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 wanted a hole big enough to fit SCINI through and big enough that it wouldn’t refreeze quickly.  If we would have successfully broken throug the ice with the large truck-mounted drill, then no further enlargement would have been required – just maintaining the hole in a liquid state.

However, since the ice was too thick for the truck mounted drill, we had to use a smaller-diameter drill and then enlarge the hole diameter using an ice-melting contraption called a “Hotsy”.  There are three main parts to this: The Hotsy burns diesel fuel to heat a fluid and pump it through external hoses, the “stinger” is a metal coil through which the heated fluid is circulated, and the generator powers the pump in the Hotsy.  The stinger coil is lowered down into the hole in the ice, and heats up the water there.  This causes the diameter of the hole to slowly grow over time.  Once the hole is wide enough, a heated dive hut is dragged on top of the hole, and hot air blown into the hole keeps it from refreezing.

The Hotsy and generator are demanding machines, requiring around-the-clock care and feeding.  Every four hours, two of us would drive a Mattrack out to Cape Armitage and refuel the generator with gasoline, and the Hotsy with diesel.

In the next photo, you can see the two hoses disappearing below the ice to the stinger in the hole.

Another area the SCINI team was working on was SCUBA diving to collect samples and photographs.  The dive was done from a dive hut in front of the station’s jetty:

It was a heated hut, and the plastic tube you see has a fan on top which collects warm air from the top of the hut and blows it onto the water surface to prevent refreezing.

It works quite well!  Here is one of the pictures from that dive:

The lab work consisted of building another light ring, fine-tuning the software used by the pilot to fly SCINI, and more work on the navigation system.

We are all eager to test our improvements on Monday morning!

And finally, the SCINI Team says hello from Antarctica to Bella Golden and “The Moonshells” at Sea Pines Montessori Academy!