‘Enchanting’ is an extremely apt word to describe what it’s like under the ice. We had a Christmas tree erected in the mess on board, but every day I was taking the submersible out to play in a seascape that was like a surrealist artist’s impression of a tree. The ice above is of varying thickness, and in places the strong sun shines through with a soft blue glow. These are my fairy lights. There are baubles and adornments scattered over the ocean floor – pink and white starfish, cerise urchins, and delicate ice crystals like clusters of glittering feathers. The desmonema jellyfish, drifting serenely through the clear water, have strings of tentacles that stream for many metres, and they are my tinsel. The Weddell seals are my choir. Their calls whoop and beat and whistle, sounding like abstract electronic music.
We’d been working at and under the ice for a month and a half. After a programme of mandatory survival training for those in the team who were new to Antarctica, we took a transport to a spot close to McMurdo where the Mimas was stationed off the coast. Her zodiac ferried us and the equipment we were carrying over bit by bit. As Norbert piloted the ship out to the Amundsen Sea, the kit was deployed in the labs, the science team unpacked and took up their berths, and Phoebe was modified with sensors. Then the expedition began. The dive team counted, measured and catalogued the marine life, bringing up specimens for Simon’s colleagues to analyse. They had the most gruelling, dangerous work. Time in freezing water is limited to forty minutes before the diver begins to risk frostbite or hypothermia, and could be ended prematurely if the metal in the scuba apparatus ices over and blocks airflow. They lugged heavy cameras and storage containers with them. It was amusing to watch Meredith and her team scoff down piles of food every evening.
December brought the last of our trips before jetting off home, before the Sun, providing the sea with continuous, round-the-clock light, brought about a bloom of algae that would reduce visibility drastically, and filming would stop. We had just returned from McMurdo to take on more fuel and supplies, have a couple of days of shore leave, and log all the work done on the previous expedition.
Simon and I had by that time logged a lot of time working together in Phoebe, sitting in close proximity. I’d grown to enjoy his company. He had a wry sense of humour and an enthusiastic outlook. We’d been in Phoebe for an hour, meticulously mapping the ocean floor and the glaciers with side-scanning sonar. That was a device that the science team had brought down and grafted to Phoebe’s exterior. It worked much like the echolocation of a cetacean, emitting focussed sound waves and listening to the reflected echo off solid surfaces. The result was a three-dimensional image of the sea floor.
It was during one of these scans that we heard the Weddell seals calling die off within the space of a few seconds, as if each fell silent in turn. In Phoebe’s cockpit, Simon and I exchanged a look. “Something made them want to find their holes and get out onto the ice,” he reasoned. “Keep an eye out for what that might be.”
We expected to encounter leopard seals, but instead started to hear low-pitched rapid clicking. “Is that an Orca?” I asked, not believing for a moment that it was.
Simon shook his head, frowning. “It’s not like any Orca I’ve heard.” In fact wasn’t like any cetacean I’d heard. The sound was more like a sustained croaking, a deep booming. Momentarily it was joined by more ‘voices’. Their calls filled the cockpit, and the plastic sphere found a sympathetic frequency and hummed slightly.
I picked up the radio. “Phoebe to surface, are you picking up these sounds?”
Frank, my dive co-ordinator, answered. “Surface to Phoebe. We were about to call down. Hydrophone is going crazy.” There was a hesitation before he said, “I’ve never heard anything like it.”
As he spoke Simon half rose from his seat. “There!” he said excitedly, pointing out and to his side, his finger almost touching the bubble. I leaned over towards him to better gauge the direction to which he was pointing. As he had done several times on our dives, Simon quickly ducked down to retrieve the marine torch he kept under his feet, twisted it to switch it on and aimed it through the canopy. Its powerful beam didn’t illuminate what he’d spotted but gave me a better indication of where to look. About fifty metres away, I could see a shape, a silhouette only slightly darker than the surrounding water. I brought Phoebe about to pilot towards it. Before I could apply the throttle, however, the shape moved towards us, its form resolving in seconds.
“It’s a dolphin,” Simon said with certainty.
“Oh.” I was a disappointed. There are a couple of kinds of dolphin that inhabit the Antarctic. At that distance it looked a little like a pilot whale, but didn’t sound like one at all. It swum all the way up to Phoebe, and stopped right in front of us, floating motionless in the water.
Straight away we could tell that it wasn’t like any dolphin we knew. Like other Antarctic dolphins it had a short rostrum, a cold water adaptation. It was about two metres in length, had a stocky, almost muscled look, and a mottled hide like that of a spotted dolphin. It hung in the water before us for far longer than any marine animal I had ever encountered in the craft. It seemed to be examining us.
I was hardly breathing. Simon had lowered the torch, without twisting it off. His hand hung limply at his side. He was staring back, rapt. Almost hypnotised.
I whispered into the radio mouthpiece. “Phoebe to dive team, have you...”
“Matt, They’re here with us.” The voice of the radio made Simon snap out of his trance. “They’re all around us!” I had expected John, who was dive team co-ordinator on the Mimas, to answer. Instead it was Meredith. Her team must have surfaced.
Simon took the radio from me. “Meredith, are you filming?” He returned his gaze to the dolphin.
“Absolutely. We’ve already got some awesome footage.” Simon grinned and let out a little whoop. The dolphin with us abruptly turned and swam around the craft.
Meredith came through on the radio again. “Hang on, they’re diving again.”
Simon cursed. The dive team couldn’t go after them, they’d be risking hypothermia and decompression issues.
I picked out more dolphins heading towards us. I guess it was the entire pod. They joined the one already with us in a slow, measured orbit of the submersible. Occasionally one left broke off, looked at part of the craft closely, or pushed its snout close to the clear plastic of the canopy, and then resumed circling us. They called to each other with soft rasping.
I got on the radio again. “Phoebe to surface. John, are you there?”
“Surface to Phoebe.” It was Frank. “John’s gone out to meet the team coming out of the water. Over.”
“Can you fetch him, Frank? Over.”
“Hold on.”
I was going to ask how soon he could put another team in, even a small one. But before Frank could bring John inside the dolphins suddenly, as one, swam away from Phoebe.
Simon sighed with disappointment. “It’s OK, Simon,” I encouraged him, “They’re swimming towards the Mimas.”
He paused for a moment, and came to a decision. “Let’s follow. I’m almost certain that dolphin species is new to science.”
The radio crackled. “Surface to Phoebe. John here. I-”
“Sorry John, can you have a couple of the team stay in to hook us to the A-frame. Frank, I’m coming up.”
“Copy that.”
I brought Phoebe about and throttled up to follow the pod. Soon we were just underwater to the aft of the ship, escorted by two divers, all of us buffeted by surf. The pod had assembled to her starboard side. “Are we ready, Frank? Over.”
Simon laid a hand on my shoulder. I followed his gaze and saw the pod moving off. “Up you pop, Matthew.”
I broke the surface. The divers held straps which they used to tether the craft to the A-frame above. As soon as they backed off towards the dive platform we were winched up and out. Simon had been squirming in his seat, driven to distraction. He picked up the radio mic. “Phoebe to Mimas. Norbert, are you there?”
“Yes, Simon. Over.”
“Have you been following events? Never mind. Can you head North. Repeat, head North. Over.”
I started to speak but Frank pitched in immediately with what I had been about to say anyway. “Negative, Phoebe. If we move off while you’re suspended you’ll sway about. We’ll damage the ship, the submersible and the crew-”
“My divers aren’t even on the platform yet, either. Over” John interjected.
Simon slapped his forehead almost comically. “Sorry, Frank, John. I wasn’t thinking straight. Over.”
Norbert had good news. “Simon, you’ll be pleased to learn that sonar has shown the pod stationed sixty metres away to the North. They’re not on the move any more.”
Simon blew out a long breath of relief. Nevertheless he remained agitated until the A-frame had winched up Phoebe, canted over to the platform, and set her down again. We unlatched the canopy and I raised it. Simon stood up and, ignoring the sudden bite of cold, raised his hands to cup his mouth. “Are the divers aboard yet?” he called. Condensation blasted from his breath.
John, in parka with the hood pulled over a hard hat, was over by the winch that had pulled the dive platform up. He turned and signalled OK. Simon picked up the mic. “Norbert, we’re ready. Over.”
“Copy that.”
The engines boomed and the captain steered hard starboard. I had been donning my gloves, and the sudden turn put me off balance. I reached out my bare hand to grab a support, yelped and pulled away at the touch of the cold, and fell onto Simon. We untangled, embarrassed, and picked up our gloves.
On the bridge Norbert gave us more news. “They’ve set off again.” A screen showed a collection of blobs ahead of the ship. They were heading roughly North. I will tell you nothing more precise than that.
“Can we keep up?”
“Our top speed is fifteen knots. They’re going a little less than that.” His watery blue eyes gave me a look. I was following a train of thought that he had already taken.
Simon gave voice to it.
“They find us, they swim to the ship, then they swim away from it. When we don’t follow, they wait. When we do, they move on, at a speed we can match.”
“They’re leading us,” I said in wonder.
Simon nodded. “They’re leading us.”
We’d been working at and under the ice for a month and a half. After a programme of mandatory survival training for those in the team who were new to Antarctica, we took a transport to a spot close to McMurdo where the Mimas was stationed off the coast. Her zodiac ferried us and the equipment we were carrying over bit by bit. As Norbert piloted the ship out to the Amundsen Sea, the kit was deployed in the labs, the science team unpacked and took up their berths, and Phoebe was modified with sensors. Then the expedition began. The dive team counted, measured and catalogued the marine life, bringing up specimens for Simon’s colleagues to analyse. They had the most gruelling, dangerous work. Time in freezing water is limited to forty minutes before the diver begins to risk frostbite or hypothermia, and could be ended prematurely if the metal in the scuba apparatus ices over and blocks airflow. They lugged heavy cameras and storage containers with them. It was amusing to watch Meredith and her team scoff down piles of food every evening.
December brought the last of our trips before jetting off home, before the Sun, providing the sea with continuous, round-the-clock light, brought about a bloom of algae that would reduce visibility drastically, and filming would stop. We had just returned from McMurdo to take on more fuel and supplies, have a couple of days of shore leave, and log all the work done on the previous expedition.
Simon and I had by that time logged a lot of time working together in Phoebe, sitting in close proximity. I’d grown to enjoy his company. He had a wry sense of humour and an enthusiastic outlook. We’d been in Phoebe for an hour, meticulously mapping the ocean floor and the glaciers with side-scanning sonar. That was a device that the science team had brought down and grafted to Phoebe’s exterior. It worked much like the echolocation of a cetacean, emitting focussed sound waves and listening to the reflected echo off solid surfaces. The result was a three-dimensional image of the sea floor.
It was during one of these scans that we heard the Weddell seals calling die off within the space of a few seconds, as if each fell silent in turn. In Phoebe’s cockpit, Simon and I exchanged a look. “Something made them want to find their holes and get out onto the ice,” he reasoned. “Keep an eye out for what that might be.”
We expected to encounter leopard seals, but instead started to hear low-pitched rapid clicking. “Is that an Orca?” I asked, not believing for a moment that it was.
Simon shook his head, frowning. “It’s not like any Orca I’ve heard.” In fact wasn’t like any cetacean I’d heard. The sound was more like a sustained croaking, a deep booming. Momentarily it was joined by more ‘voices’. Their calls filled the cockpit, and the plastic sphere found a sympathetic frequency and hummed slightly.
I picked up the radio. “Phoebe to surface, are you picking up these sounds?”
Frank, my dive co-ordinator, answered. “Surface to Phoebe. We were about to call down. Hydrophone is going crazy.” There was a hesitation before he said, “I’ve never heard anything like it.”
As he spoke Simon half rose from his seat. “There!” he said excitedly, pointing out and to his side, his finger almost touching the bubble. I leaned over towards him to better gauge the direction to which he was pointing. As he had done several times on our dives, Simon quickly ducked down to retrieve the marine torch he kept under his feet, twisted it to switch it on and aimed it through the canopy. Its powerful beam didn’t illuminate what he’d spotted but gave me a better indication of where to look. About fifty metres away, I could see a shape, a silhouette only slightly darker than the surrounding water. I brought Phoebe about to pilot towards it. Before I could apply the throttle, however, the shape moved towards us, its form resolving in seconds.
“It’s a dolphin,” Simon said with certainty.
“Oh.” I was a disappointed. There are a couple of kinds of dolphin that inhabit the Antarctic. At that distance it looked a little like a pilot whale, but didn’t sound like one at all. It swum all the way up to Phoebe, and stopped right in front of us, floating motionless in the water.
Straight away we could tell that it wasn’t like any dolphin we knew. Like other Antarctic dolphins it had a short rostrum, a cold water adaptation. It was about two metres in length, had a stocky, almost muscled look, and a mottled hide like that of a spotted dolphin. It hung in the water before us for far longer than any marine animal I had ever encountered in the craft. It seemed to be examining us.
I was hardly breathing. Simon had lowered the torch, without twisting it off. His hand hung limply at his side. He was staring back, rapt. Almost hypnotised.
I whispered into the radio mouthpiece. “Phoebe to dive team, have you...”
“Matt, They’re here with us.” The voice of the radio made Simon snap out of his trance. “They’re all around us!” I had expected John, who was dive team co-ordinator on the Mimas, to answer. Instead it was Meredith. Her team must have surfaced.
Simon took the radio from me. “Meredith, are you filming?” He returned his gaze to the dolphin.
“Absolutely. We’ve already got some awesome footage.” Simon grinned and let out a little whoop. The dolphin with us abruptly turned and swam around the craft.
Meredith came through on the radio again. “Hang on, they’re diving again.”
Simon cursed. The dive team couldn’t go after them, they’d be risking hypothermia and decompression issues.
I picked out more dolphins heading towards us. I guess it was the entire pod. They joined the one already with us in a slow, measured orbit of the submersible. Occasionally one left broke off, looked at part of the craft closely, or pushed its snout close to the clear plastic of the canopy, and then resumed circling us. They called to each other with soft rasping.
I got on the radio again. “Phoebe to surface. John, are you there?”
“Surface to Phoebe.” It was Frank. “John’s gone out to meet the team coming out of the water. Over.”
“Can you fetch him, Frank? Over.”
“Hold on.”
I was going to ask how soon he could put another team in, even a small one. But before Frank could bring John inside the dolphins suddenly, as one, swam away from Phoebe.
Simon sighed with disappointment. “It’s OK, Simon,” I encouraged him, “They’re swimming towards the Mimas.”
He paused for a moment, and came to a decision. “Let’s follow. I’m almost certain that dolphin species is new to science.”
The radio crackled. “Surface to Phoebe. John here. I-”
“Sorry John, can you have a couple of the team stay in to hook us to the A-frame. Frank, I’m coming up.”
“Copy that.”
I brought Phoebe about and throttled up to follow the pod. Soon we were just underwater to the aft of the ship, escorted by two divers, all of us buffeted by surf. The pod had assembled to her starboard side. “Are we ready, Frank? Over.”
Simon laid a hand on my shoulder. I followed his gaze and saw the pod moving off. “Up you pop, Matthew.”
I broke the surface. The divers held straps which they used to tether the craft to the A-frame above. As soon as they backed off towards the dive platform we were winched up and out. Simon had been squirming in his seat, driven to distraction. He picked up the radio mic. “Phoebe to Mimas. Norbert, are you there?”
“Yes, Simon. Over.”
“Have you been following events? Never mind. Can you head North. Repeat, head North. Over.”
I started to speak but Frank pitched in immediately with what I had been about to say anyway. “Negative, Phoebe. If we move off while you’re suspended you’ll sway about. We’ll damage the ship, the submersible and the crew-”
“My divers aren’t even on the platform yet, either. Over” John interjected.
Simon slapped his forehead almost comically. “Sorry, Frank, John. I wasn’t thinking straight. Over.”
Norbert had good news. “Simon, you’ll be pleased to learn that sonar has shown the pod stationed sixty metres away to the North. They’re not on the move any more.”
Simon blew out a long breath of relief. Nevertheless he remained agitated until the A-frame had winched up Phoebe, canted over to the platform, and set her down again. We unlatched the canopy and I raised it. Simon stood up and, ignoring the sudden bite of cold, raised his hands to cup his mouth. “Are the divers aboard yet?” he called. Condensation blasted from his breath.
John, in parka with the hood pulled over a hard hat, was over by the winch that had pulled the dive platform up. He turned and signalled OK. Simon picked up the mic. “Norbert, we’re ready. Over.”
“Copy that.”
The engines boomed and the captain steered hard starboard. I had been donning my gloves, and the sudden turn put me off balance. I reached out my bare hand to grab a support, yelped and pulled away at the touch of the cold, and fell onto Simon. We untangled, embarrassed, and picked up our gloves.
On the bridge Norbert gave us more news. “They’ve set off again.” A screen showed a collection of blobs ahead of the ship. They were heading roughly North. I will tell you nothing more precise than that.
“Can we keep up?”
“Our top speed is fifteen knots. They’re going a little less than that.” His watery blue eyes gave me a look. I was following a train of thought that he had already taken.
Simon gave voice to it.
“They find us, they swim to the ship, then they swim away from it. When we don’t follow, they wait. When we do, they move on, at a speed we can match.”
“They’re leading us,” I said in wonder.
Simon nodded. “They’re leading us.”
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