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 consisted of further software development to improve the reliability and stability of SCINI, as well as add a few new features to make flying it easier.  I added a button to calibrate SCINI’s inertial measurement unit and depth sensor, as well as fixed a problem related to the surface computer communicating with SCINI.

During SCINI’s morning dive, the main thruster motor controller failed and we spent the rest of the afternoon repairing and reassembling SCINI in the lab.

Marco spent a fair amount of time out on the ice working on his navigation system.

Diving

Stacy’s task for today was to dive on the sites of the former outflow piles.  About 5 years ago, a sewage treatment plant was installed here at McMurdo base but before that, sewage was just dumped into the ocean.  Large piles of effluent built up at the outflow pipe.  After the treatment plant was engaged, a mat of beggiatoa bacteria built up on the piles of effluent and gave them a white color.  People misinterpreted the origin of this color and started calling them Mt. Charmin, for obvious reasons.

One pleasant change that Stacy noticed is that the effluent piles are noticeably shrinking over time!  Because it is so cold and dark down there, it was expected that the effluent piles would take a long time to break down, but it’s progressing faster than expected.

Visit to Scott Base

Finally, at the end of the day after dinner, we caught a shuttle to New Zealand’s Scott Base for American night.  Scott Base is a popular trip for a variety of reasons.  They have a good selection of unique clothes and other goodies in their store.  It’s also always fun to get out of McMurdo for a change of pace, and the Kiwis are a friendly bunch.  One interesting thing about Scott Base is that it’s all interconnected by tunnels and hallways, so you don’t have to go outside!

We each found some goodies at the store, and then visited the bar for some social time.

One interesting outdoor feature near Scott Base is the Pressure Ridges.  This is an area where the Ross Ice Shelf meets the sea ice.  These two ice structures meet near Scott Base, and their different patterns of movement cause a collision which pushes up ridges of ice – much like how colliding tectonic plates cause mountain ranges.