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Originally from northern Germany, Christian is now staff researcher at the Marine Geoscience department at GNS Science in New Zealand. After finishing school in provincial northern Germany, he joined the University of Kiel to study marine geology. A few years later he received his Diploma from the University of Kiel, followed by a PhD in … Continued
“Since we know so little about the deep ocean, we need to find out ‘What’ is ‘Where’ to begin with. And that is what we are doing now – raw exploration on the seamounts to find out where life exists, who is here, what depth are they at, and more.” Look into some of the … Continued
Back in our lab at Temple University much of my time is spent running live experiments with corals, extracting genetic material, and then processing them through a bioinformatics pipeline (read: staring at a computer). It has been years since I spent any substantial amount of time with my eyes fixated on an image through a … Continued
Nature Communications published an open access paper reporting the outcomes of a sea level rise study conducted on R/V Falkor in 2012. High resolution 3D maps of about a dozen of drowned coral reefs in the Gulf of Mexico acquired by R/V Falkor indicate that all fossil reefs are structured into multiple large flat terraces, separated by 3-4 meters … Continued
Khanna, P., Droxler, A., Nittrouer, J., Tunnell, Jr., J., and Shirley, T. (2017). Coralgal Reef Morphology Records Punctuated Sea-level Rise During the Last Deglaciation. Nature Communications 8, 1046 (2017), doi: 10.1038/s41467-017-00966-x. [This article is published as OPEN ACCESS].
Each coral is an animal, made up of lots of tiny polyp organisms clinging on to, and then building up, a calcium carbonate skeleton. Some polyps live on their own, while others form huge colonies. ROV SuBastian will be diving deeper than the ‘twilight zone’ to investigate the mysterious corals of the deep, dark, sea. We … Continued
Our Way Down to the Deep Every time we dive with ROV SuBastian, we go from the surface down to around 2,500 meters depth in about two hours. That dive goes down through the blue water column, a far cry from the shallow coral reefs that I have been studying for over 20 years. Since … Continued
During the 2017 "Discovering Deep Sea Corals of the Phoenix Islands" research cruise, ROV SuBastian performed science dives of exploration and sampling. ROV SuBastian Dive 067 - Kanton Atoll - FK171005 - Deep Sea Corals of PIPA (Dive 1) Date: 10/13/2017 Location: Kanton Atoll in the Republic of Kiribati Depth: From 2500 m Work Completed: Searching for rare … Continued
A brief overview of the instruments oceanographers use at sea, including sea floor mapping with multibeam echosounder, chemical sensors on UAVs, and CTD casts for water samples. Come see inside our wet and dry laboratories, and check out some the Autonomous Underwater Vehicles we’ve worked with. Lastly, meet ROV SuBastian, Schmidt Ocean Institute’s Remotely Operated … Continued
In the marine submersible research community, the mantra is often: “Deeper, take me deeper!” This is for good reason: much of the world’s oceans remain unexplored, more so with increasing bottom depth. But equally important is that horizon of ocean just below scuba accessible depths – at 100 to 200m – which likewise hold many secrets … Continued
