Reflections from time on ‘the Ice’

• MCMURDO STATION, Antarctica
Dec. 6, 2006 | 4:30 a.m. ET
We didn’t make it to a penguin colony as hoped, but we did make like penguins and head to the ice-covered sound just off McMurdo Station. How could we pass up an offer to watch divers slip down a 17-foot ice hole and into the 28-degree-Fahrenheit seawater? Their mission: scoop up Gromia, the largest single-cell organisms in the ocean.

“These are the elephants of the single-cell world,” project leader Sam Bowser says at the surface as two divers use a small vacuum on the sea floor about 65 feet below the ice.

He’s been studying these and related organisms for 20 years, and laments that even so, very little is still known about them — including who in the food chain eats them.

His fellow divers — Henry Kaiser, David Hung and Sean Harper — signed up for the summer dive season because of the views below: octopus, sea spiders, starfish, scallops, shrimp and plenty of small fish.

The sea ice is thick, blocking light, so the divers use flashlights to see 200 to 300 feet ahead. “Better than my swimming pool, that’s for sure,” Bowser says of the visibility.

Kaiser, who’s been diving around the world, says Antarctica is his favorite spot. Harper, a marine biology grad student at the University of Alaska-Fairbanks, has seen more diversity here than in Alaska’s arctic waters.

Bowser says ice diving has gotten a lot safer in 20 years. Breathing regulators worn by ice divers had a 30 percent failure rate back then, he says, but now it’s less than 1 percent.

Other under-the-ice projects at McMurdo include a remote-controlled video camera built by high school students Ryan Garner and Amanda Wilson for the University of California, Santa Barbara.

Bowser’s two-year, $360,000 project is funded by the National Science Foundation, and while Bowser jokes about how little is known, like many others here he has plenty of passion.

A researcher with the Wadsworth Center at the New York State Department of Health, he likes to impress schoolchildren back home with how large these single-cell organisms are.

“If your body cells are the size of that,” he says of Gromia, “ho, ho, ho, you’re the Jolly Green Giant.”

Exactly how big would that human blob be? He has the answer: “The size of Montana.”

Reader comments
Some reader clarification/corrections regarding Monday’s waste dispatch:

• I stated the power plant has “new equipment” when I should have said newer. The “–er” error prompted this e-mail: “What new equipment? The diesel engines that are online in the power plant have been in service since the early 80s. One of them burns 16-20 gallons of oil in a 24-hour period.”
• Re: Recycling. I stated it made an $80,000 profit, when I should have said savings. Waste operations manager Mark Furnish writes: “We do not make a profit on our waste, we defer some $80,000 from disposal costs through recycling. We still spend over $800,000 on waste disposal (hazardous and solid).” He adds: “We do not thaw the food waste in Port Hueneme (Calif.), it goes straight to an incinerator, kept frozen in refrigerated cargo units.”

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