Sea Ice!

Out on the Ross Sea; Sea ice converging with a glacier.

Hustle bustle, hustle bustle, military planes flying in, dropping huge amounts of cargo and people at a little village we call the runway. Roads stretch this way and that as far as the eye can see, Mountains raise up all around you, one bellowing smoke, all covered in glaciers. The biggest bus you've seen and caterpillar bulldozers populate the surroundings like so many ants. It's hard to imagine; but here we are on the Ross Sea, fathoms of some of the coldest water on earth right beneath your feet. A body of water that looks to me to be the size of a great lake! Surely were it not ringed by mountains, it would be lost to the curvature of the earth, off in the distance. Come February this little village, the roads the people and equipment everywhere will be restricted to more permanent ice shelf or land, as the 84 inches of sea ice we are standing on will dissapear, revealing the depths of the Ross Sea, and it's summer populations of seals and Orcas.

As a result of it's size perhaps, theremal inertia, or maybe purely of climatic causes, Antarctica puts on it's winter coat of ice for seven months of the year, only for the sun to melt it back away with every passing day of summer. This yearly cycle effectively doubles the size of the continent, freezing a ceiling over the diverse and bustling communities of sea life including sponges, sea-stars, urchins, spiders, fish, jellys and krill. This amazing freezing and thawing is of course a dynamic event, and does not simply come and go, but it shrinks, expands, flows, flexes, pushes into islands and glaciers, cracks, heaves and dives; interacting with it's surroundings and demonstrating the forces of plate tectonics right before your eyes.

A glacier heaves upward as it approaches the frozen sea; Little Razorback Island, flanked with pressure ridges and cracks heaving sea ice in all directions.

An amazing sight, this also means that around every crevice, crack or ridge lies perilous danger to the common human mammal, certainly not designed for the sub-freezing waters beneath. Hence we receive as part or our training here, a specific sea-ice safety course, during which we take an entire day to drive around the sights and use really cool ice drills and tape measures to profile interesting cracks and crevices. Power tools meets sightseeing, and for the geeks in the audience, a physics lesson is offered in small helping from the instructor and in earth shattering reality by the ice beneath your feet.

Hagglund - a Norwegian vehicle that carried the 12 of us; a glacier descending Mt. Erebus, and flowing into the Ross Sea.



Two drills. One, a brace and bit; the other, essentially a weed eater with an auger attachment!

With a few extra minutes we decided to swing by the snow cave and have a peek inside.

While I had a great time in the class, my most thrilling experience came a couple of weeks later while on sea-ice patrol. This is a duty of the carpenter's shop, to check the heaters and propane tanks in all the dive sheds in the area. 20 miles out (this takes a long time on sea-ice) in a pisten bully and once again surrounded by ice and mountains we come to a group of islands where a large majority of the dive sheds are located.

Our truck - around here we call them Pisten Bully; The first dive shed, at the foot of a cliff holding back the glacier.

Mt. Erebus and the edge of one of the glaceirs cariving it.

Stepping out of the rig at big razorback island, sounds abound. Moans carry on the wind and echo around the islands and pressure ridges drawing your attention to the dark slug looking calico lumps laying all around the island. The pressure ridges that form around these islands open up sea access allowing Weddell seals to flop out onto the ice where they began giving birth about a week prior to our visit! Small seals abound! Researchers were busy trying to weigh the 800 pound mamas, and lord knows they could be the more testy of the two animals. We kept our distance! (Also, we are required to)

Researchers weighing seals, and one mama hanging out, preparing to give birth.

Our day rounded out with a last dive shed in desperate need of some more propane, and an active BBC dive crew inside probobly not in desperate need of some company, but we decided to poke our heads in and say hello anyway. Filming sea life for "Freezing Planet", the next big BBC nature documentary series, four divers were taking turns plunging into the 28 degree water wearing tons of gear and swimming around cameras in huge boxes for 30 minutes at a time. We chatted about some of their footage we had seen at a sneak preview and in previous films, as well as what they were filming that week. They are doing some very interesting time-lapse photgraphy that is really bringing McMurdo Sound to life!

sedimentary ice?