In October 2015, the beginning of spring in the southern hemisphere, Ballesta joined a small team for a 36-day excursion beginning at the Dumont d’Urville, the French scientific base on the Adélie Coast of East Antarctica. The trek took place as ice began to break up, allowing Ballesta and his team to break through 10-foot-thick ice and dive down as deep as 230 feet.
getting into the diving suits took an hour alone, and once equipment was secured, divers carried up to 200 pounds below the ice. The weight makes swimming almost impossible, Ballesta says, but without dry suits, divers would die in as little as 10 minutes.
The five-hour dives into the sub-29 degrees Fahrenheit water—salt water remains liquid below freshwater’s freezing point of 32 degrees—are excruciatingly painful.
At 230 feet, the limit of the dives, Ballesta says the diversity is greatest. Gorgonian sea fans, shellfish, soft corals, sponges, and small fishes exhibit the “colors and exuberance” like that of tropical coral reefs.
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