, today has been relatively mild in the excitement category. It is probably an exciting day for Stacy, who is diving in an ‘air from the surface’ full face mask in the contaminated waters of Winter Quarters Bay. Unfortunately, [...]

26 October Stacy Writing It’s Sunday, and that’s the day off here, which we sometimes observe – like today!  So, for gentle relaxation, DJ and I met at 9:30 to go “feed” the Hotsy and generator that are still melting our hole at Cape Armitage.  The weather was MUCH nicer than yesterday, when it was [...]

Today was a fairly busy day on three fronts. First was enlarging the hole in the ice that we had so much difficulty drilling over the last few days.  Depending on ice thickness, the diameter of hole required, and how long the hole must stay open, various techniques are used.  For the Cape Armitage site, we [...]

24OCT09 by Marco Flagg   After ‘smoking’ SCINI twice yesterday, we settled in for a nice, quiet day of concentrated engineering work back at the lab.  That’s how it goes in engineering.  While smoking a vehicle was on the surface a setback, we still learned a lot and turned that knowledge into productivity.  It had become [...]

This morning we assembled SCINI and took it down to the jetty hut for another technical dive. Unfortunately we had an electrical problem after spending a few minutes in the water. We took SCINI out of the water and noticed that there was smoke inside the camera housing. We quickly took it apart and realized [...]

 Wednesday October 22, 2008 Progress on all fronts, DJ writing       We made progress on many fronts today.  I began the day by talking with some of the operations management folks on station about borrowing an ice penetrating radar system that may help us find ice thin enough to penetrate with the station 24 foot [...]