This has been a hard blog to make myself write. Science is finished and for a few days now we have been heading for home not having been to our most southerly sites. I admit writing has been confounded by an absolute stinker of a storm that took us all by surprise. I had planned to write this a couple of days ago.

I have to confess to feeling a bit of disappointment this cruise. We invest so much time and energy into getting here that to be eventually beaten by mother nature is a bitter pill. As a bunch of marine scientists of various disciplines we are the folk who are driving the sustainability of our seas in the face of increasing human pressures, we get to see and to try to understand its wonder…surely nature owes us something right? Well perhaps not.

"skys a blue and seas that are green" (by Chong Chen)

Would I have still come. Without a doubt! Whales within metres of the ship, albatross and penguins, sunset and sun rises of the most fantastic hues, travel to Chile and ultimately Uruguay (port of demobalisation) and then Argentina a short hop across the mighty river Plate, new discoveries like the E2 north venting, possibly a new order of anemone to add to the list of new species from our previous trips and samples to work on after my return. Even spending Christmas at sea was a a novel and most excellent affair [although I feel i must apologies to those I left behind for that feeling].

The problem with transits is that the high intensity activity that kept you focused on the here and now is gone. 8 days in total it will have taken us to get back to terra firma. That is a long time to start missing land and people. I’ve done 8 week cruises and it seems to be the  same regardless of cruise length. As long as the work load remains high things like home and family, specific foods or recreational pursuits remain to a certain extent distant …up until the transit. Now the transit is almost done home feels so close but just out of reach. We have been running a murder game to keep folk entertained (very paranoid also).

Saying goodbye to abundant bird life, the abundance of which rapidly drops off (by Chong Chen)

On the up side it does start to feel time to go when the fresh fruit we have been having for breakfast is replaced by canned stuff. Despite the vacuum fridges and freezers we have on board (remove the atmosphere and humidity inside aids preservation of goods) we said goodbye to the grapes around Christmas. The only lettuce/leaf to now survive is iceberg [no pun intended]. While we still have pears, it could be a good debate as to whether one would/should eat them. Apples and oranges seem fairly bomb proof. Still this is better than the last cruise where there was a strike and despite delaying departure two days for supplies we could add running out of cheese, butter and bicarbonate and so on to the list above.

Another aspect of the transit is the rather surreal element of leaving a sea in which ice has blocked our sampling sites and restricted our movements to sailing under an almost tropical sky. After transiting more than 20 degrees of latitude the sea temperature has gone from below 0oC to in excess of 22oC. The air temperature we left got as low as -5oC. It is supposed to get to 33oC today. Here, we are in shorts and t-shirt and I got burnt yesterday for spending 20 minutes outside.  Yes, as everyone here takes great glee in pointing out, I’m a pasty Scotsman who could use a bit of weathering. Lesson learned…out comes the sunscreen. Docking in Montvideo at 34 degrees south puts us just outside the tropics at the height of summer.

Chief Engineer George leading an end of cruise engine room tour. Always a very popular event. (by Chong Chen)

So as I say goodbye and close off this blog I have just been informed we have our first sight of land. The pilot will be boarding to guide the ship in at 16:00 and by tonight we will be heading straight into town to find a restaurant/bar and get absolutely …stuffed on fresh juicy fruit and veg!

moonlit cruising (by Chong Chen)

So I guess this is it. The last lines of the last blog. It has been emotional. It has been an adventure and it has been fun.

Thank you for sharing it with me.

Chris

Well! Christmas has been and gone. And what an enjoyable time it was too. Some strange mix of work Christmas do and a get together of an extended family. Nobody stormed off in a huff, the turkey wasn’t burned and as far as I know, nobody put their foot in it. If I did I haven’t been told about it yet!

Watching the sun set and moon rise late on Christmas eve

Christmas day started nice and sunny. Still suffering from a lack of fresh air after a few days of bad weather, I went out on deck all wrapped up in my foul weather gear and sat under a sky bright with sunshine. It surprised me a bit when water started dripping down my neck. It turns out that after a big storm all the windows need a good wash to get the salt off and one of the favorite tricks is to rinse these off without telling the scientists. The crew know to keep well clear….they know the work plan and work obviously stops for coffee. There is a little lip to the upper gangway that collects water which then empties on those ill informed or gullible enough to take up residence below. But the best bit is that it only happens when the sporadic, almost random, slightly larger than normal waves pass. The culprit can be long gone by this time. There are plenty of the gullible / ill informed like me because it is the only place out of the wind and in the sun.

Festivities started at 12:00 with a champagne reception followed by dinner at 13:00. Dress code was smart but you can get some very interesting versions of smart at sea. Jon had a tux with flip flops,  I went for smart/casual, the boss when for shirt and tie with climbing trousers. The lassies spanned sparkly dresses and high heels (lethal on a ship) to t-shirts.

Dinner was an extensive and formal affair with a huge menu shown below. I had a bit of everything! Add to this a bottle of wine on the table and mixed seating (officers + engineers, crew, technicians and scientists) with place names. The galley staff / purser were stuck in the kitchen for this but they get a their own special dinner afterwards where service and clean up is undertaken by a couple of the officers and crew. I’m sure all would agree the meal was excellent. I just wish I had a bit more self control.

A light lunch

Dinner was necessarily followed by a promenade on deck to blast some fresh air into my lungs in a desperate attempt to find that hollow leg I had when I was 16 or, as a second best, to kick start digestion. It was topped by the coffee and mints. At least that was the idea. I had one mint and decided I was already too full to enjoy it. A BIG fat overfed tick to Christmas dinner then.

What other things does one do on Christmas day? mmmm watch TV and open presents! We must be a rather patient lot because we deferred the latter until 18:30. Instead we all squeezed into the video room as we did yesterday to watch a movie, this time “Elf”. You may have guessed but we were a little short of Christmas movies on the boat.

Presents started with a little gift from John our Chef. Everyone got a little something. I got one of those little foam airplanes. Others got a few sweets or incense sticks or similar. There is a surprising amount of fun to be had with the planes. Give them to a bunch of ROV pilots and they will be redistributing the weight to improve trim, making adjustments to flaps to improve flight characteristics and generally giving it as much care and attention to detail as might be lavished on the rather more costly ROV. It is just as much fun watching the rather unpredictable consequences. “there that should do it”… “oi! watch my coffee!” “move the nose weight aft a quater inch [some engineers seem to still work in imperial]” “you plonker…here give it to me!”

The night before we sailed we all went out for our last stable meal on shore and a few drinks. The Chileans do a mean hot chocolate that is 110% chocolate. Anyway one of the first topics of conversation as we all met up after various flights from our respective homes was how Christmas might work and what we would do. From that day developed a plan to rewrite the 12 days of Christmas for JC80 (James Cook cruise 80). Here is the outcome and it what we are all singing in the picture above. We are hoping that the PI will include this in the cruise report as one of the deliverable of the scientific project.

On the twelfth day of Christmas my PI gave to me [PI = Principle Investigator = boss]

Twelve Kiwa crawling [Kiwa = our vent crabs]

Eleven chimneys smoking

Ten ice burgs lurking

A force nine gale

Eight humpback whales

a seven armed starfish [one of the species found in greater abundance at the periphery of vents, a top predator in the system and unusual because the echinoderm group to which it belongs usually has 5 or multiples of 5 way symmetry.]

Six mini-niskens [the ROV mini-nisken rosette is a rack of 6, the big CDT has 24 but that does not fit so…]

Five meals a day [plus snacks and presents. Haribo is excluded as a meal]

Four CTDs

Three slip rings [slip rings = rotatable/spinning joints at the top equipment across which data can be transferred…,necessary to stop wire tangling]

Two clicks of wire [about how much wire we have managed to mangle on this trip…it usually happens through wear and tear from heavy use. = clicks = km]

and a brand new ROV [this is the ROVs first science cruise after a rebuild]

Festivities in action top left - Cathy drawing her secret Santa, bottom left - The 12 Days of Christmas JC80 Style, right - Santa supervising the present giving

From there it went to pass the parcel. Because we are big kids and very sensitive to being excluded from games we did the modern version of the game where there is a mini present in each layer and you are never out [not like it was in my day…one present at the centre and you tried not to be the one to open a layer…see that parcel fly]. In this modern game if you receive the parcel a second time you must pass the parcel to the next person on who has not opened a layer.  I’m not sure this event was planned as far ahead as many of our others as the prizes included, amongst other things, a single chocolates with a balloon, a tube of cotton buds, a British Airways toothbrush, a hair brush and other equally random items.

Lastly we had a visit from secret Santa who had obviously been working so hard over the preceding Christmas eve that he had used up all blubber stores. The slim version of Santa oversaw the distribution of a gift from his sack. They fell into the recurring theme of either sweets or games/puzzles. Most of the evening was then spent challenging each other to the puzzles while eating the sweets.

…. and so Christmas day drew to a close.

I was one of five that made it to boxing day breakfast. We have been lucky because Christmas fell on a nice gap in the bad weather and we are now back up to bouncing around and generally having a bit of difficulty doing anything. I’m sure it is the weather that is the cause of all our impaired abilities. ho hum…another day of transit with the slosh of the roll compensation tanks. A kind of ever present perpetual whooshing and gurgling as water is pumped from one side of the ship to the other. It makes things better but I’m still trying to figure out how to eat when I have to hold both bowl and tumbler (too many live up to their names). Perhaps I ate enough at Christmas to see me through tonight!

Chris

I thought I would just escape the festivities to cool down (a lot of bodies in a small space) and wish you all a very merry Christmas. It has not been as strange celebrating as one might think. Christmas eve started with a film showing of the Nightmare Before Christmas at 18:30. We managed to pack more than 18 people into the video room for that. I did what I do every Christmas on returning to the parental home….nick a cushion and sprawl on the floor. Most of the ships off watch company then met in the lounge at 20:00 for a cup of mulled wine courtesy of the purser. We all warbled to a few rounds of carols with a surprisingly high uptake on the singing front. Then again when you tend to see people at their worst just after they have got up there is very little dignity left to loose so perhaps it should not be so much of a surprise.

It has been a pleasant run up to Christmas for me. We get to skip the commercial spirit of Christmas as it is rammed down our throat through TV, radio, and our peers. There is no reception out here and it is a select company. We have missed or completed the present buying hassle a long time leaving as we did at the end of November and we cannot go rushing hither and thither to commute to one in-law or the next this Christmas eve. The sprouts and potatos are peeled and excepting the poor galley staff, most of us have little concern about organizing the food.

It has therefore given us the time to enjoy the social elements to Christmas. An evening in the lounge chatting with the friends we have on board, listening to Christmas music of our choosing (that has not yet worn thin) playing in the background and having a drink or two. No alcohol induced squabble for us…the bar is not that well stocked and if you haven’t learned to co-exist and play nicely in the close confines of a ship by now your in trouble. We have decorated the ship and then redecorated the ship after the bad weather turned good. We are in transit so no science. It has all come together. The only thing missing is family. So here we are thinking of you all.

So that just leaves placing my reindeer dust down to guide the landing, my night watch duties to check the Santa hatch is clear and no one has got stuck in it and being in bed before midnight…a hard task for the night watch.

My love and Christmas wishes to you all

Chris

We do a number of things to entertain ourselves at sea. We have quite the knitting circle. However there is one particular thing I would like to share. Jeff Hawkes, one of our chemists runs a rather erratically timed news paper of dubious content that is usually unsharable with the wider public….mostly because the in jokes would be meaningless and sometimes to spare the embarrassment of cruise participants …you can get top quality quotes  when people are caught just up out of bed and off guard.

Anyway for your viewing pleasure, here is the end of the world edition of “The Cloud”

enough said

Cruise equals holiday…right? If you said yes to that then please leave now because it is no fun anymore. “Mummy I want to come home”. We have spectacularly failed in avoiding the weather. It’s blowing force 8 or 9 and has been for the last 36 hours or so. I have to point out now for all those worrying at home, the James Cooks is an excellent ship to be on in this sort of weather and is far more stable and comfortable than most. If your only experience of force 8 at sea was a ferry to Europe…my sincerest commiseration. However, that does not necessarily mean it is all smooth sailing. We had been pre-warned of weather so I went to bed after placing my lap top in my desk and putting the deadlights down (steel porthole covers). The problem is that we have had fantastic weather so far and I guess everyone had got  a little lax about it. I got woken up mid-sleep by a 2L bottle of water landing on me. I knew it was bad when I wondered up to the mess to erm…find a mess. Our two Christmas trees and a couple of window decorations had taken nose dives, all laid out on the floor like a couple of corpses. A nice tinkle of rolling bobbles in the background. I had to resist drawing chalk outlines. I hope that is not symbolic of your Christmas celebrations.The big Christmas tree now looks like Joan of Arc being tied to a support post, just ripe for burning at the stake. Our little one is taking its ease still laid out on the floor .

The tally so far for appliances with suicidal tendencies stands at two telephones smashed beyond repair and one crew TV with minor scuff marks. For injuries, we have a bruise from a psychotic office chair attack (mine [bruise not chair]…those top heavy spinning chairs again) and another from wave assisted propulsion into a door handle. There are obviously a few green faces and the engineers have had to shunt unblocking sinks up the priority list. No one has had fresh air today as we have battened down the hatches and banned promenades on deck. The mere thought of attempting to exercise in the gym makes my toes curl. It is hard enough to walk. Pushing the heavy doors we have on ship uphill or stopping them flying away open on the down hill roll is a work out in itself. Even simple things like getting about the ship is a challenge. All cruise the water tight doors have been closed as part of icy seas procedures. The journey up one deck and over the top was never a problem. It is now!

Above photo is of force 8 from the bridge but we reached Force 9 = "Strong gale 47-54 mph winds, 7-10m wave height, High waves whose crests sometimes roll over. Dense foam is blown along wind direction. Large amounts of airborne spray may begin to reduce visibility." It is very hard to gauge the waves but if you look you will see than most of the water visible belongs to only three waves. (by Chris Sweeting)

Even life’s little comforts sometimes fail. All I want is a cup of tea. A nice cup of tea…please. Is that really too much to ask? Do I take the risk of making one? Can I get the lid on before the contents jump out at me? Adding milk should be a simple procedure …but no! Try pouring the right amount of milk into a cup while waving your arms around next time you make a cup. It goes something like  …wait for wave to pass….over pour milk with next wave…taste milky tea….discard….risk scalding to make another….splash milk on hand and floor….add some to mug and more to floor….cap mug and wipe floor….fall into cupboard while wiping floor….pick up mug….pause at top of stairs wondering how to descend with only one hand….chicken out and head to nearest amenable place to drink at this level….hop on one foot and flap wildly to retain balance around a corner….cringe as the door slams shut when you let it go with your one free hand….place mug on a table with non-slip mat….pick it up off the floor and take a sip….wedge cup in secure place….forget where you put it.

Well the Southern Ocean is renowned for being the roughest on the planet. Perhaps I’ll be an arm chair adventurer next time.

snap shot of the ship motion data. You can sea the weather deteriorate at about 22:50. The worst rolls take us through a 12 degree arc so uncomfortable but by no means dangerous. (by Chris Sweeting)

So what are we doing now? Well not science that is for sure. No kit could go over the side in this. We ride it out and all will be fine. On the up side we have lots of films to choose from and choosing is easier…they were spread all over the video room floor. Anyone want to start your working day with a film straight after breakfast? I did.. I’ve also passed the time with a snooze..bumpy days don’t make restful sleeps. I’ve had 5 games of scrabble throughout today…I even won one. We are getting into the knack of picking up the edge of the coffee table on the worst of the rolls to stop the pieces sliding off the board. “Who put crid down? Crid is not a word!” “It was cried, but the e slide on the board at some point and then got used in elixir…we decided just to leave it rather than work it out”

So with all this free time we must be getting a lot of work done? Nope…thanks to the digital age. Working on the computer or other close/fine tasks can only be done in small doses otherwise I’ll make myself seasick. Thankfully I’ve avoided that so far but this blog has been done in 3 steps so….

Dinner with non slip mats and the side rails up. Soup is the fun but even chasing food around the plate can be entertaining. (by Chris Sweeting)

I’m off to block a sink!

Chris

Up until a few hours ago, today might have been termed a “slow news day”. If fact it would have been a slow news couple of days and mostly included the rather uncharismatic elements of science. The repetitive and routine. Well it can’t all be discovery, charismatic mega-animals and sight seeing now can it! For example all the electronic information for CTDs and the ROV come up through an umbilical cable which has power and data cables at its core and armoring on the outside. We have spent a day on maintenance of these cables and the associated winches and accessories. It involved a nice jolly to the South Sandwich Island trough, an area of sea in excess of 7000m metres deep not far from our current position (see the chart of the previous blog. The arc of triangles represents the trough). That is the deepest water I’ve ever knowingly been over. You could loose all but the biggest mountains on earth in there.

ROV umbilical by sun run rise (By Belina Alker)

Then it was back to E2 to keep hunting for that elusive vent site that we currently know of as E2 north. A site “smelt” by CTD, but as yet unseen to the north of the sites we have been sampling for animals. Finding this site is important. E2 (now E2 south) is a funny site. While E2 is still venting, it seems to be waning. There is just not quite enough life there for a vent system in full flow and life tends to be clustered in very little patches hugging the best sites. This suggests  some kind of relic and another area might therefore be seeding this one. Based on N-S prevailing currents one would first look to the north.  We have been and spent a bit of time doing so already and been stumped.

So we have changed tactics to look for the vent. We have committed a greater amount of time to the chemical search to try and zoom in on the vent site and restrict our ROV search area much better. For a little over the last 24 hours we have been CTD tow-yoing.

Lets start with the what. I described before some of what the CDT does. Basically it is a pack of sensors in a frame that tell us how various characteristics of water changes as we lower the CTD into the depths. For us the three key measurements are temperature, the light scattering sensor and the Eh readings. They help us find the chimney smoke plumes. Water temperature rises close to venting so if we hit hot water we have to be very close a vent. This effect does not spread far. Spreading a little further from the vents are Eh anomalies. Eh tells us about the chemical character of the the water and it is very different in vent fluid. Lastly the light scattering sensor measures particles in the water. We pick up the “smoke” particles using this and this is the most widely dispersed effect but also the trickiest. Sediment blowing off a ridge will produce a similar signal to vents for example.

Based on the grey trip to the beak this is a Southern Giant-Petral, although we also have Northern Giant-Petral which has an orange tinge to the beak tip (by Chong Chen)

A CTD tow-yo is where the CTD is lowered to depth, usually to about 20m off the seabed and then partially raised up through the water so say 1000m water depth as we move to a new position and then it goes back down again. It therefore has an almost saw tooth depth pattern. Straight down and diagonally up, straight down and diagonally up….. It differs from the usual taking of water samples CTD where we  find a spot and go down and then all the way back to the surface still in one place.

Now for the why. OK for the biologists this does not make great viewing but it is an essential part of searching. It is like scent tracking….walk a line and find a strong smell. find where the smell is stronger and weaker. Go back to the strongest point. Now you are in the plume. But is the plume coming from the north or the south? So then we do a transect perpendicular to the first centered on our strong smell point. Does it get stronger or weaker as we move north? Getting closer! Repeat process. Of course things are never quite that simple. We may intersect the plume at angles, the speed and direction of the plume change with the tides and currents and the shape of the plume, e.g. how high it rises, where it spreads out etc are all determined by the wider water character.

Probably a Sei whale (By Chong Chen)

The upshot is WE FOUND HOT WATER!. A huge rise of 0.2oC above ambient. That may sound ridiculously small but it is not to be sneered at. While vents in their many forms may pump out a lot of hot water, the sea is a very big place and the signal, especially temperature is attenuated fast. It was worthy of a cheer and on the last planned drop of the day too. We must be within mere metres of venting to get that signal.

Alas, normally we would be diving the spot tonight but the weather forecast is not good. The seas are too rough for the ROV to be deployed safely unless we want to play ping pong with £5mil of kit off the side of the ship. And worse news is that the weather is likely to be poor for a couple of days. I should not complain. We have had some extremely good weather and this is supposed to be the world’s roughest sea. The silver lining? Well we can CDT in worse weather than we can ROV and bad weather will assist in breaking up the pack ice over our southern sites.

We are currently steaming overnight back to E5. While it is too deep for the ROV we can zoom in further on the venting that we found during our last little excursion down here. Who knows, we may get into hot water down here too and then the champers just might start flowing (but only half a glass please, we have consumption limits and a breathalyser on board…probably a good thing then that current plans have us working Christmas day).

One of the rarer sightings, a Macaroni penguin (by Belina Alker)

One of our ever faithful E2 visitors, the chinstrap penguins (By Belina Alker)

–Newsflash–

Scientists to face the apocalypse with the same stiff upper used to survive elusive vents and sea ice.

Scientists aboard the RRS James Cook breath a sigh of relief as the extra hours found in the longest day (December solstice in the Southern hemisphere), allows completion of a planned days work…..for once.

Chris

Well the deadline for photo submissions to our whale snaps competition has come and gone. I got gazumped with the photos and Clare has them on her blog. So please cast your vote there. Clare also has some video links on the whales

https://elgg.leeds.ac.uk/geocwo/weblog/

You can register your vote by clicking on the link at the bottom of her post where it tells you how many comments have been posted. Place your vote by writing a comment containing the number of the picture that you wish to vote for. Voting closes at 17:00 GMT on Friday the 21st of December.

Chris

So we have closed off all the high priority work at E2. We have overstayed by at least three days and unfortunately the ice has only broken up a little. Arrrgh so frustrating we are now watching time at other sites slip away. Still that is the nature of this kind of work. Remember the ever evolving alternative plans? We crack out the box marked E5. The East Scotia Ridge on which we are mostly working is segmented with a series of offsets along its length. The map below shows the sections. E1 is slowly disappearing under the South American crustal plate, but the rest of the ridge continues to spread eastward and westward. Including E1 there are 10 segments to the ridge and way back on the first cruise in this project in 2009/10 (a geology and chemistry cruise only) early evidence of hydrothermal activity was detected by water chemistry at E2, E5 and E9. Short of high priority options we steamed 12 hours south to E5. It allowed an assessment of the ice and a look for the plume signals in the water.

Sorry but I could only find an academic map of the East Scotia Ridge (ESR) showing what I wanted. It shows all 10 segments and the two that we had planned to work on. The earths crust is separating at the ridge. Some going west and forming the Scotia crustal plate (SCO) and some going east and riding over the top of the top of the South American plate (SAM). The triangles represent the subduction zone around the South Sandwich Trench. The South Sandwich Islands (SSI) and the shallow water (in grey) around them are formed by a series of volcanos, some of which are still active, the lava coming from the crust that melts as it is forced under at the trench. (By Rogers et al. 2012)

We found some! Plumes not Ice. Not big signals, but signals none the less. There is active venting down there. Now we just have to visit. And therein lies a problem. Remember the crushing pressures we experience at that depth? At 3000m the pressure will be about 300x  that at the surface and so the volume of air is 1/300^th what it was. That can crush scaffold poles if their ends were sealed up. Well the location of venting on the E5 site is deeper than at any of our planned sites. Isis has recently been undergoing repairs including new buoyancy cells (the red and yellow bits) supposedly rated to 6500m. They are a special glass bead foam that should be capable of surviving the pressures we want to work at. At £0.5 million a pop you would hope so. But as we are learning on this cruise, hope and reality can often be quite separate things. Pressure trials before our cruise saw one buoyancy cell implode. They rushed through a spare for this cruise but it is only rated to 3000m. Sites found at E5 indicating venting are at 3000m. The ROV guys have done us proud so far and it is always a gamble putting anything over the side of a ship. In this case however, the odds are not high enough in our favour. So close but so far. Chalk that site up to the next grant proposal or as a target to pass on to the cruises of other nations who find themselves in our position and looking for alternatives.

Black smokers smoking away at E2. What we are seeking more of (by Isis)

So where does that leave us? We are headed back to E2. We know we have plumes there from vents we have not found yet. True we have spent 2 days looking both chemically via the CTD and physically with the ROV in the water. Still we have ONLY spent two days. That is a short search time. The problem is that vents are small sites. Often less that 100m in length from end to end for the entire vent field. Individual chimneys can have a sphere of influence of less than 10m. We could easily have missed them in our searches. That is assuming we were looking in the right place before. Currents aren’t as easily predicted in the deep sea as in our coastal seas so it is hard to say where the plume came from. We will try again. Another vent field would make it all good. Cruises are deemed a success on finding a vent alone and we have 500 samples in the bag from the sites we visited already.

Kiwa crabs in their natural warm water habitat in a very cold sea (by Isis)

So it was a 12 hour overnight steam and back to working and waiting … waiting for the vents to show or the ice to go.

In the mean time I have plenty to do. I have time to catch up with work like data entry and vial labeling or other things that got put on hold ….sleep perhaps. It was a 91 hour working week last week according to my time sheet. A lighter workload for a day…say perhaps only 9-10hours is good for morale. Perhaps I can defend my scrabble title tonight. I won two of last night’s three games. For me that is no mean feat. Those that know me (or tut at the spelling in the blog …which I correct when I spot it) will guess I’m the wild card entry. The competition is stiff and the game very competitive!

But for now….good night I’m off for second breakfast.

Bilbo Baggins

Today was one of those “I’ll remember it for the rest of my life” days. People (and 1^st year marine biology students  in particular) generally have a poor idea of what marine biology entails. Sharks, turtles and coral reefs feature heavily thanks to TV. Nemo has a lot to answer for (apart from appalling ID skills, Nemo’s dad is not a marlin obviously and Dory is not a dory she’s  a blue surgeon fish, or more correctly Paracanthurus hepatus …. sorry). Marine biology is, at least most of the time, some form of mud, invertebrate or inclusive of 50 shades of grey, silver or brown.  To a “true” marine ecologist like me, that has never been a problem. I do however,  keep a frozen herring in my desk drawer at work to beat a dose of reality into students at times.

But just once in a while the tables are turned on me and I can start to understand the public’s complete and overwhelming love for the cute and cuddlies of the sea. Why? Because today I stayed up two hours beyond my bed time to watch whale after whale have a look at the ship. It is an experience that money literally cannot buy. Whale spotting tours are not allowed to approach whales in case doing so harasses them. It is rare enough for the whales to approach you. Today I got within 2m of 4 humpback whales some as big as 15m and weighing in at an incredible 20odd tonnes. It was spectacular.

The news came to us at breakfast, a rather sparely populated affair now that work is underway as it seems to be the meal most miss for sleep to maintain watch routines. Now I’ve missed most of the whale sightings to date as I’ve been asleep. Nights do not make great wildlife viewing times, hence why Chong has become my unofficial blog wildlife photographer.  So I was out my seat, down to the cabin for the camera, back up the stairs and layered up with extra clothes before the plate I deposited on the draining board on the way out had stopped spinning.

Wrapping up warm is the first thing I learned about wildlife watching on the boat. The rush to see things and going under dressed means that you can last about 10 minutes before ducking back in and usually missing the best bit. A classic “stitch in time saves nine” moment. This was to prove an important decision. We watched the group approach from a distance and within half an hour people are running off waking those asleep after watches, some only having had a couple of hours, because viewing had gone from the normal to the absolutely ridiculous. Round and round the ship they went, back and forward. They were spotted out of port holes and on the ROV winch cctv. And all within metres of the ship….FOR 2 HOURS!

Peek-a-boo! More correctly known as spy hopping (By Chris Sweeting)

At the risk of anthropomorphising the wildlife, I’m sure the whales enjoyed the experience as much as we did. Sneaking away out of sight and then surfacing and blowing on the other side of the ship….peek-a-boo! That big hiss of escaping air as they blow might as well have been a starting gun for the rush of bodies it caused… from one side of the ship to the other….and shortly back again.  Tired of that they then had folk rushing off from the bow to the stern and that was when they were at their closest. Poor chin strap penguins tried very hard to get a look in, even passing in flotillas of 20 and making a right racket for attention, but sadly we humans are a very fickle and easily distracted species.

Watching the watchers (author in red hat at the end) (by Chong Chen)

The shape of the whale blow is quite characteristic of the species and can be used in identification...not that it is needed this close (By Chris Sweeting)

The result? We now have a photo competition ongoing. I’ll attempt to poach the finalists picture for you. I know our chief scientist took 400+ pictures but Chong holds the record at …wait for it….1134 pictures (26GB). I filmed a bit and then decided rather than watch all the action through an LCD screen I’d just enjoy the experience…just for me. After all I want no evidence that can undermine my attempts to provide a dose of realism to our students, for it unmasted me in a mere 2 hours. An in case you were wondering. We are not dinner. They filter feed on shrimp like animals called krill and small fish.

Humpback whales have a very small dorsal (top) fin and white undersides to the tail and white flippers and nobbles on the head (by Chris Sweeting)

For those at home. I hope you enjoy the pictures. Happy birthday dad

Mother and older calf...Wow... but how come his sea is crystal blue and mine is grey/brown?... Perhaps Chong's perspective on marine biology is different! (by Chong Chen)

Today I would like to take you on a visual journey through the sampling process described yesterday. It has taken a bit of time to get all the pictures collated…the price of up to date blogging is pictures tend to lag behind. So to go with yesterdays blogs description, here is a dive in colour.

1) Pre-dive checks

...science kit check attached...check. We packed what we need! (by Chris Sweeting)

2) ROV checks

Smile your on camera ...and it works. The affectionately named bum cam gives a view aft so there is no excuse for reversing into things. It is particularly useful for going down hill as the front of the ROV can easily loose sight of the sea floor as it drops away out of camera shot. Note the drum of the suction sampler behind the camera with colour coded chambers to receive samples. You'll see that later again. The green thing with red circles is the doppler, part of the navigation equipment.

3) Thunderbirds are go

Over the side goes Isis. She is built in 3 layers. The red and yellow top provides the buoyancy, the middle houses the thrusters, hydraulics and electronics and the bottom is broadly science kit. At the front left you see the hose of the suction sampler. Centre is a white insulated bio-box on a swing arm. Its for stuff that is too big to go up the suction tube. On the right are a rack of niskin bottles...mini versions of the CTD water bottles that serve the same purpose, collecting water from specific locations. The front tool tray also has some titanium syringes for sucking up vent fluid, a big bio box, temperature probe and the ROV's emergency cutter. There is another swing arm bio box on the other side

4) Descent…for a little over 2 hours

Dave pilots the ROV down through the water column early in the dive. It is a great place to watch TV. 8 TVs and 12 monitors are wired into the ROV van which is made from two shipping containers bolted together and sealed to the drafts with plenty of expanding foam....

5) Talk amongst yourselves….this may take a while…sunrise rises during my water. It is light by 02:00.

Sun rise over the Southern Ocean...in this case it is a visual representation of time passing

6) A day at the office for those awake but not on watch

The plotting table...Huge print out maps are laid here for planning and it is the general office space for many during the day. The walls are covered with white boards including the messages for the day. The best one yet is "Wake me 15 minutes before discovering new vent sites on ext #***" Big screens in the main lab stop the small control van getting crowded with eager eyes allowing the watch and crew to do their job. In this case the upper TV shows the pilot's camera is looking at a large male crab in the hotter water while the lower TV is showing the science camera looking into a cluster of crabs in diffuse flow.

7) Waiting to receive samples

Isis is still coming on deck in the background as the group of scientists (all very warmly dressed) wait to be given permission to approach the vehicle and receive samples.

8) The sample grab

Diva gathering the chambers of the suction sampler after it has been slid out from under the ROV. The white chamber is full of vent snails. These have a symbiosis with bacteria which they host in their body. The bacteria use the chemical soup to generate their food energy which the snails then benefit from. In return they get a nice sheltered place to live

9) Samples galore. The catch of the day to be dispersed among all the various scientists and their respective research questions

The Kiwa crab (top) with the hairy chest and another shot of the vent snails (bottom) which are really slimy and produce a weak black/violet mucus. Lunch anyone? The whole lot smells of rotten eggs from the hydrogen sulphide which the vents produce and the bacteria use.

10) Sample sorting and allocation

11) Sampling chain begins

Will takes a muscle sample (left) while Jane takes an equivalent of a blood sample.

And just to round off. The ROV is currently doing what is a last bit of exploration at a site on E2, north of where we usually dive. We have detected vent plumes but as of the close of my watch 04:00 on the 16th we have not found the vents responsible yet. Here’s hoping for  a nice finish to work at E2. We have already overstayed the plan by 2/3 days but it looks like we still have ice to the south over E9 and the caldera. We therefore will up anchor…er …remove the auto park hand break and head south. At present we are only going as far as a ridge section called E5. This is a new section of ridge to me. No one has dived there ever, although way back almost 5 years ago now, the first cruise of the project dropped the CTD  in the area and weak plume signals were detected. So a bit of truly new exploration until we can get to E9.

Chris