Drill Team 249

You now know that we dive through holes in the ice to do our research here in McMurdo Sound, but where do these dive holes come from? We have to go drill them!

This time we're drilling the hole at our main site, Cinder Cones, where methane gas seepage began in 2011.

It starts by flagging where we want the dive hole to be (crossed red flags), and then we bring out a bulldozer carrying a drilling machine behind.

The drill creates a hole 4 feet in diameter down through the ice sheet, around 6 feet thick. Then, we clean it up by shoveling the spillover snow, and scooping out ice inside the hole.

Once we had approval from our site manager, a very cute Weddell seal who was eager to check out the new hole, we move our dive hut over top of it. We'll become great friends with dive hut 8, as soon as the heat is turned on inside.

Thanks to the McMurdo carpenters and our dive team, we now have a new protected dive hole where we can research the role of methane in Antarctica.