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Hey, that's a big deal to us winter-overs. When the sun comes up over the ice for the first time in months, a young (well, sort-of young) man's thoughts naturally turn to... diving. What else? Okay, there is that *other* thing, but that's not really an appropriate topic for this posting.
McMurdo falls under the catagory of "good place to visit, and a good place to leave when you're done visiting." I'm afraid that I will have waaay overstayed my welcome by the time I get off the ice, having been here some 13 months this time.
So I am in need of a serious latitude adjustment, and I think hear Fiji calling. It's saying, "Spend six weeks diving your brains out and warming up again." I've learned to trust those little voices in my head, although the one that said "Go spend another year in Antarctica" has been severely scolded recently.
Ah well, if you have any recent diving info for Fiji I'd be glad to hear it. Otherwise, I just wanted to say Hello.
Are you the same Mario who wrote the article about underwater communications? Neat stuff. I hadn't thought much about it before, but now I can see it has some interesting possibilities, especially for safety reasons.
Keralucu -- Thailand, huh? Now THERE was some great diving. Richelieu Rock, the Similans (sp?) and Andaman Sea. *Sigh*, I don't think I'll get back there for quite a while. The Thai people were so nice, and such great food too.
To answer your questions, I work contracts with the US Antarctic Program. There's just about every kind of job down here; I help out the geophysical scientists. I work for a year, take time off to go dive someplace tropical, then go back and work some more. As you might imagine, it's an interesting lifestyle...
There is diving going on, actually lots of it. The biologists are down here right now looking at the critters and trying to figure out how things live in -2C water. At this time of the year, because it's been dark for so long, there is practically zero plankton in the water column. Think: visibilities commonly in excess of 100m (300ft). Sometimes 1000ft or more. You can look down through a hole in the ice and see starfish crawling around 120ft below you. As the sun gets higher the plankton starts to bloom. By December the vis has dropped to about what you'd get in your local reservoir.
When it's this clear, they don't use safety lines while ice diving. They just hang a line with flags and strobes down through the hole. The rule is 'don't get out of sight of the down line.' The funny thing is how much life is down there... Above the ice it's stark and pretty much lifeless, but in the water there's bizarre creatures squirming around all over the bottom, and frilly jellyfish pulsing away on missions of their own. Anchor ice (that's ice that grows upwards from the bottom) coats and eventually floats away with anything at shallow depths, and the occasional ice berg also grinds up and disturbs shallow benthos, so most of the interesting dives are deep, 100+ feet.
People who've dove here at this time of the year say it's the most spectacular diving in the world. But do let me do it? Heck no. I begged and pleaded. No way, no day. I have ice diver and drysuit certs, but it doesn't matter. They have their own training program, and unless you have good reasons, you don't dive. So I content myself (ha!) with dive tending and being part of the recompression chamber crew (they have a very nice chamber). That dry diving is about all I'll ever do here unless I can get on one of the science diving projects some day. I did get to snorkel with penguins, but that's a whole 'nother story...
Wow, that would be a cool place to dive! You'll have to beg more, tell them there is a whole group of Texans and many from other states that are without purpose unless you can get under that ice and tell us about it.
We'll have to start a petition to get you under there, and soon!
Anwyays welcome to the board, I think you are the furthest from any known and spoken of diving hole on the board!
Got any pictures you could send, I'd be glad to post them on my website to share with others.
Welcome to the board. Between you and Liquid, we have almost pole to pole coverage..
Stay warm!
I remember camping in the winter when it was so cold .....
* I got a concussion from snowshoeing into the frozen cigarette smoke of the guy in front of me and it was still hanging in the air.
*Lit a match and the fire froze
*When we spoke, chunks of ice fell out of the air and we had to put them on the fire to find out what the heck we were talking about ....
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Welcome aboard g2, glad to have you here and dieing to know what your doing there. Any ice diving going on?
