Today I woke up, looked at my watch, and it was ten o'clock. I got lazily
up, took a shower, and made my way to the dry-lab. While I was in the
dry-lab, reading e-mail and working on
various things I had to finish up, Terry came in with his mustang on,
and told me that Bill "fell in." He didn't sound very upset, so it appeared
that things were all right, and indeed they were. Out on the ice-station
(that I accidentally slept through), Bill had wandered to the edge of
a melt-pond to collect what he thought was dirt, and sunk in up to his
chest. He said he couldn't feel any bottom -- meaning that the hole went
all the way through the ice. Apparently he did quite a bit of scrambling,
and got out of the water before it soaked through his mustang. It was
a joke for the rest of the day -- Bill decided to take a swim. It was
pretty funny, after everyone knew he was okay.
I went into the cold-room with Terry and Bill, and finally saw some "good" ice. This core that they were sectioning up had examples of both granular and columnar ice in it. Granular is where air pockets form in the ice, and give it a real random appearance. The columnar ice is much tighter, contains no air-bubbles, and seems to contain a sort of "grain," like in wood. It is the actual ice-crystal formations in the ice, and when put under a polarized lens, are very easy to see.
After we finished up in the cold-room, I went back into the dry-lab, where I found Mr. Buckley just getting out of his Mustang. He had flown in the helicopter to Barrow to help out with collecting the objects that the ship needed. While he was there, he picked up a package of hot chocolate as a reserve for the hot chocolate that is rapidly disappearing from the kitchen. Along with Mr. Buckley came the ROV board that Lance needed to fix it. That was great, since I was itching to see the ROV work. I watched Lance's progress throughout the day, first installing the board, closing up the interface, turning it on, and getting the different parts on the actual ROV to work with the interface. It worked!!!
I had to leave the wet-lab, home of the ROV, and do fluorometer tests on the latest ice-core with Mr. Buckley. We did those, and about four samples 'till the end, Mr. Buckley told me I could go check out ROV progress. When I came in, it was like a theater environment. Everyone was ooh-ing and aww-ing, gaping at the screen. I turned to look at the screen, and saw it patrolling through the aqua-green environment under the ice. It was absolutely amazing. Lance was controlling it, and he zoomed up to a ledge of ice that had a carpet of algae living on it. We could only find the algae on ledges like that, they didn't grow on the underside of the ice at all. They only grew "on top" of the ice, that was underwater. It was an immediate discovery that showed the ratio of how much the ROV was a toy, or a machine that could further science. It definitely proved to be the latter.
They brought the ROV back to the surface, and Lance said he was going to do a bottom mission in a little while. I had never expected them to send it down to the bottom, which to me seems like a dream come true. To be able to interact with the sea-life under forty meters of water is incredible. When it came time for that to happen, I was even more astounded at what I saw than I anticipated. The picture was incredible, cruising along the bottom over a metropolis of sand-dollars, a occasional hermit crab that would fold back into his shell upon seeing the bright-eyed monster looming overhead... The different species of starfish, appendages up, feeding on the miniscule water-life. The giant crabs running along the ocean floor, the shrimp darting across the view... It was nothing short of amazing.
The ROV came up, and I was off the mid-rats. I got more food at mid-rats than I did at dinner. Thank God, I was starving. The latter part of today has been truly extraordinary, and I am eagerly awaiting the next station to see some more ROV magic.