Diving, Under Ice
Paul Ward - 1985-86 - Signy Island - Antarcticans Database Project - more

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When you get to dive under ice it is to normal diving what normal diving is to swimming on the surface.

I won't pretend I wasn't more nervous on these dives, but they were really unworldly and a fabulous experience. Your bubbles rise and stick against the underside of the ice making great silver mirrors as they do so. The dive hole that you worry you will lose before you go down becomes a great search-light shining down from the surface.

You see things in the water in these winter conditions that you never see otherwise, in this picture for instance, I'm swimming through a huge swarm of sea-creatures related to jellyfish called "Ctenophores" you can make out 3 of them oval-shaped objects behind me in the picture. There were literally thousands of them drifting slowly by, most are not visible in this picture. Ctenophores have bands of cilia that run their length and waft them along causing interference patterns as they do so, this looks like a monochrome world, but in reality it was surrounded by numberless rainbow phantoms.

Photo; © Paul Ward