As we travel the sea ice between our dive sites, Adélie penguins are the species we most frequently encounter.
I didn't think I would be as excited to see penguins for the first time as I was a few…
McMurdo Station's hyperbaric chamber.
The USAP scientific diving program maintains and operates a hyperbaric, or "recompression," chamber at McMurdo Station, an important safety net for those…
Dr. Bret Tobalske floats near the exit hole at 15ft/5m during his 3 minute "safety stop."
In the 1940s, the Self Contained Underwater Breathing Apparatus (SCUBA) was a revolutionary device in that…
Numerous signs around "The Galley" emphasize proper dining hall hygiene.
McMurdo Station is the logistics hub for the entire United States Antarctic Program, which means it sees dozens of newly…
This week, McMurdo Station hosted Secretary of State John Kerry, the highest ranking US official ever to visit the continent. The Secretary's visit was a weather-delayed forty-eight hour whirlwind…
Released from above, Dr. Bret Tobalske observes the posture changes in a sea spider as it drifts back to the bottom.
Sixty-five feet (20m) beneath the ice, I'm laying on the bottom of McMurdo Sound…
Steven Lane stares down the eyepieces of a dissecting microscope as he deftly adjusts small knobs on a desk-top instrument mount to his right. Lane, a graduate student at the University of Montana,…
A vote-by-mail state, my home state of Washington allowed me to vote before I deployed to The Ice.
November 8 is election day in the US, so how do US citizens in Antarctica vote? While McMurdo…
On any given morning in the Crary Laboratory aquarium room, University of Hawaii PhD Candidate Caitlin Shishido can be found looming over the sea tables, staring intently into one particular aquarium…
Taking a break from sea spider collections, Steve Lane swims up to the grounding line of the Barne Glacier, 50ft/15m underwater.
I touched a glacier for the first time the other day. The river of…
The oxygen hypothesis operates on the idea that the maximum size of an animal is related to how much oxygen is available in its environment and how much it uses. The energy that powers all of the…
My working hours are pretty evenly divided between diving with the team and running a sea spider physiology experiment in one of the Crary lab's "environmental" rooms. Environmental rooms are small…
