A rescued cabin and a dive site

Square Frame is an old container that the Kiwis around here are very proud to have rescued from the Americans who were going to abandon it. It is set up a few kilometers away and it’s mostly used to as an opportunity for complete peace and quiet. I went out with a group for the night, we left after dinner and got back before brunch so that we didn’t need to worry about cooking, though we did boil some water for a hot drink. The stove oven is kept running 24/7 so it’s a super cosy room with 2x bunk beds and a long couch for sleeping. We even got some camp chairs and sat outside drinking a cold one while the wind was keeping quiet.

Scott Base runs these ‘Fam Trips’ which is short for familiarisation and it’s an opportunity to go to a science field camp and have a look at what they’re doing – usually for the base staff who are hanging around here the whole time but they had a spare seat so I went out as well! This one was around the corner from here and further past McMurdo station, and they were diving under the ice looking at seafloor sponges. As they weren’t far away they didn’t have sleeping tents out there, but they had a few other tents and shelters, including the one with the dive hole that also had a stove oven for heating. The gear to allow you to dive in these cold temperatures is very impressive, they looked very loaded up on weighty thermo-technology and also oxygen bottles, and the system was to have two divers under water tethered and communicating to two spotters on the surface and one extra diver fully geared up to go in case of any emergency.

They gave us the opportunity to try out a Kovacs ice drill, which we used to measure both thickness of the sea ice and depth of the water with various equipment.