Last dive day

All trips have to wrap up and while we still have lots more to share of this expedition, today was the last dive day where I wrapped up some loose ends. As a nice send off, a seal came to visit as I was swimming to the dive hole.

The sea life was as amazing as ever so between running some transects to see if there has been a change in seastar density over the decades this site has been studied, I took a few images of the other animals.

I do enjoy looking at the soft coral here.

And one last look at the nice cracks beneath the ice until next year.

Ok. So I guess there is always time for more Penguins.

We kept on having a couple of teams of Penguins come and visit us. It never gets old.

They are especially pretty when it is late in the evening.

But everyone has to go home sometime.

Wrapping up the Evans Seeps

Thanks to the amazing ROV exploration by Leigh Tait and Antarctica New Zealand, more seeps were found for us to dive and sample. We have now sampled 3 very different areas across this embayment.

We just returned from our last foray north to the new seeps that have been discovered off of Cape Evans. The new site was beautiful and very seepy.

One of my favorite finds was a little clump of Cladorhyzid sponges. These can either eat zooplankton or some have symbionts that eat methane! Looking forward to some analysis to see what these eat. Especially since they were hanging right over a methane seep (just out of view).

The shallows (where we poke around for our safety stop) had a series of brinicles that were either reaching the seafloor or did during low tide as you can see the white frozen seafloor. These were also jam packed with amphipods (little arthropods) that appeared to like the ice on the outside (the red dots on the outside). You can also see them swimming around, since they did not like our bubbles hitting the ice overhead.

This is the first place I have seen anchor ice growing on algae, and just like the brinicles, it was very popular for the Amphipods.

I never get tired of the diversity of shapes and colors that ice is from the bottom. Here is a crack that separates the fast ice (ice frozen to the land) from the sea ice (floating ice). It is just over a meter thick here.