You know life would be very easy here if it was not for the outside world. Simple things become a bit more of a challenge at sea. Take writing this blog for example. Some genius has rotating office chairs in front of this computer. Now I’ve got to retrain myself from a life time habit of putting my feet on the chair foot rest, and instead keep them firmly on the floor otherwise I spin side to side, and usually the final resting place is 90 degrees off where I should be facing. It is excellent for developing core strength and a huge amount of fun but not really conducive to typing. Then there are the daft things like apparently the school blog I’m using has a storage limit and I’ve run it out of space. So no photos here until I can get that resolved. But fear not for if it is not fixed soon I’ll blog under my own name and there will be plenty of photos then. As for trying to contact a service engineer for my freeze dryer pump….ohi. We have also lost access to the ice maps for the last 3 days. Are we still iced over at E9? Will we get there? The suspense!
Caption Competition "Despite having no thumbs, sticking a flipper out seemed to work well enough to catch a lift on Isis" OR perhaps "Dogs head? mmm keep heading that way until you get to crab city, from there head 100m on a bearing of 035. That should bring you to Sepia. Pass it on your port side and you'll hit a fissure....follow it north to the end!"
So what is going on? Well the ROV is in for dive 189 (remember dive 187 was our first) which was supposed to be a 12 hour dive ….24hrs later the ROV is still down. The early tasks were quite simple. Find a specific site, take some biology and chemistry samples, move to a second site, conduct a video survey and then a do a bit more sampling before coming up. Unfortunately as is the way, the weather has turned a bit and it is a little too rough to lift the ROV out the water. So why didn’t we just lift before the weather got rough? It is a balancing act. It takes 2 hours to get to the ROV to the surface and then would take >4 hours to turn around and 2 hours to get back down assuming the weather was good enough…..OR the ROV is left down and quite safe down at 2500m (the ship however, when hit by some of the bigger waves is pushed 5-6m off its auto park position). Thankfully I was always blessed with being able to sleep like the dead because my cabin is just aft from the thrusters and when they kick in to keep the ship on station they are a little noisy.
The crew know this and have all sneaked off with cabins are at least 2 decks higher and thus further away from the thrusters. We have science cabins, then lab deck, then communal deck (galley, mess, library, video room, kitchen stores etc) then its officers/crew cabins for the next 2 decks. They feel the movement more… I’ll take the lesser of two evils.
And the wild life never seems bothered
But back to the ROV. We are blessed to have a legend in the deep sea world as our PSO (Principle Science Officer) Prof. Paul Tyler. This is his last cruise as PSO and I believe second last cruise ever. He will be back on board 3 weeks after we get off to do some vent work in the Cayman Trough with the Americans. The result of all this experience is a “what will be will be” attitude coupled with an every evolving plan A-Z and the ability to modify it by the minute to keep us working optimally. Simple things like weather and technical faults keep things challenging. Remember we are using bespoke equipment in some of the most hostile places on earth….even NASA have technical faults. Sometimes it can be both technical and weather. Dive 188 was delayed by 6hours because the overnight freezing temperatures split one of the ROV oil filled electronics cables. In went the CDT for water sampling and out when plan K.
Gratuitous gloating picture of our local wildlife. A humpback whale (by Alfred Aquilina)
So dive 189 is still going on. I’m not sure if we are on plan Q or if it should technically be plan A versions 12.3. We cannot surface yet although the weather is getting better. We cannot sample as all our storage boxes have samples in already. So we are conducting a lot of video survey. The silver lining in the cloud is Leigh’s, one of the PhD students on the cruise who is doing some classic ecology looking at animal zonation patterns as they move away from the vent orifice. Environmental conditions like temperature and acidity and access to the chemical soup pumping out of vents generally decreases with increasing distance from the vent. This changes the animals present through a result of environmental preferences of the animals and or of the microbes on which they rely. She has created some of the most amazing images of the whole consortium…life size 15m vent pictures from hundreds of individual video frame grabs.
Enough for now.
In the mean time some additional reading . You’ll have notice that the picturing the deep blog has been inactive. Well the powers that be finally got sorted and this link should now be replaced with http://hotventscoldocean.blogspot.co.uk. This blog is different again and contains a full list of the scientists on board and our specialties as we other another perspective on the work. Also please don’t forget Clare’s with her video links https://elgg.leeds.ac.uk/geocwo/weblog
Goodbye for now
Chris