Travels In Antarctica: Swimming Over A Nemertean Worm

 By Frosty Wooldridge

“They made a pitiable sight—three little boats, packed with the odd remnants of what had once been a proud expedition, bearing twenty-eight suffering men in one final, almost ludicrous bid for survival.  But this time there was to be no turning back and they all knew it.”

                                                                                Endurance, 1915

          Inside the Coffee House one mid November night, a guitar player entertained me with Bob Dylan tunes while friends and I sat cozy. 

         Outside, the wind whistled past the doors and snow piled high on the roof.  Just to get to the door, I walked through a deep wall of snow on either side of me.

          On the ceiling, ancient wooden dog sleds 12 feet long with 1,000  pounds’ carrying capacity hung silently above me.  Some had broken runners and leather lashings had long dried from the harshness of Antarctica.   Worn out snowshoes and ice axes were nailed to the walls. 

          With a bit of imagination, it wasn’t hard thinking about how difficult the life of the man who wore them might have been.  He might have died with his mittens on.  For certain, his life was a constant battle against frostbite and his toes were forever frozen.   By listening carefully we could hear the huskies barking and the mushers cursing at them. It might be the ghosts of Roald Admundsen, Shackleton or Mawson rushing through the snow on their way toward the South Pole.  Their faces frost bitten and their toes numb from the bitter cold—they mushed through the whiteouts—fighting scurvy, their teeth fell out from malnutrition and their lungs burned from the cold.

          As I sat there sipping a Merlot, in the warm comfort of a gas heated Quonset hut, I was a long way from ‘that kind’ of misery.  I took a shower every day and enjoyed a flush toilet and great food.  Modern clothing and boots kept me warm no matter what the weather.  All those advancements had given humans an ability to explore the ice continent like never before.

          However, there was one place most people never ventured:  under the ice.  How could they?  It was ten feet thick and the salt water, under pressure, lowered the mercury to a frigid 29 degrees Fahrenheit.  That made it liquid ice!  Even the fish that lived under the ice in Antarctica had antifreeze (nature made it) coursing through their systems.  Some had white blood with no red corpuscles.  It would be crazy for a human to jump into water that cold. (Every January at McMurdo, a dozen completely out of their minds, half-baked lunatics in need of Freud’s couch—cut a hole in the pack ice and plunged.)

          Nonetheless, I listened quietly to the buzz around the room.  One of the men had caught the attention of a dozen people around his table.  He was a Scuba diver.  I had been a diver for 30 years and had hoped to dive while working at the station.  When asking about the chances, I was told, “Slim to none and the emphasis is on none.”

          Nonetheless, I volunteered as a dive tender to help other divers. In Antarctica, a dive hut was pulled out over the ice with a track vehicle.  Once a location was picked, the snow was cleared and the hut was placed on the ice.  A hole was drilled.  The divers and support personnel prepared for the dive.

          The diver told how his dive tenders helped him get dressed in a dry suit with special fabric underwear that could keep him from freezing to death for 40 minutes.  He said it was uncomfortable for the first half-hour and after that, it became intolerable.  His dive tenders helped with weight belt, tank, gloves and hood.  After making sure all systems were go, he and his two companions dropped a safety rope through the hole and slipped under the water.

          “Bobbing on the surface for a minute, still warm, with only my lips exposed to the water, I was ready.  After letting the air out of my suit to become negatively buoyant, I dropped down the hole.  Walls of blue-ish-white ice slid past my mask.  When I cleared the pack ice, the world opened beneath me. It was as if I was flying high above the land, and had emerged from a dense cloudbank.  The water was crystal clear.  Below me, I saw Marv and Dave taking pictures.  There was zero current so I hung in the water completely still, rising and falling with my breathing.  Breathing out, I dropped quickly toward Dave, clearing my ears and inflating my suit to compensate for the increased pressure.  How relaxed I was, utterly at home, overjoyed to be underwater in a spectacular place.

          “So quiet, only the sound of my bubbles rushing past my ears when I exhaled.  I dropped to the bottom, about 60 feet, and began exploring.  I turned on my flashlight.  Oranges, yellows, beiges, maroons and reds replaced the browns and dark blues on the bottom.  I floated above a 40-degree slope, running above me to the level of the sea ice, flattening out momentarily, and then, above the ice, continuing up at the same angle to the low, jagged ridgeline of an island.  Below me, it dropped in fluted slopes to gray-blue nothingness.

          “The ridges were solid rock and they supported colonies of soda-can sized brown anemones.  They required a stable surface to attach themselves.  Anemones can change location in their hunt for food.  They could lean over so their tentacles could grasp a rock, loosen the hold of their foot, stand on their heads, tip over in a new direction and when their foot contacted solid bottom again, they re-attached.

          “There were three species of fish that were bottom feeders and well camouflaged.  They didn’t think they could be seen.  It was like my friend’s house lizard.  If I picked him up, he would close his eyes and think you weren’t there because he couldn’t see you.  I got so close to those fish, my air bubble vibrations startled them into swimming away.

          “Soon, I swam over a Nemertean worm.  It was flat, squishy and nearly four feet long.  When I poked it, the thing writhed and scrunched up just like an angleworm.  Along with the worm, I saw hundreds of orange sea stars and spiny urchins.  I tried to pick up one dead sea urchin in my dry gloves but it broke into pieces.

          “After inspecting the bottom, I rolled over for a view of the undersea ice.  Marv and Dave were busy with their own photography and I saw their flashes as I watched.  There were bacteria and algae that grew on the under surface of the ice, utilizing the light before it could reach anything else.  They grew in orange, dark green and brown patches.  I expected pristine blue ice, but it looked mottled.

          “There wasn’t much platelet ice here, as opposed to the ice under the Seal Camp further away from the open sea.  Platelet ice was water that froze out of seawater, forming sheets of ice ½ millimeter thick in the same plane as the seed ice crystal.  The formation of this water ice left a highly saline solution that formed brine channels, long hollow ice tubes that hung down from the undersea surface.  I saw the heavily salted water that exited those channels because it was a different density than the surrounding seawater, causing the light to refract differently through it.  That phenomenon was called ‘scaleration’ and was similar to the mixing and ‘out of focus’ look in the top couple feet of seawater when it was raining.

          “I felt a poke in my side.  It was Marv.  He signaled to go up.  At that moment, I realized how cold I was and that my exposed lips were numb.  I rose slowly, following my bubbles.

          “Being under the ice in Antarctica was like star gazing with an astronomer. The astronomer could tell you all about M-51, red shift, atmospheric disturbances, binary doubles versus optical doubles and other esoteric facts, but it was still great fun to lie in the middle of a meadow on a summer’s night wrapped in a blanket with your honey—and just stare at the ink black sky dotted with a million twinkling stars.

          “For me, under the ice was much the same,” he said, finishing his story.

After his tale, I sat back wishing it had been me moving through that underwater world, but in a way, I took my many years of diving in the Atlantic, Pacific, Indian and many other great bodies of water and ‘felt’ his journey in my own way.