As reported by Sam:
30 November – The ice at Explorers Cove is getting soft. I learn that on the
way to the tile hole dive site, one of the snowmobiles gets wet and stalls.
This is bad news. 
If
the snowmobile sits on the ice too long, it can melt in and become difficult
to remove. After consulting with the mechanics at McMurdo, I’m confident that
we can get it going again. Neal and Doug completed their dive at the tile hole,
and later that night made back-to-back surface supply collections at the dive
shack.
1 December – Neal and Doug continue their collection work under the dive shack. Dr. Travis is picking like crazy to keep up with the number of samples returned to the surface.
2 December – The flight back to New Harbor is delightful. Doug has developed a chest cold, so he is not diving for a while. Neal and I make a couple of dives
3 December – During breakfast we talk about ways to improve our field operations, especially ways to improve efficiency of foram harvesting. Such brainstorming helps us prepare for future work here and elsewhere. Later that day, Neal and I retrieve an experiment I deployed last year near the dive shack. We very carefully bring it up to the surface. It looks intact, and I can’t wait to learn what the forams did over this past year. Later that night, Neal and I make a shallow dive at a spot where a small iceberg grounded back in 1992-93. Neal plays a cruel joke on me. I am floating on the surface waiting for Doug to check Doug’s dive equipment. Neal has a serious look on his face. "I sure hope that deadly leopard seal doesn’t surface from the hole," he says. I look around quickly, exclaiming "What leopard seal? When did you see it?" Just then he jabs me with his dive fin and yells "look out!" I just about shot out of the water, thinking that a man-eating seal was munching on me. We have a darned good laugh over it, and then drop down to collect samples. The iceberg bulldozed a large swath on the seafloor, and Dr. Stockton is comparing the effects of such catastrophic natural disturbance with our activities collecting foraminifera. It sure looks to me that Nature does a lot more damage than we could ever do collecting our favorite creatures. But we will have to wait for Dr. Stockton’s analyses to be sure.
4 December –
Our time here in the Cove is up, so we fly back to McMurdo to catch the plane home. This is an LC-130 Hercules, flown by the Air National Guard 109th Airlift Wing out of Scotia, NY. It will fly us to Christchurch, New Zealand, and then we'll catch a Qantas flight back to the States. Notice Erebus still erupting in the background.
This is the inside of the Hercules. Check out the overhead bins! We didn't get any pretzels on the flight, either. The flight back to Christchurch takes about 12 hours, so you've got plenty of time to talk to your neighbors--but it's very noisy.
After arriving in the U.S., the field team split up to go back home. Sam (and a bunch of forams) made it back to Albany the next day. The forams find Albany too warm for their tastes--remember, they live in water that's -2 degrees C--so we have to keep them in a cold room. If we want to do research on the living forams, we have to be in the cold room, too.
