Sunday, November 13, 2011

Live from the deep!

I must admit that I was impressed yesterday, watching the live ROV images in the lab, looking at these small red shrimps, crabs, colorful corals, sponges, and fish swimming in front of the robot.
The ROV Kiel6000 stayed for 8 hours in the water exploring the seabed at 1300m depth. It collected more than 100 organisms and brought them back on board the ship for scientists to study them.



The ROV is piloted from a fitted out container by the IFM-GEOMAR technicians, one or two scientists directing the sampling. The rest of us are in the main lab, watching screens relaying the ROV images, counting, identifying, taking notes etc.


Processing of the samples, once on board, went on into the early hours of this morning.
Today we are going on with robot dives and instrument deployments to explore the area ...