Volcanic activity is enthralling, but when observed deep below the seafloor from a Remotely Operated Vehicle, like SuBastian, it has an additional mysterious and dream-like quality. Over the course of the next six weeks, Falkor will be sailing over one of the most active underwater volcano sites in the world, the Mata Volcano group.
Falkor’s journey from Nah Trang, Vietnam to the island of Guam was over nearly 1200 nautical miles of open ocean, of which the majority is uncharted – despite being in an area of strong scientific interest. Even with no scientists on board, Schmidt Ocean Institute’s Technicians always aim to run a suite of science sensors as … Continued
One of the main goals of the Perth Canyon research cruise is to locate and collect a variety of marine organisms that are living down at great depths, in particular deep-sea corals. But what are deep-sea corals and why are researchers so interested in them? Deep-sea corals are widely distributed within the earth’s oceans and … Continued
As you may have noticed, there is a lot of high-tech experimental equipment and instruments on an oceanographic research cruise.
For new comers to science, it is important that they begin their journey in some particular way.
If you have not already become enamored by the beautiful and diverse marine zooplankton that we have been talking about over the past week, let me give you one more reason– they glow! Well, some of them do at least, and one of the projects on this cruise has been to dig a bit deeper … Continued
The weather was too rough for deploying any instruments today. But the science team continued to work on experiments in the lab. Molecular ecologist Dr. Iliana Baums and graduate student Danielle Young worked into the late hours to complete a four-day experiment on deep-sea corals that were collected on the first ROV dive. Corals live … Continued
The research team onboard was very excited to begin scientific underwater surveys and sample collections with remotely operated vehicle (ROV) Global Explorer MK3 this morning. The primary objective for this ROV dive is to collect live deep-sea corals of two different species for molecular ecologist Iliana Baums and graduate students Danielle Young and Arielle Anderson. … Continued
August 13, 2012—Last month, during routine functional performance testing of the mutibeam mapping echosounders on the Schmidt Ocean Institute’s flagship R/V Falkor, the team aboard—including researchers from the University of New Hampshire, Ifremer, and Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution—discovered the S.S. Terra Nova, a whaler, sealer and polar exploration ship that sunk off the southern coast … Continued
