**Ariel's Underwater Adventure**

As I sat in the little boat, also known as an "odd tube," surrounded by the vast expanse of sea ice, I couldn't help but feel a sense of wonder and magic. The ice creaked and groaned above me, its thick layers stretching up towards the sky like a frozen fortress. The sound was almost musical, a constant rumble that seemed to vibrate through every cell in my body.

I had always been fascinated by sea ice, and this trip was a dream come true. I got to see the underside of all the sea ice, which was a completely new experience for me. The ice was so thick that you never had to worry about falling through it - no matter how far down I looked, there was always enough ice above to support my weight.

As we bobbed along in the little boat, I couldn't help but feel a sense of awe at the sheer amount of life that existed beneath the surface. There were fish swimming all around us, their scales shimmering in the sunlight that filtered through the ice. And then there was the sea floor itself - a vast expanse of dark, featureless mud that stretched out as far as the eye could see.

The best part, though, was the sound of the seals. They made these strange, Doctor Who-like sounds that echoed through the air, and it was like nothing I had ever heard before. It was almost like they were trying to communicate with me, but in a language that was completely beyond my comprehension.

I asked one of the divers about the thickness of the ice - how much of it was actually above us, versus how much was buried beneath the surface. He told me that some areas had ice as thick as 250 centimeters (about 6 feet), while others were closer to 400 centimeters (about 10 feet). I was amazed by the sheer thickness of it all - it was like something out of a science fiction movie.

As we continued on our journey, I couldn't help but wonder about what lay beneath the ice. How far down did it extend? And what kind of creatures lived in that dark, featureless world? The divers told me that there were crinoids - those weird, wavy things that Ariel had mentioned earlier - as well as starfish, sea spiders, and even crabs.

But it was the microbial life on the seafloor that really caught my attention. I spent hours filtering through samples, trying to get a glimpse of the tiny creatures that called this place home. And what I found was incredible - diatoms with glass shells that came in all shapes and sizes, as well as worms that seemed to be constantly on the move.

One time, while working on one of these samples, Ariel accidentally activated a batch of worms, causing them to start squirming out of their little holes. It was like something out of a science fiction movie - I couldn't believe my eyes. And it's moments like those that made me realize just how amazing this place was.

**The Long Road Ahead**

Ariel's underwater adventure is just the beginning. As she continues to explore this incredible world, she'll be sharing her findings with the world through her YouTube channel, Instagram, and Patreon page. And as she delves deeper into the mysteries of sea ice, she's sure to uncover even more secrets and surprises.

For now, though, Ariel is taking a well-deserved break from filming five weeks' worth of footage from Antarctica. It's not easy work, but it's worth it for the chance to share her experiences with the world. And as we wait patiently for her next update, we can't help but feel grateful for the opportunity to be along for the ride.

**Getting Involved**

So how can you stay up-to-date on Ariel's adventures? The best places to find her updates are on YouTube, Instagram, and Patreon - all of which offer a wealth of information about this incredible project. Be sure to subscribe to her channel and follow her on social media for the latest news and updates.

And if you're interested in learning more about sea ice itself, there's plenty of resources available online. From documentaries to scientific papers, there's no shortage of information to help you understand this fascinating world. So why not start exploring - and who knows? You might just discover a whole new side of Antarctica.

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enwelcome to still untitled the Adam Savage project I'm well I'm norm Adams gone but we have Ariel here how you doing I'm doing awesome how are you we're we're doing good we this is a surprise recording we didn't expect to record this episode with Adam last week he's abandoned us he well he's he is on a well-deserved vacation traveling the earth with family and his dogs if you follow him on Twitter he's shown pictures of him in the car with the dogs but we are still using the cave because all this week we were doing this twitch livestream event and we're filming some of our favorite things and and of course we wanted to check in with you Ariel we thought would be a perfect time to hear about your adventures because you were recently in a fantastical place tell us where were you friends for how long I was in Antarctica and for five weeks this is like you're the second person we know now I think they've lived for an extensive period on McMurdo who's the other person our friend a friend of the site Phil Broughton who is runs the blog thundranium labs and makes black but at the earth did a winter at the South Pole I think like things style as a bartender slash staff member that's pretty awesome he had a lot of it like he sounded kinda like me he might have been a gender I think what you were doing is a little more science so I'm kind of and I'm I'm really curious like first off like how did you have this one get to go to Antarctica I mean for me it was certainly difficult I spent five years trying to get a grant and this grant was the NSF Antarctic artists and writers grant which is amazing because it's a grant that you know you they send artists and writers down to Antarctica and they get to explore and do a bunch of awesome stuff and so I figured well this might be you know my my really good shot cuz I went to art school and even though I do all this science he stuff now you know I I still do artsy stuff as well so I applied for this for five years and I finally finally got it so so my path was was a little bit strenuous but I mean that doesn't sound it doesn't keep I know a lot of people apply a lot to get to get to go just for any period of time so what was your what was your pitch I'm gonna go down and document stuff I'm gonna make art with things that are only available materials they're only available in in yeah I mean so my whole pitch was looking at life underneath the ice the microbial life beneath the ice and so I was working with ice divers who were getting samples for me from the seafloor I was working with researchers we hiked up a glacier and we got to drill into the top of a glacier and like I got to look at the microbes that live on tops of glaciers and and frozen lakes and subglacial pools and all these different locations and this is my pitch was the fact that a lot of people when they think about Antarctica they think it's you know barren and lifeless except for maybe penguins and so I really wanted to showcase how Antarctica is kind of an oasis or a Serengeti of life and show all of the life that actually is this there so what I was doing was actually doing microscopy of all these different little micro organisms and doing video microscopy because there's not a lot of images or videos of what these micro organisms look like in Antarctica well and because it's isolated from the rest of the world and and frozen there's a lot of stuff there that's very unique right yeah I mean this was the thing that I found so fascinating about actually going to Antarctica is I think a lot of people make it out to be very exotic and foreign and I mean it makes sense because very few people have actually gone there but it's also a place that's very familiar you're still on earth you're still part of the ecosystem of Earth and so a lot of microorganisms there there might be specific you know sub species that are specific to Antarctica but a lot of the things you can find everywhere so example there are tardigrades also known as water bears which everyone loves because you know they can't survive in the vacuum of space and they're cute and they've got little claws and they're in Star Trek yeah and they're in Star Trek discovery yeah you know they've blown up in popularity you can find harder grades in on the top of a glacier that I went and in a bunch of different locations and Antarctica but you can also find them in your own backyard or in sidewalks or anywhere on earth and so this is what I serve really found about being in Antarctica is on one hand yes it's this like foreign place and it is very different but there's also so much about it that's very familiar and I think a lot of people associate Antarctica with the room the remoteness of it at least with its how its presented in popular culture you know obviously like the base is like the thing and so watch your back yeah totally I would love to hear from you about one what the living conditions and what that base was like and then to just the logistics of getting there yeah that's what I'm curious about like yeah this I want the space shot at the space shuttle what's it like to be in space as I said it's both you know weird and not I you know I did really relate it a lot to the recent movie that we reviewed on offworld first man you know cuz it's about Neil Armstrong and it's about like you know he's got this whole personal life and then like towards the end of the film you know he goes to the moon and in the entire lead-up to that he's just a guy he you know and and so he lands on the moon and he looks around and I don't know I feel like that movie gave like a sense of being like well this is weird but I've got work to do and you know you and you just get on with it and so that was sort of my experiences like going to Antarctica and it was like this is weird it looks so real everyone's going to think it looks surreal but I have to go do some microscopy and there are hundreds of people alongside on the base doing the work right for them it's day to day even though it's an arrest like you know the astronauts on the ISS on station it's also just their job as well yeah so life actually at McMurdo Station so McMurdo Station is the United States space its largest base on all of Antarctica and in the summer which is when I went it can host up to a thousand people like a whole lot of people yeah that's so that's still a tiny town by like North America it's way more than the thing though the thing you have like well it doesn't doesn't you people and that's when I think of like remote base and I was in locations where I was only with like eight people so when I was in the the Dry Valleys which is a helicopter ride away from McMurdo these are locations that very few people who go to Antarctica can go and yeah the the campsites that I was at and I was camping like in the valleys of mountains like only had eight people so for ten days I was sleeping in five degree Fahrenheit weather in a normal camping tent which was intense and yeah and the camps were like eight people or so no we didn't have like special like Arctic or Antarctic tents they're like double insulated or anything like that REI oh they're just regular camping tents like you would use anywhere else and what you do to survive is you have a really thick sleeping bag and in the sleeping bag you've got a fleece liner and then if you're cold which I was I'm always cold I poured boiling water into two different water bottles I put one of them at my feet one of them at my chest then you go to sleep with your neck gaiter on and your hat and then you like you know bury yourself sometimes even hand warmers I would have an addition to all of this and then I would put my parka on top of my sleeping bag on top of all of that and with all of that for me I was just like okay now if I just don't move an inch I'm warm enough so okay but are you laying like an air mattress or something yeah so you do you do have like a little thin layer of air between you and the ground to like also insulate you which is really important so it but it's only you know thick so it's tense not your dog digging holes in the ground with caves to hunker into for you just used rocks around the area to sort of weigh down the tent and then yeah you drive stakes into the ground and you know normal camping stuff which is funny because like I'm not much of a camper at all I'm more of a glamper but yeah so wills an analogy for McMurdo base it wasn't a thousand people there for up to a thousand apt it's like a small town or as I would think of it that's right so the crew contingent of the enterprise right yeah right you know was did you have a small-town feel it it definitely did but in I would say a positive way so a lot of people equate mcmurdo to being like a mining town and certainly in appearance it has that because yeah there's a lot of tractors there's a lot of like industrial machines around and everything but you know life at McMurdo is actually kind of comfortable like if you're not doing field work a lot so you know they've got two bars they've got a coffee shop they've got a huge laboratory which I worked in and they've got the galley which is the big cafeteria where everyone has the same meal times and everything and so you know it's it's it was really it was comfy and the thing that really struck me about McMurdo the most that I wasn't expecting was just how friendly everyone is just everyone is extremely friendly and I wasn't really expecting that not that I thought they were going to be unfriendly but in a lot of science communities there's a lot of you know prove yourself sort of behavior and things like that and I just didn't get that at all in McMurdo like everyone like everyone was here in Antarctica and everyone respected everyone else and it was just really fantastic I mean I have to imagine if a if you've been there for a while new faces are really exciting right like but but also everybody's on the same team there right you're if you're in Antarctica it's because you're interested in climate science or or disappearing ecologies or you know whatever it happens to be and when you're surrounded by a giant group of really smart people it's like it's like when you go to a really good conference it's full of people that are really a lot more interesting that you like oh man everybody here I can talk to is really interesting and and I have to imagine it's the same kind of same kind of vibe they're like I got imagine the conversations in the CAF are pretty good yeah like so this is really something no one can relate to except for myself but when I was there I was like oh it's like like getting to spend the night at NASA yeah like I just felt like you get to be in this cool place where everyone is interesting and fascinating and you're there 24/7 and yeah you get to learn about all this amazing stuff and and this is from the scientists and you know the janitors alike because there are a bunch of people they are doing science but there are a lot of people there just with interesting stories that are working on the wastewater plant or working in the nuke and not the nuclear power plant the the power plant and you know people who are doing really interesting stuff and and I loved hearing stories about how people found their way to Antarctica and you know it was a broad range it was the summer so you weren't you weren't you had the ability to go outside and explore and in the wintertime our people basically stuck in the base and hallways and it feels more like isolation from what I heard a lot of the people who do winter over so they stay for the full winter yeah it's definitely a different vibe and it takes a lot of adjustment once the summer months start so for the winter people it's definitely much more hermit mode the winter people have a ton of video games a ton of DVDs a ton of like stuff that they bring with them and people kind of keep to themselves and there's no lines because in the winter there's maybe 150 people or so so it goes from like 900 to 150 ish and so once the summer starts up all these people who have sort of been in hermit mode and in eternal darkness suddenly there's all these people who are like really excited is like who are you how are you doing it like they're a bit like whoa like I have to wait in line for food and all joyful and you know stuff like that's what um so so okay so you said the people they're the winner have a lot of video games stuff like that what like when you're packing for Antarctica like how much stuff do you like when you get there this like here's the last person's coat this one looks a little fit you smack it on are you responsible for bringing everything that you're gonna need and like survival gear and the whole thing so essentially there is like a quartermaster of sorts in New Zealand when you land in New Zealand from the US and they give you all of your external gear so they give you a big parka they give you you know some snow overalls they give you gloves and goggles and boots that are way too huge for everyone and and are really cumbersome but so all your external stuff they give you they issue you but everything that goes beneath that you have bring yourself so you've got to do all your base layers all your mid layers you know everything else sunglasses everything like that and for me as someone who doesn't go skiing or snowboarding it doesn't go camping I had to do a lot of shopping before I before I went and buy a lot of gear that I knew nothing about prior but now I just had a friend who was going to spend a few days in Antarctica and I was just like oh yeah you definitely want these socks and you want this baselayer pant and you know and so now I feel like I know what to bring is there like a message board or a subreddit or something that's like people who like because there's no there's no Amazon Prime you can't if you forget something you're kind of bone yeah so they do have a store where they've got you know some clothing there and they've got you know various you know toiletries and things like that but you know if you need something special or or any of your gear that you don't bring yeah you are kind of bone like it you know so for me like on my favorite things video I was talking about a driver kit that had different like screw driver heads and things like that and that thing just saved me because I was able to like take apart all of my different devices and I didn't have to go hunting around for the right screwdriver but stuff like that yeah if you don't bring it you have to get really creative and that's one of the things that actually I really liked about McMurdo is it's definitely very maker hacker community people get creative about how to make do with very little well speaking of like message wars is there an intranet I do do people on the base communicate with each other and build communities and share resources yeah so let's talk about communication so there is an intranet in McMurdo and that's useful but there's no you're not allowed to have any internet on your phone unless you're an extremely important person and I was not extremely important enough to have internet on my phone and so you are using a lot of 1990s era technology so you're using a lot of Ethernet to plug your computer in to get internet access and then everyone has pagers Wow everyone uses pagers and like it's really really really weird way ones like you they don't have any like things where you can type on it you can type out a message I think if you go through some online source or some I oh no but essentially their pagers that have like five buttons on them and nothing more and as a Star Trek communicator yeah it's how you're it's how you get pinged but what do people to send you an extension so you have a like a old-school phone in your dorm you have an old-school phone in your office for me I had a lab also so I had an old-school phone in my lab and so all of those have extension numbers and so then yeah if someone needed to reach me and they couldn't reach me it got the exact time at the phone then they would have to page me and then I would have to go looking for a phone to call them back because there's no there's no well Euler sorry so yeah a lot of things are very 90s era texts so I know you probably posted pictures of stuff to your Instagram and Twitter and other places but but what like what does that does it when you go to NASA stuff then you walk around and you're like oh man everything seems really clean and then you get into the places where people actually work and it feels much more not quite like a factory floor but it feels it feels industrial right it feels like places that the serious work is happening and I have to imagine McMurdo has been there for a really long time now in different incarnations like what it does it does it feel like a place that has been there for 40 years or does it feel like I mean it definitely has and I would actually say you know the most government facilities NASA included are not like all sleek and clean like not the way you see in the Martian like say the new Mission Control in Johnson and the hallway outside Mission Control in Johnson right yeah I guess yeah I mean it it feels like a government facilities it's like if you're someone who's familiar with what government buildings look like and how opposite of glamorous they are and how outdated and and falling apart they are then you won't be shocked so I wasn't shocked but other people who were not familiar with like working with a government before showed up and they were just like this is the state of science in our country like because things are really falling apart and old and there are plans to update some of the buildings in McMurdo in the coming years and everything but you know is this government building so it's kind of you know the least they can do one thing you know a lot of I'm understanding of but one thing that I thought was really ridiculous and definitely like I want to like lobby Congress to fix this because it's so basic you have dorms and in the summer it's like all times like 3:00 in the morning 4:00 in the morning it's always daylight the Sun never goes down you would think the most minimum thing that these facilities could do for the dorm rooms is have blackout curtains they have some slightly thick curtains that don't fully cover the windows and so with what people end up doing who are like people who go every year they cover their windows with foil and so you walk around and all these windows and dorms are just covered with foil so people can just actually get a good night's sleep I'll block out the light when he was on tour what I mean so when you pack your clothes you pack your science gear how much like you've a weight I assume you have a weight allowance cuz you have to come in with by plane right yeah but what is it how much it if you don't have an excess baggage allowance I think it's like only like 85 pounds which you know and a lot of people are there for months and no it's not an excess baggage allowance because I was bringing down microscope so I had a hundred hundred dollars 100 pounds extra of baggage that I was able to bring down but I had to pay some excess baggage fees and things like that and so yet to make the trip down to Antarctica because you had asked about that before you take a plane to New Zealand and a normal commercial normal commercial plane you know so from San Francisco to Auckland it's like a 13 hour flight and then you do a small hop from Auckland to Christchurch and Christchurch's where everyone out of the United States and the New Zealand Antarctic program deploy out of for McMurdo and the South Pole and so then you're there and then you take a military plane from Christchurch into Antarctica and you land on a snow packed runway so on the way there I took a c-17 military huge jumbo on the inside of the Union Declan commercial airline you're sitting on the side of the wall they had like huge like huge pallets of cargo and so there was only maybe 40 people on my flight or something on the c-17 massive plane but it was filled with cargo and filled with weapons up in the back and that was actually pretty comfortable considering on the way back from Antarctica so coming back the the runways as the summer goes on the runway start melting and then different planes are not allowed to fly in anymore and so I had to take a smaller plane on the way back which was a c-130 which is a floor propeller plane yeah definitely and that one is not made for passengers whatsoever they've got like cargo netting and you sort of sit in that and the difference between the c-17 going down from Christchurch to McMurdo versus ec130 going back so on the way there it was a five-hour flight on the way back because it's this propeller plane-- eight hour flight and a half hour flight what are you doing because like there's no room for anyone to sit so you've got this netting and you have to pretty much sit like right right next to everyone even though there's like only like 20 25 people on the plane it's just not meant for passengers and then the first two hours you're you know because it's not pressurize you're really really cold because you're leaving Antarctica and then like two hours in I sort of like half woke up and it was just really freaking hot because you're entering summertime in New Zealand and so everyone just started like stripping all of their like exterior wear off and like it's just really hot all of a sudden hey everybody norm here and before we continue with this week's episode I want to thank the sponsor that makes it possible and that's ops Jeannie and by Atlassian because incidents happen and they require complex coordination between operations and software development teams who are putting out fires every day that's why getting alerts immediately is critical thankfully there is opportunity by Atlassian option e empowers dev and ops teams to plan for service disruptions and stay in control during incidents it also gives teams the power to respond quickly and efficiently to unplanned issues helps notify all the right people through a smart combination of scheduling and escalation paths that account for things like time zones and holidays better yet ops genie allows for deep flexibility and how when and where alerts are deployed with over 200 integrations like JIRA Amazon CloudWatch data dog New Relic and more plus it tracks all activity and provides useful insights to improve future incident responses its services like ops training to allow the other services that you rely on and you use so frequently especially during this holiday season to stay up and running without service interruptions because those engineers are on it with ops Genie your next incident doesn't stand a chance visit Ops Cheney comm to sign up for a free company account and add up to five team members that's ops Genie comm never miss a critical or again with ops genie now back to the conversation yeah when you're bouncing all over the place I think everything you say makes me think of like eight different questions what when you're in the base so you're camping you said you're kind of cold all the time it's just it's just there's no campfires cuz nothing burned you have a stove to make boiling water and that's what what can make you warm right okay right because I guess you're not supposed to scoop well you say you you do get your water from they call it glacier berries which are like sort of little outcrops of ice so you get your ice from you know the natural area around but yeah you have to have very limited water so I was in the Dry Valleys for ten days and there's no showers like yeah it's not hot but you're doing feel like you're sweating you're sweating a lot so it's really yeah ten days without like you're hiking up glaciers you're doing like intense work and yet you're not showering for the entire time and it was on the base bar but the bar avatar is a glacier ice cube ice yeah I mean people did make a lot of comments about how you know bars would love to have like untouched by human human mostly um what was like in the base is it is it cold like it's the basic like are you walking around heavy sweaters and boots and all that McMurdo is pretty comfortable so I got there you know at the start of summer and it was definitely there were days where it was just like really cold and the wind always affects how cold it is a hundred percent so but towards the end so over a five week span it went from you know the ground being utterly frozen and really cold just miserable days - at the end of five weeks like there was water on the ground and Sun is out and like everything's melting and so you definitely got the sense of oh yeah this is summer in Antarctica and when it is that warm some people not me but some people consider it t-shirt weather just because when there's no wind even when it's oh it's like if there's no wind and it's like 20 degrees Fahrenheit and there's Sun like it's actually not that bad so wind affects everything and and but you know most the time you know you don't have to wear a big red parka just to dart between buildings and everything you can just wear jeans or whatever it's pretty dry right so you're not very dry if you get the humidity sucking all the yeah it's extremely dry and I think that was something that really caught me off guard is that you know antarctica is a desert it's a polar desert and it's drier than any regular desert that i've been in and it ruins your skin and you have to i had to sleep with a humidifier which i never do just to like not wake up and feel like my face was concrete every day so actually that dryness like hits you wait more than the cold the area around the base I'd imagine is pretty well explored and so what are the expedition's like and people leave base how far they go out and what are these other set destinations people go to or are these they're actually new new places they go yeah so usually there's set field camps for a lot of people who do go off base so most people stay in McMurdo and and a lot of science is done like in the sea-ice area and surrounding area and most of the support staff and everyone stays in McMurdo but there are set field camps so in the Dry Valleys there's three main camps there's Lake Bonney which has blood falls which is that like if you've ever seen a picture of red stuff coming out of a glacier there's Lake which Algie it's not algae it's actually iron oxide they originally thought that it was algae but it's iron oxide that hasn't hit oxygen for like millions of years and then like is just hitting it and there is bacteria living in it though which is why it's really interesting to study so yeah you've got like Bonney Lake and then Lake Frick cyl those are all kind of right next to each other and yeah this area called the Dry Valleys is it's you know a 30-minute helicopter ride away from McMurdo so in one instance you would think well maybe it's you know only the most interesting thing like close to McMurdo but it's actually really fascinating for the entire continent is the largest area in all of Antarctica that is not covered by ice or snow the entire continent and the continent is nearly the size of North America so you've got this one patch that's near McMurdo that has no ice or snow and it's really fascinating to go there because you're walking around on all this ice and snow all the time in Antarctica and you start wondering like what does the land itself look like like what if I could like get rid of all the ice and snow and actually see the continent so the Dry Valleys you can actually walk on the continent itself which is what makes it exciting Amana is it soft is it so there's there's no there's no you know trees or anything you know there's no plants that are you know not microbial and it is soft which was the weirdest thing because I was going there it's the Dry Valleys you're an Antarctic eye you expect everything to be frozen solid but everything is soft so you get out of the helicopter and the Dry Valleys and your first step it's like squishy like squishy like the way sand would be squishy and it weirded me out because it gives you the feeling that like everything is like wet but it's not but what I think is actually happening is the fact that the permafrost doesn't start until like 20 centimeters below or something and all the rocks and sand and stuff that sits on top never has any moisture so it never clumps together so it's just all loose constantly and so you step on things and your like just squishes into the ground everywhere you step it was really a weird sensation because I mean there's no bio there's no like biomass to make the soil matrix so it's just fines and pebbles yeah like there's you know there's some microbes around but but otherwise yeah it's very limited you don't have like moss or anything you want bring fertilizer out there all do well I mean I have to imagine it's like if you filled a bucket with sand and pebbles of different sized pebbles and start walking around yeah that's really weird yeah it's weird because it again it just it gives you the same feeling as like as mud or moist stuff but it's not moist at all so other locations that people go to are like the South Pole there's also a really cool location called waste divide which stands for West Antarctic Ice Sheet divide where they've got like a three-story building that they're having to dig out because it got covered all the way to the telus know right now there is a team out at Lake Mercer which is a sub glacial lake that is not at the South Pole but it's closer to the South Pole and they are drilling through to you know study what life might live you know in this sub glacial lake and numa been isolated for yes yeah like most of these sub glacial lakes yeah are fascinating to study because yeah they sort of have these ecosystems in them but they're completely remote from the surface tell us about the underwater stuff yeah that I was yeah okay so the coolest thing to do in in McMurdo that anyone can do you don't have to be a scientist to do this is there is a thing called the Abdu which is known as the observation tube and the obtuse is literally a pipe that is barely the width of a human that they insert into the sea ice and you can crawl down this pipe and it's I don't know I don't know it's maybe three to four times my height or something would tall enough to be a scary ladder deep or something 20-plus feet deep baby and you crawl down this like little ladder into this pipe it looks like from Mario like you're going down one of the Mario pipes and then you get down there and there's 360 windows surrounding you and you get to actually be underneath the site see looking at all the sea creatures and the seafloor and everything so you get to have the same experience more or less as a diver in this little contained thing that you don't have to actually be a diver for and it was fantastic because prior to going in it I was like why would anyone ever be a diver in Antarctica like that sounds miserable and like Oh like who would dive in you know negative two degrees Celsius like water like and then I went into this tube and saw like a glimpse of what they get to see and I was like I get it now like this is incredible that get that sir start reapplying and divers are on the other side yes yeah so if you go at the same time as divers are going down and and I did one time like they'll take a selfie with you and they're underwater and they're just swimming and what's also really cool about is not only so you get to see the underside of all the sea ice you get to see all the fish swimming around you get to see the sea floor but also there's seals though there's Weddell seals and they make sounds that sound like Doctor Who sound effects I kid you not and you get to hear them with such clarity in that little bob tube it you're just it's it's really magical for questions how thick is the ice it'll burn out so this is my I was trying to look it up because I think I forgot like I want to say like some of the ice was like around like 250 centimeters 6 every 10 feet yeah like pretty thick and then in other places maybe it was closer to like 400 I need to look it up but it's it's so thick that you never in a million years have to worry about falling through yeah I mean I was just I was just wondering like how much how far below the ice are you and you're in the 20-foot deep too and it seems like you're pretty close but yeah you're you know I feel like if I'm sitting in the odd tube then you know the ice is maybe I don't know I says maybe 15 feet above me or something and yeah and then the seafloor is I don't know maybe thirty feet below so I know that the seafloor depth around that area is around 75 M or 75 feet sorry 75 feet so you're sort of suspended in the middle between the sea ice and the sea floor how how what's the sea life like on the floor under that like that I assume there's not like kelp forests it's not like there's a lot of life there's a lot you have crinoids which are those weird little I don't know yeah the wavy things for audio listeners Ariel is putting her hands in her side yeah I think back and forth yeah exactly I'm doing an awkward flapping crinoids are really cool but no there's starfish there's there's sea spiders there's there's crabs in some areas there's actually that's why I found it so fascinating there's a ton of life underneath the sea is a ton and then on the microbial side there's tons of just beautiful diatoms which are single-celled algae that have glass shells and they come in shapes of triangles and squares and circles and they're beautiful most of the sea life that I had to filter through which wasn't fun from the seafloor is a lot of worms a lot of worms so I was like I'm getting like these little samples from the divers and it's they're filled with mud and I'm trying to get all this microbial stuff the stuff you can't see out of it and I'm like start poking it with like a spoon or a knife or something trying to get some of the mud out and one time I was hooking like this little sample of mud and just I like activated the worms and all these like little worms started like rearing their heads out it was so great that part sounds like it feels a good science fiction at another planet yeah that's great that's that's I mean we keep asking questions for hours we'll have to take you back Ariel was back I think and Ariel I know this is an ongoing project because not only did you document a lot you film videos of yourself and you're waiting for samples to come back from the trip to do further work on it but eventually this stuff will and your stories will make their way not only your YouTube channel but also on your website and it's that you're setting up yeah yeah absolutely so I'll be working on all this stuff for the months to come and yeah I'm still in the process of actually editing five weeks of video from Antarctica so anyone is interested in checking it out you can go to my youtube channel Instagram and patreon are probably the three best places to find me and those are all under Ariel Waldman thanks for sending us a postcard from Antarctica - yeah awesome yeah I I can't wait to hear more I can't wait to see what what what the rest of the trip was like this is amazing thanks so much Ariel well welcome back and this will be the final podcast for this story sure this time you told me that last sure this time we got you on yeah do the final podcast so have a happy new year everyone you'll be able to find most of our stuff next year on test comm force will you can find online at Will Smith yeah and at Ariel Waldman for Ariel as well and we have a show called offworld arrow and does for us that find new episodes turning new year and subscribe to that as a podcast as well if you're a blonde cast listener as we hope you are today thank you everyone out there thank you guys both and see you next time Thankswelcome to still untitled the Adam Savage project I'm well I'm norm Adams gone but we have Ariel here how you doing I'm doing awesome how are you we're we're doing good we this is a surprise recording we didn't expect to record this episode with Adam last week he's abandoned us he well he's he is on a well-deserved vacation traveling the earth with family and his dogs if you follow him on Twitter he's shown pictures of him in the car with the dogs but we are still using the cave because all this week we were doing this twitch livestream event and we're filming some of our favorite things and and of course we wanted to check in with you Ariel we thought would be a perfect time to hear about your adventures because you were recently in a fantastical place tell us where were you friends for how long I was in Antarctica and for five weeks this is like you're the second person we know now I think they've lived for an extensive period on McMurdo who's the other person our friend a friend of the site Phil Broughton who is runs the blog thundranium labs and makes black but at the earth did a winter at the South Pole I think like things style as a bartender slash staff member that's pretty awesome he had a lot of it like he sounded kinda like me he might have been a gender I think what you were doing is a little more science so I'm kind of and I'm I'm really curious like first off like how did you have this one get to go to Antarctica I mean for me it was certainly difficult I spent five years trying to get a grant and this grant was the NSF Antarctic artists and writers grant which is amazing because it's a grant that you know you they send artists and writers down to Antarctica and they get to explore and do a bunch of awesome stuff and so I figured well this might be you know my my really good shot cuz I went to art school and even though I do all this science he stuff now you know I I still do artsy stuff as well so I applied for this for five years and I finally finally got it so so my path was was a little bit strenuous but I mean that doesn't sound it doesn't keep I know a lot of people apply a lot to get to get to go just for any period of time so what was your what was your pitch I'm gonna go down and document stuff I'm gonna make art with things that are only available materials they're only available in in yeah I mean so my whole pitch was looking at life underneath the ice the microbial life beneath the ice and so I was working with ice divers who were getting samples for me from the seafloor I was working with researchers we hiked up a glacier and we got to drill into the top of a glacier and like I got to look at the microbes that live on tops of glaciers and and frozen lakes and subglacial pools and all these different locations and this is my pitch was the fact that a lot of people when they think about Antarctica they think it's you know barren and lifeless except for maybe penguins and so I really wanted to showcase how Antarctica is kind of an oasis or a Serengeti of life and show all of the life that actually is this there so what I was doing was actually doing microscopy of all these different little micro organisms and doing video microscopy because there's not a lot of images or videos of what these micro organisms look like in Antarctica well and because it's isolated from the rest of the world and and frozen there's a lot of stuff there that's very unique right yeah I mean this was the thing that I found so fascinating about actually going to Antarctica is I think a lot of people make it out to be very exotic and foreign and I mean it makes sense because very few people have actually gone there but it's also a place that's very familiar you're still on earth you're still part of the ecosystem of Earth and so a lot of microorganisms there there might be specific you know sub species that are specific to Antarctica but a lot of the things you can find everywhere so example there are tardigrades also known as water bears which everyone loves because you know they can't survive in the vacuum of space and they're cute and they've got little claws and they're in Star Trek yeah and they're in Star Trek discovery yeah you know they've blown up in popularity you can find harder grades in on the top of a glacier that I went and in a bunch of different locations and Antarctica but you can also find them in your own backyard or in sidewalks or anywhere on earth and so this is what I serve really found about being in Antarctica is on one hand yes it's this like foreign place and it is very different but there's also so much about it that's very familiar and I think a lot of people associate Antarctica with the room the remoteness of it at least with its how its presented in popular culture you know obviously like the base is like the thing and so watch your back yeah totally I would love to hear from you about one what the living conditions and what that base was like and then to just the logistics of getting there yeah that's what I'm curious about like yeah this I want the space shot at the space shuttle what's it like to be in space as I said it's both you know weird and not I you know I did really relate it a lot to the recent movie that we reviewed on offworld first man you know cuz it's about Neil Armstrong and it's about like you know he's got this whole personal life and then like towards the end of the film you know he goes to the moon and in the entire lead-up to that he's just a guy he you know and and so he lands on the moon and he looks around and I don't know I feel like that movie gave like a sense of being like well this is weird but I've got work to do and you know you and you just get on with it and so that was sort of my experiences like going to Antarctica and it was like this is weird it looks so real everyone's going to think it looks surreal but I have to go do some microscopy and there are hundreds of people alongside on the base doing the work right for them it's day to day even though it's an arrest like you know the astronauts on the ISS on station it's also just their job as well yeah so life actually at McMurdo Station so McMurdo Station is the United States space its largest base on all of Antarctica and in the summer which is when I went it can host up to a thousand people like a whole lot of people yeah that's so that's still a tiny town by like North America it's way more than the thing though the thing you have like well it doesn't doesn't you people and that's when I think of like remote base and I was in locations where I was only with like eight people so when I was in the the Dry Valleys which is a helicopter ride away from McMurdo these are locations that very few people who go to Antarctica can go and yeah the the campsites that I was at and I was camping like in the valleys of mountains like only had eight people so for ten days I was sleeping in five degree Fahrenheit weather in a normal camping tent which was intense and yeah and the camps were like eight people or so no we didn't have like special like Arctic or Antarctic tents they're like double insulated or anything like that REI oh they're just regular camping tents like you would use anywhere else and what you do to survive is you have a really thick sleeping bag and in the sleeping bag you've got a fleece liner and then if you're cold which I was I'm always cold I poured boiling water into two different water bottles I put one of them at my feet one of them at my chest then you go to sleep with your neck gaiter on and your hat and then you like you know bury yourself sometimes even hand warmers I would have an addition to all of this and then I would put my parka on top of my sleeping bag on top of all of that and with all of that for me I was just like okay now if I just don't move an inch I'm warm enough so okay but are you laying like an air mattress or something yeah so you do you do have like a little thin layer of air between you and the ground to like also insulate you which is really important so it but it's only you know thick so it's tense not your dog digging holes in the ground with caves to hunker into for you just used rocks around the area to sort of weigh down the tent and then yeah you drive stakes into the ground and you know normal camping stuff which is funny because like I'm not much of a camper at all I'm more of a glamper but yeah so wills an analogy for McMurdo base it wasn't a thousand people there for up to a thousand apt it's like a small town or as I would think of it that's right so the crew contingent of the enterprise right yeah right you know was did you have a small-town feel it it definitely did but in I would say a positive way so a lot of people equate mcmurdo to being like a mining town and certainly in appearance it has that because yeah there's a lot of tractors there's a lot of like industrial machines around and everything but you know life at McMurdo is actually kind of comfortable like if you're not doing field work a lot so you know they've got two bars they've got a coffee shop they've got a huge laboratory which I worked in and they've got the galley which is the big cafeteria where everyone has the same meal times and everything and so you know it's it's it was really it was comfy and the thing that really struck me about McMurdo the most that I wasn't expecting was just how friendly everyone is just everyone is extremely friendly and I wasn't really expecting that not that I thought they were going to be unfriendly but in a lot of science communities there's a lot of you know prove yourself sort of behavior and things like that and I just didn't get that at all in McMurdo like everyone like everyone was here in Antarctica and everyone respected everyone else and it was just really fantastic I mean I have to imagine if a if you've been there for a while new faces are really exciting right like but but also everybody's on the same team there right you're if you're in Antarctica it's because you're interested in climate science or or disappearing ecologies or you know whatever it happens to be and when you're surrounded by a giant group of really smart people it's like it's like when you go to a really good conference it's full of people that are really a lot more interesting that you like oh man everybody here I can talk to is really interesting and and I have to imagine it's the same kind of same kind of vibe they're like I got imagine the conversations in the CAF are pretty good yeah like so this is really something no one can relate to except for myself but when I was there I was like oh it's like like getting to spend the night at NASA yeah like I just felt like you get to be in this cool place where everyone is interesting and fascinating and you're there 24/7 and yeah you get to learn about all this amazing stuff and and this is from the scientists and you know the janitors alike because there are a bunch of people they are doing science but there are a lot of people there just with interesting stories that are working on the wastewater plant or working in the nuke and not the nuclear power plant the the power plant and you know people who are doing really interesting stuff and and I loved hearing stories about how people found their way to Antarctica and you know it was a broad range it was the summer so you weren't you weren't you had the ability to go outside and explore and in the wintertime our people basically stuck in the base and hallways and it feels more like isolation from what I heard a lot of the people who do winter over so they stay for the full winter yeah it's definitely a different vibe and it takes a lot of adjustment once the summer months start so for the winter people it's definitely much more hermit mode the winter people have a ton of video games a ton of DVDs a ton of like stuff that they bring with them and people kind of keep to themselves and there's no lines because in the winter there's maybe 150 people or so so it goes from like 900 to 150 ish and so once the summer starts up all these people who have sort of been in hermit mode and in eternal darkness suddenly there's all these people who are like really excited is like who are you how are you doing it like they're a bit like whoa like I have to wait in line for food and all joyful and you know stuff like that's what um so so okay so you said the people they're the winner have a lot of video games stuff like that what like when you're packing for Antarctica like how much stuff do you like when you get there this like here's the last person's coat this one looks a little fit you smack it on are you responsible for bringing everything that you're gonna need and like survival gear and the whole thing so essentially there is like a quartermaster of sorts in New Zealand when you land in New Zealand from the US and they give you all of your external gear so they give you a big parka they give you you know some snow overalls they give you gloves and goggles and boots that are way too huge for everyone and and are really cumbersome but so all your external stuff they give you they issue you but everything that goes beneath that you have bring yourself so you've got to do all your base layers all your mid layers you know everything else sunglasses everything like that and for me as someone who doesn't go skiing or snowboarding it doesn't go camping I had to do a lot of shopping before I before I went and buy a lot of gear that I knew nothing about prior but now I just had a friend who was going to spend a few days in Antarctica and I was just like oh yeah you definitely want these socks and you want this baselayer pant and you know and so now I feel like I know what to bring is there like a message board or a subreddit or something that's like people who like because there's no there's no Amazon Prime you can't if you forget something you're kind of bone yeah so they do have a store where they've got you know some clothing there and they've got you know various you know toiletries and things like that but you know if you need something special or or any of your gear that you don't bring yeah you are kind of bone like it you know so for me like on my favorite things video I was talking about a driver kit that had different like screw driver heads and things like that and that thing just saved me because I was able to like take apart all of my different devices and I didn't have to go hunting around for the right screwdriver but stuff like that yeah if you don't bring it you have to get really creative and that's one of the things that actually I really liked about McMurdo is it's definitely very maker hacker community people get creative about how to make do with very little well speaking of like message wars is there an intranet I do do people on the base communicate with each other and build communities and share resources yeah so let's talk about communication so there is an intranet in McMurdo and that's useful but there's no you're not allowed to have any internet on your phone unless you're an extremely important person and I was not extremely important enough to have internet on my phone and so you are using a lot of 1990s era technology so you're using a lot of Ethernet to plug your computer in to get internet access and then everyone has pagers Wow everyone uses pagers and like it's really really really weird way ones like you they don't have any like things where you can type on it you can type out a message I think if you go through some online source or some I oh no but essentially their pagers that have like five buttons on them and nothing more and as a Star Trek communicator yeah it's how you're it's how you get pinged but what do people to send you an extension so you have a like a old-school phone in your dorm you have an old-school phone in your office for me I had a lab also so I had an old-school phone in my lab and so all of those have extension numbers and so then yeah if someone needed to reach me and they couldn't reach me it got the exact time at the phone then they would have to page me and then I would have to go looking for a phone to call them back because there's no there's no well Euler sorry so yeah a lot of things are very 90s era texts so I know you probably posted pictures of stuff to your Instagram and Twitter and other places but but what like what does that does it when you go to NASA stuff then you walk around and you're like oh man everything seems really clean and then you get into the places where people actually work and it feels much more not quite like a factory floor but it feels it feels industrial right it feels like places that the serious work is happening and I have to imagine McMurdo has been there for a really long time now in different incarnations like what it does it does it feel like a place that has been there for 40 years or does it feel like I mean it definitely has and I would actually say you know the most government facilities NASA included are not like all sleek and clean like not the way you see in the Martian like say the new Mission Control in Johnson and the hallway outside Mission Control in Johnson right yeah I guess yeah I mean it it feels like a government facilities it's like if you're someone who's familiar with what government buildings look like and how opposite of glamorous they are and how outdated and and falling apart they are then you won't be shocked so I wasn't shocked but other people who were not familiar with like working with a government before showed up and they were just like this is the state of science in our country like because things are really falling apart and old and there are plans to update some of the buildings in McMurdo in the coming years and everything but you know is this government building so it's kind of you know the least they can do one thing you know a lot of I'm understanding of but one thing that I thought was really ridiculous and definitely like I want to like lobby Congress to fix this because it's so basic you have dorms and in the summer it's like all times like 3:00 in the morning 4:00 in the morning it's always daylight the Sun never goes down you would think the most minimum thing that these facilities could do for the dorm rooms is have blackout curtains they have some slightly thick curtains that don't fully cover the windows and so with what people end up doing who are like people who go every year they cover their windows with foil and so you walk around and all these windows and dorms are just covered with foil so people can just actually get a good night's sleep I'll block out the light when he was on tour what I mean so when you pack your clothes you pack your science gear how much like you've a weight I assume you have a weight allowance cuz you have to come in with by plane right yeah but what is it how much it if you don't have an excess baggage allowance I think it's like only like 85 pounds which you know and a lot of people are there for months and no it's not an excess baggage allowance because I was bringing down microscope so I had a hundred hundred dollars 100 pounds extra of baggage that I was able to bring down but I had to pay some excess baggage fees and things like that and so yet to make the trip down to Antarctica because you had asked about that before you take a plane to New Zealand and a normal commercial normal commercial plane you know so from San Francisco to Auckland it's like a 13 hour flight and then you do a small hop from Auckland to Christchurch and Christchurch's where everyone out of the United States and the New Zealand Antarctic program deploy out of for McMurdo and the South Pole and so then you're there and then you take a military plane from Christchurch into Antarctica and you land on a snow packed runway so on the way there I took a c-17 military huge jumbo on the inside of the Union Declan commercial airline you're sitting on the side of the wall they had like huge like huge pallets of cargo and so there was only maybe 40 people on my flight or something on the c-17 massive plane but it was filled with cargo and filled with weapons up in the back and that was actually pretty comfortable considering on the way back from Antarctica so coming back the the runways as the summer goes on the runway start melting and then different planes are not allowed to fly in anymore and so I had to take a smaller plane on the way back which was a c-130 which is a floor propeller plane yeah definitely and that one is not made for passengers whatsoever they've got like cargo netting and you sort of sit in that and the difference between the c-17 going down from Christchurch to McMurdo versus ec130 going back so on the way there it was a five-hour flight on the way back because it's this propeller plane-- eight hour flight and a half hour flight what are you doing because like there's no room for anyone to sit so you've got this netting and you have to pretty much sit like right right next to everyone even though there's like only like 20 25 people on the plane it's just not meant for passengers and then the first two hours you're you know because it's not pressurize you're really really cold because you're leaving Antarctica and then like two hours in I sort of like half woke up and it was just really freaking hot because you're entering summertime in New Zealand and so everyone just started like stripping all of their like exterior wear off and like it's just really hot all of a sudden hey everybody norm here and before we continue with this week's episode I want to thank the sponsor that makes it possible and that's ops Jeannie and by 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season to stay up and running without service interruptions because those engineers are on it with ops Genie your next incident doesn't stand a chance visit Ops Cheney comm to sign up for a free company account and add up to five team members that's ops Genie comm never miss a critical or again with ops genie now back to the conversation yeah when you're bouncing all over the place I think everything you say makes me think of like eight different questions what when you're in the base so you're camping you said you're kind of cold all the time it's just it's just there's no campfires cuz nothing burned you have a stove to make boiling water and that's what what can make you warm right okay right because I guess you're not supposed to scoop well you say you you do get your water from they call it glacier berries which are like sort of little outcrops of ice so you get your ice from you know the natural area around but yeah you have to have very limited water so I was in the Dry Valleys for ten days and there's no showers like yeah it's not hot but you're doing feel like you're sweating you're sweating a lot so it's really yeah ten days without like you're hiking up glaciers you're doing like intense work and yet you're not showering for the entire time and it was on the base bar but the bar avatar is a glacier ice cube ice yeah I mean people did make a lot of comments about how you know bars would love to have like untouched by human human mostly um what was like in the base is it is it cold like it's the basic like are you walking around heavy sweaters and boots and all that McMurdo is pretty comfortable so I got there you know at the start of summer and it was definitely there were days where it was just like really cold and the wind always affects how cold it is a hundred percent so but towards the end so over a five week span it went from you know the ground being utterly frozen and really cold just miserable days - at the end of five weeks like there was water on the ground and Sun is out and like everything's melting and so you definitely got the sense of oh yeah this is summer in Antarctica and when it is that warm some people not me but some people consider it t-shirt weather just because when there's no wind even when it's oh it's like if there's no wind and it's like 20 degrees Fahrenheit and there's Sun like it's actually not that bad so wind affects everything and and but you know most the time you know you don't have to wear a big red parka just to dart between buildings and everything you can just wear jeans or whatever it's pretty dry right so you're not very dry if you get the humidity sucking all the yeah it's extremely dry and I think that was something that really caught me off guard is that you know antarctica is a desert it's a polar desert and it's drier than any regular desert that i've been in and it ruins your skin and you have to i had to sleep with a humidifier which i never do just to like not wake up and feel like my face was concrete every day so actually that dryness like hits you wait more than the cold the area around the base I'd imagine is pretty well explored and so what are the expedition's like and people leave base how far they go out and what are these other set destinations people go to or are these they're actually new new places they go yeah so usually there's set field camps for a lot of people who do go off base so most people stay in McMurdo and and a lot of science is done like in the sea-ice area and surrounding area and most of the support staff and everyone stays in McMurdo but there are set field camps so in the Dry Valleys there's three main camps there's Lake Bonney which has blood falls which is that like if you've ever seen a picture of red stuff coming out of a glacier there's Lake which Algie it's not algae it's actually iron oxide they originally thought that it was algae but it's iron oxide that hasn't hit oxygen for like millions of years and then like is just hitting it and there is bacteria living in it though which is why it's really interesting to study so yeah you've got like Bonney Lake and then Lake Frick cyl those are all kind of right next to each other and yeah this area called the Dry Valleys is it's you know a 30-minute helicopter ride away from McMurdo so in one instance you would think well maybe it's you know only the most interesting thing like close to McMurdo but it's actually really fascinating for the entire continent is the largest area in all of Antarctica that is not covered by ice or snow the entire continent and the continent is nearly the size of North America so you've got this one patch that's near McMurdo that has no ice or snow and it's really fascinating to go there because you're walking around on all this ice and snow all the time in Antarctica and you start wondering like what does the land itself look like like what if I could like get rid of all the ice and snow and actually see the continent so the Dry Valleys you can actually walk on the continent itself which is what makes it exciting Amana is it soft is it so there's there's no there's no you know trees or anything you know there's no plants that are you know not microbial and it is soft which was the weirdest thing because I was going there it's the Dry Valleys you're an Antarctic eye you expect everything to be frozen solid but everything is soft so you get out of the helicopter and the Dry Valleys and your first step it's like squishy like squishy like the way sand would be squishy and it weirded me out because it gives you the feeling that like everything is like wet but it's not but what I think is actually happening is the fact that the permafrost doesn't start until like 20 centimeters below or something and all the rocks and sand and stuff that sits on top never has any moisture so it never clumps together so it's just all loose constantly and so you step on things and your like just squishes into the ground everywhere you step it was really a weird sensation because I mean there's no bio there's no like biomass to make the soil matrix so it's just fines and pebbles yeah like there's you know there's some microbes around but but otherwise yeah it's very limited you don't have like moss or anything you want bring fertilizer out there all do well I mean I have to imagine it's like if you filled a bucket with sand and pebbles of different sized pebbles and start walking around yeah that's really weird yeah it's weird because it again it just it gives you the same feeling as like as mud or moist stuff but it's not moist at all so other locations that people go to are like the South Pole there's also a really cool location called waste divide which stands for West Antarctic Ice Sheet divide where they've got like a three-story building that they're having to dig out because it got covered all the way to the telus know right now there is a team out at Lake Mercer which is a sub glacial lake that is not at the South Pole but it's closer to the South Pole and they are drilling through to you know study what life might live you know in this sub glacial lake and numa been isolated for yes yeah like most of these sub glacial lakes yeah are fascinating to study because yeah they sort of have these ecosystems in them but they're completely remote from the surface tell us about the underwater stuff yeah that I was yeah okay so the coolest thing to do in in McMurdo that anyone can do you don't have to be a scientist to do this is there is a thing called the Abdu which is known as the observation tube and the obtuse is literally a pipe that is barely the width of a human that they insert into the sea ice and you can crawl down this pipe and it's I don't know I don't know it's maybe three to four times my height or something would tall enough to be a scary ladder deep or something 20-plus feet deep baby and you crawl down this like little ladder into this pipe it looks like from Mario like you're going down one of the Mario pipes and then you get down there and there's 360 windows surrounding you and you get to actually be underneath the site see looking at all the sea creatures and the seafloor and everything so you get to have the same experience more or less as a diver in this little contained thing that you don't have to actually be a diver for and it was fantastic because prior to going in it I was like why would anyone ever be a diver in Antarctica like that sounds miserable and like Oh like who would dive in you know negative two degrees Celsius like water like and then I went into this tube and saw like a glimpse of what they get to see and I was like I get it now like this is incredible that get that sir start reapplying and divers are on the other side yes yeah so if you go at the same time as divers are going down and and I did one time like they'll take a selfie with you and they're underwater and they're just swimming and what's also really cool about is not only so you get to see the underside of all the sea ice you get to see all the fish swimming around you get to see the sea floor but also there's seals though there's Weddell seals and they make sounds that sound like Doctor Who sound effects I kid you not and you get to hear them with such clarity in that little bob tube it you're just it's it's really magical for questions how thick is the ice it'll burn out so this is my I was trying to look it up because I think I forgot like I want to say like some of the ice was like around like 250 centimeters 6 every 10 feet yeah like pretty thick and then in other places maybe it was closer to like 400 I need to look it up but it's it's so thick that you never in a million years have to worry about falling through yeah I mean I was just I was just wondering like how much how far below the ice are you and you're in the 20-foot deep too and it seems like you're pretty close but yeah you're you know I feel like if I'm sitting in the odd tube then you know the ice is maybe I don't know I says maybe 15 feet above me or something and yeah and then the seafloor is I don't know maybe thirty feet below so I know that the seafloor depth around that area is around 75 M or 75 feet sorry 75 feet so you're sort of suspended in the middle between the sea ice and the sea floor how how what's the sea life like on the floor under that like that I assume there's not like kelp forests it's not like there's a lot of life there's a lot you have crinoids which are those weird little I don't know yeah the wavy things for audio listeners Ariel is putting her hands in her side yeah I think back and forth yeah exactly I'm doing an awkward flapping crinoids are really cool but no there's starfish there's there's sea spiders there's there's crabs in some areas there's actually that's why I found it so fascinating there's a ton of life underneath the sea is a ton and then on the microbial side there's tons of just beautiful diatoms which are single-celled algae that have glass shells and they come in shapes of triangles and squares and circles and they're beautiful most of the sea life that I had to filter through which wasn't fun from the seafloor is a lot of worms a lot of worms so I was like I'm getting like these little samples from the divers and it's they're filled with mud and I'm trying to get all this microbial stuff the stuff you can't see out of it and I'm like start poking it with like a spoon or a knife or something trying to get some of the mud out and one time I was hooking like this little sample of mud and just I like activated the worms and all these like little worms started like rearing their heads out it was so great that part sounds like it feels a good science fiction at another planet yeah that's great that's that's I mean we keep asking questions for hours we'll have to take you back Ariel was back I think and Ariel I know this is an ongoing project because not only did you document a lot you film videos of yourself and you're waiting for samples to come back from the trip to do further work on it but eventually this stuff will and your stories will make their way not only your YouTube channel but also on your website and it's that you're setting up yeah yeah absolutely so I'll be working on all this stuff for the months to come and yeah I'm still in the process of actually editing five weeks of video from Antarctica so anyone is interested in checking it out you can go to my youtube channel Instagram and patreon are probably the three best places to find me and those are all under Ariel Waldman thanks for sending us a postcard from Antarctica - yeah awesome yeah I I can't wait to hear more I can't wait to see what what what the rest of the trip was like this is amazing thanks so much Ariel well welcome back and this will be the final podcast for this story sure this time you told me that last sure this time we got you on yeah do the final podcast so have a happy new year everyone you'll be able to find most of our stuff next year on test comm force will you can find online at Will Smith yeah and at Ariel Waldman for Ariel as well and we have a show called offworld arrow and does for us that find new episodes turning new year and subscribe to that as a podcast as well if you're a blonde cast listener as we hope you are today thank you everyone out there thank you guys both and see you next time Thanks\n"