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

oooohhh bless

Yes we have extra space…please see the updated blog for day 11/12

*******

You know that sinking feeling when you have made a mistake? 06:00 yesterday I got that feeling big time. It came with the realization that perhaps my bravado in an earlier blog suggesting “I’ll sleep when I’m dead” was something that my body was not going to be able to cash. It came facing the mountain of samples I had yet to process as the last of my fellow biologists dusted their hands and said…”That is me, I’m off too bed”.

A chinstrap's distinctive porpoising (leaping) swimming style

But let us back up oh….8 or so hours. I’ve come on watch and the first thing to be done is to pick up from the last ROV watch. I know what’s coming I’ve been watching the TV relay into the main lab/sciences office. It looks like a blizzard in car headlights. The analogy is close enough. It is phytoplankton, the sea’s green plants, and other matter in the upper surface of the sea reflecting off our camera lights. This means Isis is in the upper water layers and by a process of deduction based on the direction of the blizzard across the screen, we are surfacing. Bummer! That means all the good stuff in the ROV van is over and we get paper work and tidy up. Swap out the last of the video tapes, take through all the paper logs for scanning and filing, remove all the cups the last watch left, snaffle the chocolate the last watch left…Every job has the admin. We drew the short straw.

There is an upside. We get samples. This is good. We have been waiting for these for a while. Second the timing could not be much better. The problem is that when samples come on board, you need to deal with them. If you are unlucky the ROV comes up right in the middle (or worse start) of your sleep. I’m lucky. I’ll work 20 minutes of my ROV shift and the remaining 5hr 40minutes I would normally spend in the ROV control room, I’ll spend doing my own (not communal) sampling.

Possibly my favorite photo yet. All natural light (by Helena)

Wrapping up the control van means I miss the social gathering that occurs on deck. It takes place just beyond the safety barriers while waiting for the ROV to be secured and powered down making it safe for a bunch of highly intelligent people with absolutely no common sense to come forward and stick their hands in all sorts of awkward places to pick up their exceedingly precious samples.

I include myself in the no common sense list. I’ve done my calculations and I know how many sample I would like of which species and from where. The chief scientist has done his very best to collect them for me…. I just didn’t ask the question “how long will this take to process”. The following half hour is an enlarged ant colony swarming over Isis and removing buckets, boxes, sensors and tools and then following a nice procession to the hanger where the path stops and none shall pass.

Standing behind an 2m table bolted to the floor is Katrin…our very organized German. Every cruise should have one. No sample may disappear into the bowels of the controlled temperature room or microbiology container without first going through Katrin. Buckets are sorted into trays and sub divided into prior agreed recipient lists. They are recorded in the big black log book and given a unique sample  number which they will keep until they reach maturity as a full fledged data point. We now know what the sample is and this will tally back to when and where it was collected. We will know where it will live after the cruise and who is the person responsible for nurturing the sample to maturity.

I’m duly allocated my trays. “Here are your 25 white anemones and 5 crabs of your own, You ave to share the tray of 15 viz Chong for is genetics”. Then its limpets, snails, sea spiders (they are not true spiders but a group called pycnogonids and yes we have a pycnophobe on board) and more of the same from different sites. I’m lucky its so cold (air temp 0.0oC) we can dispense with fridges and we can go into the controlled temperature room to warm up!

With an immense amount of blind optimism that comes from receiving samples that I have waited a long time for we start to chew through them. The processing line starts up. Take an example of the specialty of our study site Kiwa, a yeti crab. Leigh is up first and takes size and gender for population studies, Chong takes a muscle sample for genetics, Jane takes a belly scraping for analysis of the bacteria growing on the crabs chest hairs, then it comes to us in the food webs group. More muscle and bacterial scrapings for our feeding studies and finally it returns to Leigh who whips out the gonads to complete the population details with maturity. We can swap orders a bit.

One by one the chain shortens as people complete their tasks and head for bed. Finally the food web group are faced with a backlog of tissue collections to make. The final blow to my enthusiasm comes at 06:00 when Jenny, one of the 4am gym crowd braves the journey up into the hanger in her gym gear and back into the super structure before descending back down into the gym  (avoiding the water tight doors that make a huge racket when opening and closing) at the same time as the  the sole surviving microbiologist heads for bed.

It is times like this I fall back on some well tested tactics. No one to talk to, no one to listen to and more importantly no one to hear me. I down the now stone cold coffee I forgot about, crank up the MP3 to 11 and howl out the Rolling Stones (please swap music to taste). It is quite a sight, scalpel in one hand, sample vial in the other, warbling completely off key and blessedly drowned out by the engines of the vessel and the rattle of winches as the ROV goes about its business on the sea floor lining me up for another long night.

Chris

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

Aaarrrghhh so much going on! Work, eat, sleep and blog…there is only time for three. I can sleep when I’m dead!

Well it is good news. The ROV has been in done its shake down dive, collected what we suspect is not just a new species or even a new family but … possibly a new order of anemone, seen active vents and come back safe. What a day. You could see the weight evaporate off shoulders and the nervous grimaces turn back towards genuine smiles. Bring it on!

Isis launch (by Chong Chen)

The first dive was a relatively short 12hrs. The ROV itself is not massively limited by time. The moving of arms and parts etc degrades oil and eventually it needs to come up for a service but that could be after 48+ hours. The problems is we have usually filled all our cargo boxes by then.

So we are doing a series of short bounce dives. Dive 187 (our first) confirmed the site as still active, oriented us in space and even gave tantalizing hints that things have changed. For example we are working on a vent chimney called Dogs Head (only looked even remotely like a dogs head 2 years ago when viewed from a specific angle and altitude). Its size and shape appear to have changed and many of the animals have gone. Questions like why and where spring to mind.

Dive 188 was a swath mapping dive where we scan the seabed. It is perhaps the most riveting of ROV watches. The ROV is set to auto altitude 40 above the seabed (so you see nothing) and it does a systematic mowing the lawn coverage of an area. Science log reads

00:23 start line 1 northward,

01:14 end of line 1

01:27 start line 2 southward

02:23 change pilot camera tape

It’s a job that requires our mapping scientist (Verla) and 1 member of the watch. Sampling (now that is where the fun is) requires a team of 4-5 scientists and if there was one piece of advice it is know when to say “STOP. Everyone take a breath….” as things can happen too fast. What is the point of receiving a sample and not knowing where it came from because it was not logged or missing a tape change because everyone had headless chicken syndrome. I think a major part of the problem is we do this because we love it and everyone regresses to childhood with new toys/games if you are not careful. Yes the excitement can get the better of us. Although we strive to find our academic detached analytical self we will probably find him up the tree house having a picnic with joy of discovery and her little brother adventure.

I have to stop now. 45 minutes until the team takes over control the Dive and I have to spend some time in cahoots with the previous watch doing a hand over.

Chris

Pictures speak louder than words

Chinstrap penguin Pygoscelis antarctica (by Jenny Thompson)

King Penguin Aptenodytes patagonicus (by Belinda Alker)

Black-browed Albatross Thalassarche melanophris (by Chong Chen)

Snow petrel Pagodroma nivea (by Chong Chen)

Today's sunrise over E2, the first clear morning we have had (by Jenny Thompson)

“Are we nearly there yet?” “Not yet”

“Are we nearly there yet?” “Just a wee bit longer”

“Are we nearly there yet?” “Please stop asking”

“Are we nearly there yet?” “Yes we’re here”

But where exactly? That is a little harder to tell. We have arrived at a dot on an electronic map, but otherwise there is no outwardly visible feature to mark the end of our 8 day epic …the horizon looks the same in every direction and that is not just because it is black out there at night. Strangely, although we have arrived it is still 2½ km to our destination, just instead for heading N, S, E or W we need to look down.  Time to park up and travel the rest of the way remotely.

So here we are parked…yes you can park a ship in the middle of the ocean. It is called dynamic positioning and broadly speaking it is an auto park function for the ship that will use global positioning satellites (that form the basis of your car sat nav systems) and the ships thrusters to hold the vessel on a point within a few metres.  The thrusters are strong enough to move the ship 6knots sideways, which is very fast going considering our journey here was only at 12knots during the day and 6knots at night (high speeds, low visibility and iceberg ridden seas don’t mix).

We are now going to spend the next 4/5 days or so on station. I would be surprised if we move more than a 1km unless we go scouting around for new sites. Surprisingly sitting on station makes very little difference to life….the boat still rocks, the horizon is still “water water everywhere” and there is no sensation of being still. Weather will still make you walk in curves and S shapes down the corridor, crash into door frames as they reposition around you and generally make climbing stairs an entertaining experience where your knees buckle as the vessel rises to met you or make you feel all floaty as it drops away.

But we are here and the first task to see if the journey is worthwhile. The reason is that hydrothermal vents form when sea water percolates into the earth’s crust. In areas like where we are, magma is not that far from the surface. Magma at close to 1200oC heats the seawater in the crust and a combination of the heat and the extreme pressure experienced at this depth does some really funny things to it. It becomes a super critical fluid. It is neither liquid nor gas but something in between. Without these special conditions of temperature and pressure it cannot exist. This creates a comic book hero of our humble water imbuing it with special powers including for example the ability to dissolve metals.

Still bound by the rules of physics this super hot water >400oC rises buoyant towards the surface stripping chemicals out of the seabed as it goes. As this water exits the sea floor it is now carrying a load of metals and other minerals and chemical compounds and is still around 400oC and more acidic than vinegar. The hot water hits the cold and suddenly its ability to hold all these chemicals in solution is reduced. Cold is the vent fluids kryptonite. These chemicals precipitate (form into particles) out of the water building mineral chimneys around the edges and smoke plumes out the top.

Black smoke pouring out of a mineral chimney. The classic vent

[You can do a similar experiment yourself. Heat a glass of water add salt until it just stops dissolving. As the water cools you will see more and more salt in the glass as its ability to hold the salt in solution is reduced with its temperature…it won’t build chimneys though so don’t expect too much]

The problem is that the magmatic activity that generates the heat and gives the water it’s super powers is transient. Pathways to the surface block or change and the heating waxes and wanes. Thus vent sites have a life span and it is usually in the regional of a few decades. Our previous research suggests that the E2 vent side is dying. First task at this station is to drop the CTD over the side as see whether we still observe the smoke plume.

Deploying the CTD to sniff out vent plumes.

Sensor readouts...all the wiggly lines show how the chemical characteristics of the water change with depthProfile of the Starboard rail and the CTD headed to sniff out our vent plume. Is the site still active?

So was the journey worthwhile? You’ll know when I do. Not to worry much because as one vent site dies, another generally appears…we just have to find it.

Snow! In the middle of summer?