Day 9 pictures

The gates of Antarctica ! Behind these two icebergs lie the ice shelves, the floating extremities of the glaciers flowing from the continent.

We arrived near the coast yesterday, but there was too much sea ice to be able to deploy our moorings where we wanted to. We therefore searched for another location clear of sea ice. We finally found it at 11 pm yesterday, just when I was thinking of going to bed, so we prepared to deploy ! Below is one of the water samplers being craned to the deployment deck.

And carefully handled down to the deployment deck.

We covered it with its custom-made coat to prevent the water in it from freezing.

John cutting some chain for the moorings.

I don't have more pictures of the deployment, since I was taking part in it. But other people took lots of pictures. I will put some on this blog when I manage to get them.
After 22 hours of hard work, we have deployed 4 out of our 5 moorings. The last one, the deepest and longest, will have to wait for the sea ice to clear up. We will come back later during the cruise to deploy it, if the sea ice has cleared up...