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.

It’s not Halloween, but Marco has to wear a stupid hat because he is late writing his blog entry.

Marco and I dove at one of the sites along the station front, part of a long term data collection to document community changes.  The marine community near the station is still recovering from sewage contamination that stopped in 2002 when a sewage treatment plant was installed.  I have been happily surprised at how rapidly the recovery is proceeding.  This was Marco’s first dive with the still camera, and he did an excellent job of taking the photo quadrats that we use to document the abundant, large animals such as seastars and anemones.  We also take video transects to quantify the rarer large animals that would not be captured in the smaller area of the quadrats, like sea spiders and fish.  And I collect cores to enumerate the tiny infaunal animals that live buried in the sediments, the worms and crustaceans.  With these three kinds of sampling, we get a complete picture of the benthic community.

This image is a random shot of the seafloor near McMurdo. How many anemones do you see in it?

I spent the balance of the day working on a talk that I will give to the community here in a couple of weeks.  It is a good opportunity to show people what that weird group of scientists down in the corner of the aquarium is doing.  Since the “purpose” of McMurdo Station is to support science, the supporters appreciate knowing what it is that they are supporting.  It’s also an opportunity to recruit volunteer dive tenders, people to help us get suited up and get in – and out of – the water.  As with any nice 2 way street, this also gives the volunteers a chance to get a little ways away from the station and see something different.

The beginning slide for my Wednesday Science Lecture, which will be about the Antarctic Sewage Pollution Impact and Recovery Experiments - ASPIRE

I finished the day by flagging, or marking the two sites that we will have drilled for the next 2 dives.  GPS has made this much much easier, but every year I have a tussle with someone at McMurdo who thinks that I should not put dive holes where I have been putting them for 20 years, and where they need to be to look at the distance that contamination from the station is spreading.  This year, the someone was irate because the holes were close to the snowmobile parking area, and even though I had put huts on two of the holes and flagged the third with a black flag, which means “Danger – do not approach,” they were afraid a snowmobile would drive into one.  I pointed out that if a snowmobile driver did not A: Avoid the flag and B: Notice that there was a 4 foot hole in the ice, perhaps they should not be driving a snowmobile.  Natural cracks in the ice that can cause problems for snowmobiles are much smaller, and do not naturally sprout black flags.

Here is Zach, carrying what we hope is a sufficient number of black flags that no one will miss the hole.

SCINI engineering tests continued today with a very successful test mission.  Everything was stable and functional, so we will do our first science dive tomorrow – finally we are getting to the work that we all want to do.

And it all works!

Hoping that you do not encounter any black flags today –
Smiles, Stacy