Location
I am the luckiest guy ever. I get to dive under the sea-ice around McMurdo.
Why do I dive here? I am so giddy about this that I want to say because it is so cool, of course, but this is not the way things work down here. Anything that is done around here has to serve a scientific purpose that has been approved by the National Science Foundation. We gave you the scientific background of our project in the objectives section and in previous blogs on the 2008 and 2010 websites. The short answer to this question is that we need to dive to tend to our experiments and to explore new places to take samples for our study. 
The seafloor is one of the extreme environments in which we study how microbes can use energy and chemical compounds from rocks to make biomass, AKA the rock bottom of the food web. The results of our work will not be known until we take all of the samples to the lab and analyze them.
When reporting about diving in Antarctica it is only fair to explain some of the specifics that keeps us all safe and I have done that in the News and Views piece posted at the same time as this blog.
Lets start my dive blogs with some pictures my two check-out dives near the McMurdo jetty. This is a very nice and simple dive to familiarize yourself with the diving conditions and to check out your gear. 
The first dive was with Steve Rupp and on the third day, Henry Kaiser joined us for his check out dive and to shoot some photographs for his Halloween card. I added a number of pictures to this report on these dives taken mostly by Steve Rupp who took me out on that dive.
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