What's next? Tomorrow, Monday, December 10, it's up to the top of Mt.
Erebus, our nearby, active, 12,500' volcano. I'll be staying at the field
science camp of Phil Kyle's volcano research group. Check out their
excellent web site.
I'll be back with a full report next week.
Alien Baby & Erebus
In the meantime, a few odds & ends...
Word from Pole: CHINGAZO IS ALIVE and back to digging tunnels again. Here he
is peering in at us.
El Gran Faceoff
We've just formed a band with Bill Meyer, Jay Fox, Mark Hitchcock, Kenda
Anderson, and myself to perform at the Christmas party and, most
importantly, at ICESTOCK 2002, the Southernmost annual music festival on our
planet, that takes place around New Year's day.
McMurdo Band
The diving has been great. I have been working as a volunteer with Art
DeVries' research group. His main area of study is anti-freeze proteins in
the blood of fishes. As you may know, the seawater temperature here is a
cold 28°F. The salt dissolved in the water depresses the
freezing point below what we are used to in our home freezers. Professor
DeVries has discovered many exotic and special things that go on within the
tissues and blood of fishes that live here in this supremely cold ocean.
More about this later on.
I have been diving with Kevin Hoefling and Ben
Hunt, two professional Antarctic divers, that DeVries has hired to collect
fish and fish eggs. Mary K. Miller, of San Francisco's great hands-on
science museum, The Exploratorium, has also been joining us for some diving.
Here are some rough JPGs that I have extracted from my available light,
underwater video work.
Dive Hole from Below
600' Visibility
My Kind of Place!
Big Brine Channel
Rough Ceiling
Portal Between Worlds
Kevin on the Ceiling
Kevin Walks on Water
After a Dive with MKM
After a Dive
Besides diving, we often lower and pull up fish traps in the deep, 1500'
water. Here is a seal's head that was placed in one of the traps for a
couple of days so that the amphipod crustaceans could strip the flesh from
the bone. Also, some amphipods crawling across my hand. Don't put your hand
in a bucket of amphipods for 30 minutes, or it might end up looking like the
seal skull!
Amphipods Eating Seal Head
Amphipod in my Hand
Amphipods Picnic on HK
Ice forms on the first stage of our regulators during each dive.
Regulator 1st Stage: Before
Regulator 1st Stage: After
On one dive I was attacked by a Dragon Fish. He was just defending some eggs...
Dragon Fish
Dragon Fish Guards Eggs
Dragon Fish Lunges
Dragon Fish Attack!
One odd organism did turn up in one of the fish traps this week.....
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