That's what is so exciting about this work - we are not sure what we will find - but we know it will be new!  Last year we expected to find very little living under the ice shelf near Heald Island - and instead we found octocorals, tunicates, crinoids and sponges in profusion.  How so many large animals are surviving where there is so little food is a puzzking question we plan to pursue further.  This year we weill be going to Bay of Sails, an iceberg graveyard, and we expect to find a seafloor that is scarred and plowed by iceberg keels dragging across the seafloor.  I hope you can read our updates to see what we DO find!

The historical experimental structures were planned to look at colonization of new animals, and the effects of predators.  Some are ropes with floats and PVC plates and fiber pads as settling substrate.  Some are card tables with trays of sediment.  The idea is to supply all the different habitats that occur on the seafloor - smooth flat surfaces, protected interstices, and mud -  up off the bottom where predatory seastars can't get to them.  Now that we know where they are, we will be going back in 2010 to sample them extensively.

 The ROV looks like a torpedo - she is 54 cm long but only 15 cm in diameter.  She can be used for any research in a frozen sea - her shape is so that it is easy to drill a hole and launch her through ice.  In addition to our work with seafloor communities, we will be using SCINI to support the geological study ANDRILL (http://www.andrill.org/).  We also plan to use her to map animals in the water column, the swarms of krill and fishes that are prey for penguins and whales, as well as the phytoplankton, or one-celled plants, that are food for the krill. What would YOU like to use SCINI to discover?