On Thursday while the rest of the team was at Ice School, Steve and Sally completed their remaining training courses, set up the lab, and set up for sampling. The marine stations were located, marked and 4 four-foot diameter holes drilled through the ice for diving operations. The marine sampling consists of 15 stations that were randomly selected from a hexagonal pattern to characterize the marine environment adjacent to McMurdo Station (see Map). Once the 15 hexagons were selected, the stations were randomly selected within each individual hexagon. One site, 62, had to be re-generated since it was unsuitable for sampling.
The first station, Station 68, off Cape Armitage was occupied today. Prior to diving, a dive hut is positioned over the drilled hole to support the divers. This year we are using a Quonset dive tent (see photo) instead of a dive hut. The main advantage of the tent over the hut is that we can move the hut using a small tracked vehicle (a Spryte, shown next to the dive tent) instead of a large bulldozer. This allows us more flexibility since we don't have to get heavy equipment operations to come down to the ice and move the hut for each station.

Dive Tent	Diver	McMurdo 2001 Marine
Dive Down

The sediments are collected by divers, the photo is of Rob Robins just prior to entering the water with Christian assisting. The divers sampled the sediment by taking push cores, inserting plastic tubes into the sediment and then closing the ends. The push cores were then processed in the dive tent and brought back to the lab for storage or analysis. Two types of push core are collected: small push cores that are extruded for coliform analysis and toxicity determination, and large push cores that are extruded for infaunal community structure, trace metal, organic, and grain size analysis. The coliform and toxicity analyses are performed on station while the remaining samples are packaged for shipment back to the United States. This station was rich in sponge spicules; a layer of roughly 1 meter of spicules was overlaying the sediment. In order to take a sediment sample, the divers gently moved away the thick spicule layer and collected the push cores.