Sea-Ice Training and Seal Expedition

We finally had some time to settle in to our lab space on Thursday.  We spent part of the day in meetings, which included finding out that a part we need for the boat we're using at the ice edge when we launch the gliders hadn't arrived yet, so our launch date has been pushed back.  We also unpacked the gliders, updated some of their software and ran a few simple tests.  We have three gliders, but one is a backup and that one is having a few minor problems, but should be OK.

Friday, most of us had to go out all day for training on how to travel on the sea-ice.  We drove out onto the sea-ice about 15 miles away from base.  We then learned things such as how to look for cracks, how to use a couple of types of drills to check to see if the ice near a crack is thick enough to drive over (30 inches for a small truck) and how to probe the snow layer on top of ice when you're travelling through areas of folded up ice covered by snow. 

The tall wall of ice is the Erebus Ice Tongue (a part of a glacier that has flowed off the land and sticks out into the sea-ice).  The rest of the ice in the picture is frozen sea-ice (different from the glacier which is ice from compacted snow).



Travelling through an area where the sea-ice has been pushed up against something and folded up (pressure ridge).


We again got lucky with the weather, so the sea-ice training was pretty fun.  We got back to base around 5pm, so we had time to go over to an observation tube that is sometimes drilled through the sea-ice.  You climb down around 20 feet and then you're in a small tube with six windows that is in the water below the ice.

Not a great picture, but that's looking up at the bottom of the sea-ice.

I don't think I had shown any pictures of McMurdo Station yet.

On Saturday we got really lucky.  We weren't going to calibrate the compasses on the gliders until Sunday (more on that later) so we had some free time.  There's a seal biologist here that I know and he said that it would be OK if we came along to help with examining a Weddell Seal.  We all said that would be awesome!

You need permission to touch any wildlife in Antarctica, so the biologist first had to get us approved to be on his permit.  That only took about a day and on Saturday we headed out onto the sea-ice again, but this time we got to go on snowmobiles.  I have not had snowmobile training, so I had to ride on the back, but it was still a blast (other than the metal lid on the box behind me which was right at the small of my back).  Once we got out there, we mostly stood around and took pictures while the biologists did all the work.  When they saw a mother and her pup, they first gave the mom a shot to calm her down and then waited for a while.  Then, they put a big net over her head (so she wouldn't bite anybody) and I got to help hold her down.  She was pretty big (one of the things the biologists did was weigh her and she was almost 900 lbs.) so it took a bunch of us.  Because of where I was holding her, my legs were dragged through some seal poop (just on my knees mostly).  Luckily the snow pants are washable.

The seal pup (about 1 week old) whose mom we weighed.

You can just see a seal sticking its nose out this hole in order to breath.

While we were out on the ice, we also experimented with another instrument that is a remote controlled little submarine with a camera on it.  We put it in a seal hole and managed to take some good videos of a couple of seals swimming under the ice.

The image on the screen (kind of hard to see in this picture) is the water cavity beneath the sea-ice.

All-in-all, a pretty amazing day.