May 19 2008
May 19 2008
Empty dredge come up from the last sampling site.
Jenny White and Marshall Swartz setup the CTD rosette before deployment.
Kathy Scanlon peers inside the CTD sediment corer.
This Styrofoam mannequin head (on the right) is suffering from the effects of over 4000 m of pressure and has seen better days.
Today saw us complete work on our penultimate study site, which was an unnamed seamount in the middle of Drake Passage. Today we’ve been rock dredging and box dredging, bringing up some more fossil corals and sponges, and we deployed our final CTD. Tina van de Flierdt, Taryn Noble and Kate Hendry collected waters from the CTD rosette as before for nutrient, radioisotope and stable isotope analysis, and more fun was had squishing decorated cups and, as an alternative, wig heads.
All in all “interim” seamount (as we’ve been calling it – as an interim seamount before heading to Sars seamount – our main proposal goal) has been very successful, we’ve had good hauls of fossil corals, some live corals scattered in there too, as well as two TowCam runs showing us pictures from the deep.
Now we are heading off to Sars Seamount (a ten hour transit), which is also in the Drake Passage, to the west of our current location. We’re all very excited about Sars because corals, just like the type we’re looking for, have been found there before, a long time ago.
As soon as possible, we will start multibeam surveys and then, all being well, deploy TowCam and get down to some sampling!