Search

Like all good things, the Loihi Seamount excursion has come to an end. Close to two weeks onboard the R/V Falkor, and our science crew is leaving with enough data to keep them busy for the next six months. All in all, we had seven AUV Sentry deployments to the two deep regions of Loihi … Continued

Most of the time when you tour a ship you see the main areas where the science gets done, the aft deck, wet lab, control room, but have you ever thought about what powers all these amazing technologies? I didn’t until recently, when I was graciously offered a tour of the engine room, also known … Continued

Another day (or night), another hydrocast. As I watch the wire disappear into the ocean, I recall K.O. Emery’s preface to his classic 1960 book The Sea Off Southern California,“An oceanographer’s view of the ocean”. Emery pointed out that the surface of the open ocean looks the same no matter where you are, unyielding the … Continued

By this point you should be intimately familiar with the star of our cruise, AUV Sentry. Sentryis primarily a survey tool, and like most Autonomous Underwater Vehicles (AUV’s) Sentry’s main mission is to collect data about the ocean bottom. In addition to many other types of information, Sentry collects several types of sonar data, photographs, and … Continued

Metals are present in our ocean, this is nothing new to us. Scientists have been measuring metals for decades and have a fairly good idea of their average concentration at different ocean depths. Some of these metals are very abundant, including ones that belong to the alkali metal and alkaline earth metal group, such as … Continued

Although iron is the focus of our Loihi Expedition, a number of other measurements are being collected during our cruise as we hunt for Loihi’s hydrothermal plume. You might be asking yourself “If the focus of the cruise is to collect iron data, why measure anything else?” However, as scientists our goal is to tell … Continued

Loihi seamount is an underwater, hydrothermal vent site that sends iron-rich water into the ocean in a plume.  In addition to the dissolved iron, the hydrothermal fluid also contains a lot of iron-rich particles. My job along with Mike is to collect these particles so they can be analyzed using a synchrotron light source. Although … Continued

What does it take to measure iron in the ocean? The science crew of the R/V Falkor are intimately familiar with this question. The concentrations of iron at Loihi seamount are quite high for ocean water, but in actuality, they are extremely low –equating to a drop of water in an Olympic-sized swimming pool! However, … Continued

Moving a laboratory onto a ship is no small feat. Multiple days are required just to transfer gear from shore to ship. It’s somewhat similar to moving from your own home to a dormitory, where more people share smaller spaces. On top of that, your schedule is always different, often times working in the evenings … Continued