Four decades ago, Paul Dayton, a gutsy benthic ecologist, plunged into the -2° C waters below the Antarctic sea ice, sinking as far as 61 meters to study this unique ecosystem of sponges, colorful sea stars, and other bottom crawlers. "I remember being so cold and miserable and crying daily," Dayton recalls from the warmth of the Scripps Institute of Oceanography in San Diego, where he has been a professor for 38 years. "But the dives themselves were so amazing and wonderful."
Dayton's dives were also extremely dangerous, at least in the eyes of the National Science Foundation, which oversees Antarctica's American base. By the early 1970s, NSF instituted rules banning divers from swimming below 41 meters. Much of Dayton's work—including transects he monitored annually to understand animal distributions and growth rates, and cages he planted to study starfish predation on sponges—was suddenly off limits.
Fast forward two scientific generations ...
