Astrobiologist Dale Andersen Status Report 24 November 2012, Lake Untersee, Antarctica
We are now fully operational at the Lake Untersee, all the tents are up and the weather has been cooperating nicely with little wind and sunny skies. I guess we need to enjoy it while we can! The last two days have been pretty tiring for the team getting the camp put in place. Once we arrived at Lake Untersee we had to establish the camp fairly quickly to ensure we had safe shelter in the event the weather turned bad. This included setting up the tents, moving all the gear, food, boxes of science equipment and supplies, diving gear, propane bottles, etc. from the lake over to our camp on the shore of the peninsula; securing all the loose gear to prevent it from being lost in high winds, and then drilling a hole through the ice for drinking water.
Today we will lighten our workload a bit as we organize and get set for some routine measurements of the lake’s water column including pH, temperature, dissolved oxygen, redox, conductivity and light. Tomorrow we will select a site for a new dive hole and begin the process of melting a one meter diameter hole through the 3.5 meters of ice. Within the next few days we will also drill sampling holes in the two basins of the lake and begin collecting and filtering water from various depths to be analyzed after we return home.
