Saturday, November 12, 2011

Arrival on Coral seamount and first ROV dive!

Today we are arriving at the first site: the Coral seamount! It is located at 41°25 South and 41°55 East.
Everybody is very excited, eager to see to the first ROV dive of the cruise and get our first images from the deep!
The way samples are going to be registered, marked with the bar code, dealt to the different group of scientists, preserved in ethanol of formalin and stored required a lot of organization. This first dive will be a challenge!


We are going to stay in the vicinity of Coral seamount for the next six days and have different operations going on: CTD deployment (instrument used to measure the properties of the water from surface to seabed like temperature and salinity), Kiel6000 ROV dives, SHRIMP dives (another type of robot but just with cameras – cannot take samples), HYBIS dives (yet another type of robot – this one can take a big amount of sediment from the seabed), coring operation (collects a pile of sediments from the seabed) and acoustics for looking at animals in the water column.

Hopefully tomorrow we will have some nice pictures of monsters of the deep!