Research Cruise

So, I’m going to stay true to my word and post the menu first.  I also neglected to mention that outside of dinner, there is PLENTY of food – sandwich fixings, leftovers from previous meals, coffee, tea, drinks, and a deadly array of snacks and candy…

Breakfast:

• Mushroom Scramble
• Sausage patties
• Cream of Wheat
• Potatoes and onions
• Fresh guava and other fruit
• Cranberry Scones

Lunch:

• Salad bar
• Meatloaf
• Mashed potatoes
• gravy
• Steamed green beans
• Rice

Dinner:

• Prime Rib
• Eggplant stew
• Roasted rosemary potatoes
• Garlic rice 
• Steamed broccoli 
• Au jus
• Salad bar
• Raspberry tarts

Weather:

Cloudy and overcast, with a light drizzle

Position:

First dive happens at:

147° 16.862′

44° 20.235′

Speaking of which, we’re jumping right in with our first dive today!  Jason went in at around 1700 this evening, and will come out again some time after breakfast tomorrow.  I’ll have a detailed post about Jason in a little bit, but Jason is operated from the “Van,” which is 2 converted cargo containers fused together.  Inside, there are TONS of electronics and screens – there are pictures in the first album.  The Jason pilots sit in the front, and the science crew are set up behind them.  We’ll be working on 5-hour shifts, each with 4 scientists, from 1700-2200, 2200-0300, and 0300-0800.  The tasks will be divided up into a media recorder, who is responsible for making sure all video is recorded to DVDs and other recorded media, a data logger, who inputs important events into the log and keeps a tally of the types of terrain, flora, and fauna they see at determined intervals, a biologist to help with identification of species, and a lead scientist, who communicates with Jason’s pilots.  The pilots sit up front; there is an engineer to the left, a pilot in the center, and a navigator to the right.  Between us and the Jason crew, be working all through the night to determine her progress as she makes her first pass.  The first goal is to descend just south of the A1 seamount, and progress north up along the ridge, and then follow it to the Northwest.  We’ll dive down to about 1700 meters, and then go up from there: the summit of A1 is at about 1225 meters.  Here are some of the primary objectives:

1. Collect solitary fossil corals at 50 meter increments, if possible
2. Collect large fossil Isidids (type of coral – usually branched)
3. Run a test mosaic at several altitudes, at a location to be named by the science crew.  
4. Trip water samples at 1600 and 1450 meters.
5. Between 1600 and 1350 meters, sample the ‘tops’ of the living Solenosmilia reef (this is a highly branched, tubelike coral that forms an intricate network.  Many times, our target coral, D. dianthus, is located inside a Solenosmilia reef).  At first there will be only rubb, collect a representative sample of this material.  The goal is to have multiple samples of solenosmilia from each depth.  Separate samples by depth.  
6. Biobox samples: Live Isidids (not for genetics), associates where n can be large.  
7. Photos of representative species that structure the community, and the whole community.  
8. What is the depth distribution of the living species of scleractinia (the stony corals; D. dianthus is a stony coral)?  
9. Mark the transition between living and dead solenosmilia.

Some tools we used:

• 12 nylon mesh nets on steel frames
• Wire mesh net scoop
• 2 Bio boxes to hold live samples, on swing arms that can swing out from Jason’s side
• 8 milk crates to store the fossil samples, held in the front of Jason.  

And there’s success already!  Within the first hour of being on the bottom, we’ve found plenty of sampling material – many of these scarps are covered with fossil corals that we can easily have access to.  Apart from the dead corals, we’ve seen a pelagic holothurian (or a swimming sea-cucumber), tons of anenomes and gorgonians (fan corals), a whiptail fish, a very interesting sea-cucumber, and other sea life…it’s been simply incredible.  We also got a grant thanks to Ron Thresher, a biologist on board, to get an underwater HD camera from WHOI’s Deep Submergence lab – the picture quality is downright stunning.  Hopefully I’ll be able to post some stills on the blog.  

So I’ll split up the posts a little differently later, with a pre- and post- dive post, but the dive is now completed!  We managed to bring up all of the samples without a problem.  However, the nets did not do so well; there was serious bending on some of the nets, mainly where the handles met the steel frame.  They did not fare too well against a basalt seamount…  We’re going to try to fortify the joints by adding supports to either side.  Fortunately there’s a machine shop on board that can do some welding.  And with that, we’re finished with the first dive!  We’ll be going in again this evening at 1600, so stay tuned for that!

Hello all,

First I’ll take a little time to introduce this blog and the trip.  The layout might change as we go along, but first things first: our menu for the day will be posted, because food is the most important thing.  You can’t do science if you can’t eat!  Next, I’ll post our location in Latitude and Longitude, and the weather for the day.  Finally, I’ll go over some of the activities going on around the boat – there are two other scientific groups on the boat other than ours, although ours is the largest, so I won’t be able to cover all of the different projects.  

Our group’s goal over the next month is to collect deep-sea corals off of some seamounts known as the Southern Hills – just south of Tasmania.  Seamounts are exactly what they sound like – underwater sea mountains, or to be more precise, extinct underwater volcanoes.  They are formed when the earth’s crust passes over magma “hot spots”, jutting up volcanoes on the sea floor.  Or, they are formed at a mid-ocean ridge, where two plates are newly forming, and move slowly away from the ridge along with the rest of the plate.  Kunzig, in Mapping the Deep, gives an eloquent description of our deep-sea corals on a seamount:

“…the Deep Tow photographs showed [that the seamounts] were covered with fileds of a spiral black coral, as many as 20 per square metre, clustered in eerie dark forests on every knob and pinnacle: on any perch that would allow them to intercept a decent current.  Each spiral looked a bit like the dead branch of a corkscrew willow, planted in the hard rock.  But each one was a colony of polyps, and each polyp was equipped with tentacles around its mouth to snare food from the passing water.”  

Hopefully we’ll get some pretty pictures from Jason when she dives!  

So it’s the first day on the boat…we’re still docked in Hobart, and are scheduled to leave tomorrow morning at 0800.  Hobart is a pretty small city…only around 200,000 inhabitants, with about 500,000 on the entire island of Tasmania.  

In the morning, we had a meeting with the Jason crew – Jason is the Remotely Operated Vehicle we’ll be using to collect the corals – to discuss different tools to try out for dislodging and collecting the corals from the rock.  Basically, they went to a hardware store and bought a whole bunch of gardening tools – shovels, rakes, hoes – and decided between them which one would be the best.  We also went over to the machine shop at CSIRO (which is the Australian version of WHOI) and worked with them to design and fabricate wire and cloth mesh nets to scoop up the corals.  

Afternoon was spent settling in and going through customs: we met the Customs crew with our passports, and got a safety briefing about the boat.  We had some fun goofing around in our safety suits; big orange things that keep you warm if you go over but also make you look like a big orange Gumby…

 I also got a chance to drive out into the countryside to pick up some final equipment – check the photo gallery for some pictures! 

That’s it for today, stay tuned tomorrow for the first day at sea!