First Dive hole in!

Always an exciting day when we get our first dive hole in the ice. As you will see over this season there are many ways to get dive holes in... and todays is as easy as it gets. We use a very large drill, driven and operated by the US Antarctic Support Program Heavy Shop. It involves a large drill bit (about 1.2m or 4ft across) and can put a hole in the 1.5m/5ft ice in a matter of no time.

The drilling goes along until we get our goal of a great big gurgle of water that sweeps away a bunch of the ice shavings and gets the hole ready for us to attack with shovels.

In the end we have a nice clean hole to pull a hut over (when we are lucky) and be ready to dive.

We have a few more days of training and preparations and then we can get our check out dive and science really underway.