On Location Aboard Alvin: Third DispatchSaturday, May 15, and Sunday, May 16
Get a closer look: (14k file) What you are looking at is one of the manipulators that is controlled by the pilot. The cylinder in the manipulator is a sampling bottle made out of titanium. This "major" is used to sample the water coming from the vents that can be up to 405-degrees Celsius. It is constructed out of titanium specifically to avoid being melted. The water that is sampled is used for chemical analyis and, on this cruise, to look at the microbial population within the diffuse flow areas (water that is less than 90-degrees-celsius). Diving in the submersible Anna-Louise Reysenbach (my advisor at Portland State University) and I dove yesterday (Saturday) with Pat Hickey. The dive started out with a school of yellow-fin tuna greeting us as the sub was lowered into the water. From the surface we sank to the bottom for the first hour and half. As we neared the bottom, Pat adjusted the weights and ballast so that we would not slam into the bottom and we made a slow approach and landed gracefully on the basalt rubble off to the side of the area that we would be working in for the day. Perhaps my favorite part of the dive is just looking out the small portholes and observing features that do not always make it into the videos of hydrothermal vents. As we were looking for some of the crab traps that we needed to recover, I saw a white worm in the water column that was moving in a corkscrew fashion up from the seafloor. I have never seen this particular worm before and so far, I have not figured out exactly what it was. Observing patterns and species that I have not seen before is one of the exciting parts of having the opportunity to spend time on the seafloor. Some of these observations may not have any direct impact on my own research, but I still find them interesting. The five hours allocated for bottom time were busy as we deployed and collected crab traps, made chemical measurements of the fluids coming from the vents, collected Rifitia embryos that have been growing in situ for the last weeks, and collected Alvinellid worms. The time in the sub always passes too quickly as we worked to finish everything that we had planned to accomplish for the day. A different school of fish greets us as we wait the last few minutes on
the surface for the ship to pick us up with the A-frame. The dive has been
a success and as the sub is pulled back into the hanger, the scientists
cluster around the basket to see what we have brought back as samples.
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