Research Cruise

Menu

Breakfast

• Ham and eggs
• Fruit salad
• Pancakes

Lunch

• Sloppy joes
• Fried rice
• Fish chowder
• Potato soup
• Salad bar

Dinner

• Cheese ravioli
• Garden marinara
• T-bone steak
• String beans
• Salad bar

Weather

Windspeed average: 40 knots.  Wave height: 13-21 feet

Position

146° 15.20′ by 45° 24.19′

So I neglected to post yesterday, but our D. dianthus catch turned out to be massive!  We had over 1,000 corals from a single collection, and a total of 3,795 corals for the whole dive!  The great thing is that dianthus also seems to be more prevalent at lower depths, so this number should only go up as we sample deeper.  We’re on our way to locations a little North of where we currently are, to try to minimize the impact of the massive weather that’s descended upon us – as of right now, we won’t be able to get back in the water with Jason until Thursday.  Karen, our invertebrate biologist and resident of tasmania, said that a buoy capable of measuring wave height measured the maximum wave height at 27 meters – that’s an 88 foot wave!!!! Let’s hope we don’t see anything near that size during this trip…  The average windspeed and wave height above are only going to get bigger in the next few days, though, and then will finally ease up after that – by Thursday, waves should be around 6-15 feet; with any luck, it will actually be on the low side and we can get Jason sampling again.

In the meantime, we’re doing some swath bathymetry work, which uses echo sounding to map the seafloor. Echo sounding with a single node gives a bearing – the latitude and longitude of the ship – and a range, calculated by the time it takes a sound beam to reflect off the seafloor and return to the ship.  This time can be converted to a distance using the speed of sound in water.  Our equipment is an EM-300, which consists of 135 nodes across the hull, making a fan of sound waves out from the ship.  From each of the nodes, we get a range and a bearing, but this time the bearing is calculated using trigonometry.  We know the angle at which the sound wave is emitted, and the range it gives us, thus allowing us to calculate the location that the beam hit the seafloor.  Swath bathymetry, then, provides a very detailed image of the seafloor, detail obviously increasing with the number of nodes used.  Interestingly, long before the public community had access to this technique, the U.S. Navy performed a lot of swath bathymetry in the Atlantic, mainly because seafloor bathymetry is very useful in hiding submarines from sonar and other detection mechanisms.  If one knows the bathymetry to a very high resolution, however, it is very hard for an enemy submarine to escape detection.  Much of this bathymetry still hasn’t been released to the public.

Unfortunately, swath bathymetry is a purely secondary objective, which means we only do it in bad weather, which means the data is often quite noisy.  As soon as the nodes are exposed to the air, for instance when the ship crests a wave, the data becomes complete noise.  Moreover, the heave of the ship means that the sound swath is constantly moving back and forth, and not progressing linearly.  But since our only time to perform swath bathymetry is in bad weather, it’s the best we can do… 

Karen, thanks for the answer to the riddle!  We’ll surely get stuck on some more, so look out for another challenge!

Menu

Breakfast

• Yogurt
• Cereal
• Egg scramble
• French toast

Lunch

• Linguini with clam sauce
• Grilled pepper steak
• Rice
• Turkey noodle soup
• Salad bar

Dinner

• Sauteed shrimp
• Fried rice
• Cheese tortellini
• Salad bar
• Pound cake

Weather

Calm and clear seas and skies

Position

Same as yesterday 

…So there’s nothing particularly special about Friday, I just didn’t have another title for today’s post.  Jason is still down on the seafloor, now up around 1700 meters.  It’s been a fantastic dive so far; this depth range is chock-full of fossil dianthus and big ones too!  It’s been by far the most successful collection, with over 500 solitaries collected in one quad box (A quad box is simply four milk crates bound together in a square).  We’re working full-time, and have been cycling elevators for the past few days; tomorrow, both elevators are currently on the floor, and each can hold 2 quad boxes and several nets.  We’re also hoping to do some photomosaic work using the HD camera of some of the seamount faces and walls we’ve come across – there are some really fascinating niches down here, so it should prove an interesting form of documentation of the Southern Hills. 

So we were given a book of verbal puzzles for Christmas, and are thoroughly stuck on one of them – “The word ADEPT consists of five letters in alphabetical order from left to right.  The name of what fabric consists of six letters in alphabetical order?”  Free fossil coral to anyone who gives the right answer!

Menu:

Breakfast

• French toast
• Oatmeal
• Fresh fruit
• Yogurt

Lunch

• Chili dogs
• Baked pasta casserole
• French fries
• Broccoli
• Salad bar

Dinner

• Grilled marinated steak
• Baked beets
• Seasoned rice
• Potatoes and onions
• Salad bar
• Ice cream’

Christmas Dinner

• Turkey
• Stuffing
• Gravy
• Yams
• Fingerling potatoes
• Cranberry sauce
• Fresh baked bread
• Salad bar
• Assorted deserts

Weather

Overcast, getting more windy in the evening 

Position

Jason launch: Seamounts Z39 and Z40, 147° 16.66′ by 44° 23.36′ 

Happy holidays to the folks back home from everyone on the ship!   We were able to get together the science and Jason crew last night and to a little gift swap, and we also found gifts outside of our bunks this morning - Santa didn’t forget us out here!   I’ve posted some pictures of the crew aboard; sorry if I’ve missed anyone, I’m still tracking everyone down.  We spent the rest of the eve watching Elf (they didn’t have a Christmas Story!) and fortunately we got the night off from watches because of a low-pressure front coming in.  However, Jason is in the water, bright and early on Christmas at 8:30 AM.  We’re going to stay in for a few days, and then it looks like we’re going to have to hunker down for a while as a massive low-pressure system comes in.  

Our goals this Christmas day are the following: Investigate the Z39 and Z40 seamounts (you can tell which ones are named by scientists and which by fishermen) and explore the two, especially focusing on ridges and the col between the two (~1910 m).  We’ll now be concentrating on lower depths; we’re dropping in at ~2100 meters – the summit of the smaller seamount is only ~1775 meters.  This is uncharted territory in the Southern Hills, so hopefully we’ll get some good HD footage!  

We were able to spot some whales off the starboard bow this morning!  There were about 3 or 4 of them that I could count, and maybe more than that – unfortunately, they were too small and far away to get any pictures of.  Anyway, to all of the family and friends reading today, happy holidays and we miss you all!  

Menu:

Breakfast

• Breakfast burritos with ginger salsa
• Malto meal
• Bacon and sausage patties
• fresh fruit

Lunch

• Crab melt
• Pork adobo
• Pork egg rolls
• Lentil soup
• Rice
• Breaded eggplant
• Veggie lasagna
• Salad bar

Dinner

• Roast chicken
• Garlic potatoes
• Rice
• Lentil soup
• Asparagus
• Salad bar
• Chocolate cake

Weather

Calm!

Position

147 6.80′ by 44 15.02′

We’re back in the water with Jason!  Today, we’re investigating some more of the higher-altitude seamounts to fill in the upper gaps of our coral selection.  Specifically, we’re going to Mongrel seamount, named by the fishermen because of its notoriously difficult terrain, and its ability to mangle equipment.  This seamount is also very heavily fished, so we’re going to try to do some more photomosaic work in this location, to serve as a baseline for future restorative work in this area.  It is amazing how bleak some of these seascapes look when they’ve been dredged – it’s really a complete change from the coral-covered scarps of some of the more underfished seamounts.  We landed on a plain of basically pure rock and sediment – a lot of fish, but not really much else, save a few isidids and gorgonians here and there.  We were able to pick up a second sea pen of a completely new species – no one has ever been able to bring one back to the surface before this trip!  A “slurp” was also added to Jason recently – basically a big underwater vacuum connected to holding tanks.  We’ve been trying to slurp off associates from corals we find, and also slurp some sediment samples.  We managed to get quite a catch – some squat lobsters, some of the purple gorgonian coral that we found the other day – lots of good stuff! We also were able to see a black shark, at least 2 1/2 feet long swimming around the bottom last night, which is much bigger than any of the dogfish sharks we’ve seen in the past, so that was pretty exciting.  The summit was reached by following an incredibly steep and narrow ridge up to around 800 or 850 meters; on the way we encountered some lost fishing equipment – the Mongrel stays true to its name!  Stay tuned for some more HD photos!

Menu:

Breakfast

• Veggie and egg scramble
• Grits
• Bacon and sausage
• Fresh fruit (the melon was primo!)

Lunch

• Grilled cheese
• Potato and leek soup
• Tuna wraps
• French fries
• Salad bar
• Roast beef
• Steamed broccoli

Dinner

• Spaghetti with meat sauce
• Green beans
• Rice pilaf
• Vegetarian lasagna
• Salad bar

Position

Southwest of the Sisters, at a small seamount named the Dory.

Weather

Winds up around 40-50, although a high-pressure front is coming through: hopefully we’ll be able to get in the water by tomorrow morning!

So we spent a good deal of the morning trying to figure out the dredge issue.  Let me present it as a word problem:  The dredge is strung out behind the boat by a length of wire, and since we’re moving on the surface, the dredge is trailing us at an angle, known as the “layback”. What we have to figure out is how long that wire has to be in order for the dredge to drag along the bottom.  In order to determine this, we have a tool called a “pinger”, which sends pulses of sound that bounce off the seafloor and then back up to the ship.  The pinger is attached to the dredge line, about 150 meters up from the dredge.  To muddy the waters, this pinger, if not directly below the ship, bounces its sound waves at an angle off the seafloor back to the ship.

Fortunately, the layback is small enough that this bouncing does not confound our pinger measurements very much.  The layback ratio, or the ratio between the length of wire out to the distance from the dredge to the surface, is around 1.02 – 1.08.  If we do some calculations, we find that a change in this trawl ratio changes the pinger signal by under 10%, which is a small enough error to be able to still accurately determine our position on the seafloor.

Given this information, and a flat seafloor, it should be relatively easy using trigonometry to determine the depth of the dredge.  However, the seafloor is anything but flat, especially when you want to dredge across a seamount.  So how, given the uneven topography of the seafloor, do you pinpoint exactly where the dredge is on the bottom?  Now, it is really a matter of lack of information; given enough iterations we should be able to generate a good intuition about where it is.  If we know the starting position of the boat, and the exact heading, as well as the bathymetry (the topography of the seafloor), we should be able to narrow down our dredge mark.

Unfortunately, with the prevailing 35-knot winds, we’ve had to cancel operations for the rest of the day. However, it seems that a high pressure front is moving in sooner than expected, so with any luck, we’ll have Jason in the water again bright and early tomorrow morning.

To address Justin’s comment to this process of dredging and sampling from the seafloor, I’ve definitely had the same doubts about the costs versus the benefits of doing such sampling.  Compared to the larger fishing trawls, our tiny dredge doesn’t make a huge dent in the reef.  Although I must admit that science does also operate under the “bigger is better” mantra: there is a dredge called the “Sherman” that the group used last year on some seamounts that would no doubt leave a very large mark on whatever seamount it was sampling.  Regardless of sample size, our focus is also primarily on fossil corals; that is, material that is not alive.  There are other science crew aboard that collect live samples – you can get paleoclimate data out of live samples, especially to reconstruct reef position over time on the seamounts, and taxonomists are still discovering and describing species from this area.

I like to think that our sampling is sparse and selective enough to not have much of an impact on the reef community as a whole.  However, in an already impacted zone that’s trying to recover from serious overfishing, our small sampling could seriously retard reef regrowth in this area.  Indeed, this whole area is a Marine Protected zone, which means that no fishing of any kind can happen here, and any live coral taken from the seafloor must be catalogued and reported back to the Australian government.  We had to get special permits to travel here – most Australian vessels are banned from operating in these waters. Moreover, our “sparse” sampling is potentially targeting very long-lived individuals that have been part of the reef community for decades, and maybe even centuries; it is no secret that corals take a very long time to grow, and their presence is an island to many fauna that are closely associated with it and he environment it creates.

The bottom line, though, is that our single cruise takes such small transects of the available ecosystem.  We sample up and down contour lines with a field of vision of about five meters; we really have no idea if what we’re seeing is even indicative of the entire ecosystem on these seamounts.  Even a large dredge like the Sherman, taking up literally a ton of material during a single dredge, impacts an incredibly small area of the Southern Hills.

The real ecological threat here might be the vast amount of carbon dioxide we’re releasing into the atmosphere by steaming in a big boat – the tank of the boat holds 285,000 gallons of diesel fuel (!!!!!) and even when idling in one place, the boat burns 1600 gallons of fuel every day.

Maybe we would be better off taking video of the whole thing and looking it at a screen, but there’s something about discovery that lends itself to dissection and destrucion – Human curiosity isn’t satisfied until we have really “gotten to the bottom of something”.  And now I wax philosophical, which means I’ve spent way too much time thinking and writing about this.  People’s thoughts and comments about this are encouraged, though!  I’d like to hear what people think about the ecological friendliness of our cruise, dredging, sampling, or anything!

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…

Menu

Breakfast

• Cheddar and links scramble
• Fruit and yogurt
• Oatmeal

Lunch

• Beef Tacos
• Refried beans
• Rice
• Mexican spoon bread
• Chicken soup
• Salad bar

Dinner

• Beef tenderloin
• Yellowtail steaks
• Garlic mashed potatoes
• Rice
• Steamed broccoli
• Salad bar

Weather

Clear and sunny, clouds in the distance

Position

Dredge: Southern ridge of A1′s summit

We tried dredging today – back to the founding technology of oceanography!  The dredge is an oceanographer’s workhorse, and one of the original “Remotely Operated Vehicles”: it’s basically a large rectangular mouth that feeds into a net – this mouth is dragged across the seafloor, and collects anything that it comes across.  Although not the most ecologically friendly device, if used properly, it can have minimal impact and give a really good sense of the diversity present in a given area, because it gathers up everything it comes across.

Conversely, Jason is a very selective sampler; although we have videos of everything in front of her, Jason can only collect what she can grab and hold in her limited payload.  We used the dredge to help get some coral samples from depths that we haven’t harvested from- pinpointing exact depths weren’t really necessary (the depth error with a dredge can be quite large – up to 50 meters or so), and we were looking for a large bulk of samples.  Unfortunately, our workhorse wasn’t really working too hard…the first dredge came up with nothing save a lone sea star.  The second and third dredges came up with slightly more material, but our net was nowhere near filled.  So we did get some nice solitary corals, but overall, the dredge’s success was limited.

We’re hoping to go into full 24-hour operations with Jason starting bright and early at 6 AM tomorrow morning – this means we have 4 hour shifts and three groups, so 4 hours on and 8 hours off.  This is a much more typical way of running operations, or so I’m told…

The target is a seamount to the West of the Sisters, where the Southern Surveyor did a dredge last year.  This seamount has also been heavily fished, so we’ll approach it from the opposite face that the fishing trawlers typically approach it from, to hopefully find non-impacted sites.  We also want to run across the dredge mark, to see what it sampled, and the depth of the dredge.  That’s it for today; more on the dive tomorrow!

Dear all,

As promised, here are some HD photos from the past 3 dives!  Images provided are attributed the Advanced Imaging and Visualization Laboratory, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, Copyright 2008.  Thanks to Maryann Morin for the camera and support!

Menu:

Breakfast

• Avocado and egg quesadilla 
• Ginger salsa
• French toast
• Yogurt
• Fresh fruit
• Fresh muffins
• Bacon, sausage and spam

Lunch

• Leafy bean soup
• Pork adobo
• Chinese chicken salad
• Ravioli casserole
• Steamed rice
• Green beans

Dinner

• Vegetable pasta with chili sauce
• Yellowtail steaks
• Garlic rice
• Salad bar
• Mint chocolate chip ice cream

Weather

Windy – up to 30 knot winds!  Waters choppy, skies overcast with some rain. 

Position

Heading back to shore…

Extracting Jason from the water today was a bit rough; the seas really kicked up last night, and Jason and Medea were blown off course last night due to high winds.  We’re heading back in to land this afternoon; unfortunately one of our crew members is sick and has to be transported back.  Due to the weather, we wouldn’t have been able to dive again tonight anyway.  So it’ll be a quiet night for us on the Thompson, and we’ll hope to be back out with Jason underwater tomorrow night.  

In the meantime, we had an interesting catch last night, with some huge Isidids, covered in intersting flora and fauna.  They were all bamboo coral, which consist of large fingerlike skeletons connected by organic joints.  These were so old, though, that the carbonate had grown over the joints – it was too big to be supported by the tissue, so the whole thing fused together.  We also brought in a giant black coral covered in ophyroids – the sea stars serve a cleaning purpose, keeping large amounts of sediment and detritus from smothering the organism.  There’s also a large predatory worm we found – it sits waiting in corals for unsuspecting animals to be caught in its jaws.  Our coral catch was small today, although we managed to find quite a bit of live coral, which Ron is currently keeping in saltwater tanks in the holding bay.

We hope to get a dredge done tomorrow morning on A1; a dredge is less accurate in terms of a depth range, but it brings up a much larger payload than Jason can.

Menu

Breakfast

• Sausage patties, bacon, and spam
• Egg sandwiches and spam
• Coconut pancakes and spam
• Fresh fruit and spam
• Cream of wheat and spam
• Spam, spam, spam, and spam

Lunch

• Barbecued pork
• Roasted chicken
• Rice
• Roasted stuffed peppers
• Chicken soup
• Salad bar

Dinner