Originally from upstate New York, Michele Cross is a special education teacher who currently teaches an Introduction to Science class and a variety of English classes at Corning East High School in Corning, New York. When not in the classroom, Mrs. Cross can be found coaching both tennis and soccer for her school district. Likewise, she enjoys cycling, hiking, and gardening in the summer months and snowshoeing and cross-country skiing in the winter. She particularly loves spending summers with her niece and nephew in Colorado. While climbing her first 14,000-foot mountain a couple of summers ago, she learned that her hair could stand on end even in the midst of hail and rain due to the highly charged air around her! Mrs. Cross is thrilled beyond belief to be given this opportunity, and she hopes that it will inspire her students to dream great dreams!

Stacy Kim is a Benthic Ecologist, a scientist who studies the communities of animals living on and in the seafloor. She is especially interested in disturbances and the ecological changes that occur in response to them. In Antarctica, disturbances are from ice - icebergs, anchor ice, and glaciers - and from large animals - humans, penguins, and seals. Since the nearshore Southern Ocean is ice covered, access to marine communities can be a challenge. The remotely operated vehicle SCINI fits through a small 15 cm hole in the ice, opening research opportunities in otherwise inaccessible areas. Stacy knows that working with the PolarTREC program will help her reach learners of all ages and encourage them to follow their dreams!

Bob Zook is an Engineer, or as he likes to call himself, a gizmologist. He imagined the original concept of a skinny ROV that would enhance under ice research, and built a prototype from sewer pipe and a security camera. He has shepherded the design and development of SCINI, which can now dive to 300 m, produce HD quality video in real time, and navigate with better than meter accuracy.

The team will be working out of McMurdo Station, Antarctica. McMurdo is on Ross Island, a volcanic island (with the southernmost active volcano, Mt. Erebus) south of New Zealand in the Ross Sea. They will be working near Cape Evans to perfect our piloting skills. Then they hope to do science dives at Bay of Sails, an iceberg graveyard under seasonal ice on the west side of McMurdo Sound. This will give them a comparison for last years work under the permanent McMurdo Ice Shelf at Heald Island, and for the iceberg disturbed site at Cape Evans on the east side of the sound. They also have requested permission to work at White Island, the only place where there are natural cracks through the permanent Ross Ice Shelf that is hundreds of meters thick, to describe isolated communities there and compare them to the isolated McMurdo Ice Shelf communities.