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I've been back in Virginia for a few days now.  The flights back home from Christchurch (Christchurch -> Auckland -> Los Angeles -> Cleveland -> Norfolk) were pretty uneventful, which was good as I just wanted to get home.  If took about 31 hours from when I left the hotel in New Zealand to when I got back home.

The first glider has been doing great (105 dives as I type this) and is returning lots of data.  It's still not exactly where we want it, but we'll have to wait a little longer for some of the sea-ice to clear out before we steer over to where we would like.

The second glider was launched about 2 1/2 days ago.  There were only two people from our group left, so they had to get some help from the field safety people and were still quite busy with the launch.  However, they did get one cool picture of a Minke whale starting to surface through the hole near the ice edge where they launched the glider:

Yes I'm jealous I didn't get to help with this launch

When this glider was first launched, we lost contact with it for over a day, but it has finally phoned home twice.  This one was launched closer to the open water we want to sample, but it's also in perhaps a more dangerous place as it is right next to floating end of a glacier.  If it gets stuck under the glacier, we'll never hear from it again.  The first time it called in, it showed that it had a couple of dives where it couldn't get any closer to the surface than about 250 ft.  We're not sure, but we think it may have actually gone under the glacier for a while (which is scary, but kind of cool too).  You can track this one on the same web page as the first glider:

http://iop.apl.washington.edu/seaglider/index.php

(The first glider will be SG502 Ross Sea, the second one is SG503 Ross Sea)

It's currently overdue for its next call back, but I'm not too worried yet.

Now it's time to start doing something useful with all this good data we're getting...