Day 7 – 24 Hour Ops
Menu:
Breakfast
- Egg scramble
- Pancakes
- Fresh fruit
Lunch
- Grilled beef and mushrooms
- Sweet and sour pork
- Rice
- Carrot and potato soup
- Salad bar
Dinner
- Barbecue beef brisket
- Cheese tortellini
- 3-cheese sauce
- Satueed zucchini
- Salad bar
- Baked pumpkin
- Herbed potatoes
- Almond fudge brownies
Weather
Absolutely beautiful – heavy winds in the forecast
Position
Launch: 44° 14.505′ by 147° 7.630′
On bottom: 44° 14.5747′ by 147° 7.3810′
Now that we’re in 24-hour operations, Jason can basically stay down on the bottom as long as weather permits. The key to this mode of operation is to use elevators for all of the payload we collect on the seafloor. An elevator is basically a weighted platform with several large buoyant glass spheres attached at the top – there’s a photo of one in the HD picture gallery. We can load and secure our gathered samples onto the elevator, release weights, and it will float up to the surface for us to pick up from the boat. It’s amazing that with some glass and a metal frame, we can drop something down farther than a mile, load it up, and send it back to the surface – if only it were that easy on land!
So we’re starting to the Northeast of a fairly shallow seamount to collect corals from shallower depths – this will allow a greater range of ocean mixing analysis when we date our samples. We’re hoping to land Jason around 1225 meters, and work around a knoll whose summit is around 1075 meters, collect some samples, and then work our way towards the larger peaks of about 700 meters. We’re approaching from the Northwest, because most of the fishing trawlers come from the Southeast – this way we’ll maximize our chances of finding non-impacted zones. Moreover, the Sherman dredge last year came up with literally a ton of material from this side of the ediface, so we know we’ll have some sampling success. We can also use this dredge mark as a way to sample inside the reef – since the top of the reef will have been removed, we can search for samples deeper down; these samples will hopefully be of an older age and thus more useful for our paleoclimate work.
Also, Ron was able to successfully keep some live corals alive in his tanks in the holding bay! There are some pictures here of polyps in the tanks, as well as the rather humorous treadmill situation in the workout room…
December 22nd, 2008 at 2:23 am
1. The unidentified coral with its symbiont is beautiful.
2. How is this research not destroying more than its worth? Am I wrong in taking this to understand that you’re tearing the roof off a reef?
3. No pictures of you? Are you enjoying yourself?