"Boricua en la Antártida"

No amount of training can give you true expectations of what is like to dive in Antarctica. After two years of gathering the necessary certifications, designing the experiments and learning about our work for the season, you are finally seating down in front of the dive hole. The same thoughts nervously cross through the mind: weights? - yes, fins? - yes, backplate secured? - just now, connect the drysuit hose, make sure the tube-ies are in, triple hood on, mask on, drysuit gloves on, one last check that everything is clipped, and, ready to jump?

And just like that, you slide into the dive hole past 6ft of sea ice into the McMurdo Sound. Everything is quiet and calm. The immense support from both the divers and the team made any ounce of nervousness in that moment just pure excitement. I had the privilege of having the Antarctic diving legend Steve Rupp as a dive buddy waiting for me on the other side. Once I established my neutral buoyancy, which took me two more dives after to nail down but all part of the experience!, I was mesmerized by the view.

Once you look up, you can see all kinds of different shades of blue that can only exist as the light passes through the snow on top of the sea ice and into the ocean. Those beautiful colors set the stage to more than 100m of visibility that brings into contrast the vibrant benthic life waiting to be admired. As you come closer to the bottom, my eyes could not stop seeing the organisms that I’ve spent the last two years studying - happy in their natural habitat! From the vibrant pink Odontaster seastars to the striking red Sterechinus sea urchins and the the iridescent Parbolasia worms, how much life to be found under the Antarctic sea ice!

As I dove beneath the sea ice for the first time and admired the flourishing life in its waters, I could not help but feel grateful and privileged to be there. Because it was not only a first for me, but a first for any one in my community from Puerto Rico. I couldn’t help but feel love for the ocean, for the science we do and for the community I represent. It is my goal as a scientist, and a value I don’t doubt echoes throughout the Cold Dark Benthos team, to connect people with their ocean resources and foster healthy and sustainable relationships with it, from its shores to its most remote regions. May this be the first of many dives where we can connect the world (including you!) with life underneath the Antarctic ice!

Time for your close up

So lots of the things we look at are small - including the amazing things that Dexter wrote about in the last post. Much of the seafloor and water is full of small and medium things that are lost in the spectacular landscapes that surround us. While the ctenaphone above is not small...the intricacies of its body is still lost when viewed from afar.

These cnidarians (octocorals) are another example of amazing detail. They carpet the seafloor at Dayton's wall and much of the region. The tentacles are mesmerizing when viewed up close.

Even the large anemones have amazing microstructure. This one is the size of my hand, but up close shows even more beauty.

I don't make a pattern of posting the back end of animals, but even the rear of this nudibranch is a good angle.

And how can one not love all the legs and finer bits of a big sea spider.

At all scales, the underwater world in Antarctica is astounding.

Antarctica Under the Microscope

On top of the ice lie penguins, seals and skuas in Antarctica. Under the ice are fields of sea stars, sponges, corals and nemertean worms. But what about under the seafloor? Here is a collage I put together from this season of many of the invertebrates that burrow and crawl around the sediment.

One of the types of collections we're doing during our SCUBA dives here are infaunal sediment cores. This means cores of the seafloor to look at the animals that live inside. We take multiple cores at different depths, sites, and levels of methane release.

I spend many hours under the microscope sorting through these rocks and gravel picking out all the animals to study which animals live there and how abundant they are.

These are the three most dominant animals: an anemone called Edwardsia meridionalis, a tube-building worm called Spiophanes tcherniai, and a protist called Gromia oviformis. The collage above showcases some of the other animals including amphipods, clams, snails, shrimp, ostracods, mites, kinorynchs, and other worms.

These may be animals that most people will never see as they're mostly smaller than 1 millimeter. However, they all play an important role in how nutrients and chemicals are cycled through the ocean. This work will help us decipher how the methane seeps we are studying impact the animals communities in McMurdo Sound.