Day 3 – Coral Collection, CTD, and the next dive
Menu:
Breakfast
- Veggie and egg scramble
- Lemon bars
- Papaya and other fresh fruit
- Cereal (hot and cold)
Lunch
- Hamburgers
- Black bean burgers
- Salad bar
- French fries
- Stuffed roasted peppers
Dinner
- Roast chicken
- Cheese ravioli with marinara sauce
- Parsley potatoes
- Wild rice
- Summer squash
- Salad bar
- Ice cream
Weather
Clear and sunny
Position
CTD: 44° 19.28 by 147° 16.50′
Launch Jason: 44° 19.28′ by 147° 16.00′
On bottom: 44° 19.331′ by 147° 15.848′
Today was mostly spent sorting, categorizing, cleaning, and sorting Jason’s payload from the night before. We had to separate our D. dianthus out from the large bulk of other corals and debris, including chunks of Solenosmilia, barnacle plates, and some Caryophillia sp. Amongst the corals, we occasionally found little creatures like ophyroids (sea stars, of all shapes and sizes), worms, shrimp, and sometimes even a crab! One little guy was still alive in a little bucket of water, although he wasn’t too happy… Then, we labelled and catalogued all of our D. dianthus and Caryophillia samples and packed them with bubble wrap to ensure their safety. It’s the start of our coral database for the cruise…our goal is to collect over 5,000 coral samples!
We also deployed a CTD in the afternoon, around 1200. A CTD, or Conductivity, Temperature, Depth sensor, takes a wide array of ocean measurements at different depths to generate a depth profile. Although oceans do mix fairly well, there are still salinity and dissolved oxygen gradients over a given depth interval, and measuring and understanding these gradients has been a huge help to oceanographers in determining ocean mixing and currents. We’ll be doing a few depth profiles on this cruise to get a larger sense of the modern Southern Ocean mixing, so we can better interpret past data we’ll be gathering from the corals.
As for the dive, many of the goals are the same as yesterday’s. We’ll be covering an area that was covered by ABE dives from last year, using the high-resolution bathymetry produced from those dives. Specifically, we will focus on the region between 1600 and 1300 meters: we’re looking to get good fossil coral sampling in this area.
Our equipment:
8 nets
Coral breaking tools
Marker weights (large steel plates), especially to mark the start of live solenosmilia reefs
Scoops for filling milkcrates
2 quadboxes, 1 milk crate, 4 bioboxes
Results to come shortly! Also stay tuned for HD frame grabs!
Tags: CTD
December 18th, 2008 at 9:29 am
Hi, thanks for doing this blog! My husband is on the cruise…. Walter Cho, from WHOI. Could you possibly post a picture of him every now and then? I miss him so much…. I would really appreciate it! I will check this blog every day. Thanks for helping me to keep posted on what’s going on way out there…
– Carol Cho, Walter’s wife