Field Planning

Today was full of science and planning.  Our entire field team (Tyler, Ian, Anne, Devin, and me) assembled at 10 am this morning at Waterways, University of Canterbury, Christchurch, NZ.  First, we went through our hazard assessment for our field season.  This included talking about our plans, how they might change, making sure communications are clear, avoiding environmental damage to Antarctica, avoiding damage to our bodies, training we will get at Scott Base, etc. 

We then moved on to talking about something very important: diver safety and the signals we’ll use to communicate between the diver and the people on top of the ice tending the dive.  In the past, we have had voice communication between the diver and the dive tenders.  This year we won’t because we are diving under the Antarctica New Zealand program.  They have different rules and equipment, and the divers will take down their own air with them.  The diver still goes through a hole we melt in the ice.  They will be tethered with a rope to the surface that a dive tender holds and handles the entire time.  They let out rope as the diver moves farther away and pulls rope in as the diver comes back toward the hole in the ice.  We’ll communicate using pulls on the rope.  One pull from the diver means “I’m okay”.  The person on top tending the line repeats the pull to say “message received”.  Two pulls from the diver says “give me more slack on the rope”, with two pulls from the person on top to say “I heard you ask for more slack on the rope”.  Three pulls means the person on top should pull in slack on the rope.  A whole bunch of pulls means there is an emergency, and the person on top should responsibly pull the diver back to the hole and out of the water.  We don’t expect to need the last signal.  We also talked about pre-planning the dives, including the amount of time the diver expects to be down, etc.  This is one of the most important safety aspects of our field program.  We all agree that although the diving has the potential to be dangerous, we will take the proper precautions and sufficiently plan that it is unlikely anything will go wrong.  It’s more likely one of us will slip on the ice and sprain a wrist than to have a safety issue with diving.

After the dive discussion, we talked about the field equipment we’ll have, including tents, heaters, dive hole melters, etc.  as well as the science equipment. 

After a break for tea, we moved on to our science plans.  We’ve been working on a document that describes our science goals, how we intend to accomplish them, and the equipment we need for weeks now.  Today, though, everything came together.  With the five of us in the room, we went through each goal, how we might accomplish it, its priority, and how it might be scaled back if we run short of time.  We asked ourselves and each other what data we need to publish the scientific papers we want to write.  We asked each other why we would want to measure this parameter here or there.  We learned about new things from each other. 

This was fantastically useful because we now know what each person wants to come home with from the field season, we adjusted our plans to fit our science goals better, we identified some new observations that will be easy and might lead to important insights into how Lake Vanda works, and we got to know each other much better.  We ended by laying out what observations we would target for each week we’ll be in the field.  It will all fit in with some bad-weather days, as long as there aren’t too many delays.  If there are delays, we have our work prioritized, so we know where to cut if necessary.

All of this took until 5:30 pm!  (Minus 20 minutes to get take-away from the Asian place down the road.)

Tomorrow, we have a bit of shopping to do, and we might address a couple more science questions after sleeping on them overnight.  Also on the agenda: a BBQ party in the afternoon.  We are scheduled to fly to Scott Base on Monday morning!


This is a great start to our field season.

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