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Today, the research team completed the final planned ROV dives planned at the natural oil seep site designated as GC600. ROV Global Explorer MK3 collected more push cores of microbial mats surrounding the seep and the underlying sediment. It also returned to the bubbling seep where the video time-lapse camera (VTLC) system was operating on … Continued
Today was an incredibly successful day. Falkor the Luck Dragon—the ship’s namesake—seemed to be with us all along the way. The first order of business was recovering the GC600 benthic lander. Originally the R/VPelican was scheduled to meet us here and conduct the recovery with R/V Falkor and ROV standing by. But when R/V Pelican operations … Continued
We woke to sunny skies this morning and the anticipation of diving the ROV Global Explorer MK3 at the “Megaplume” natural oil seep site. The pilots and crew launched the ROV into the sea first thing in the morning. We watched live ROV video on the monitors installed throughout R/V Falkor with anticipation as the … 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
Today we had both successes and setbacks. Working at sea is often like this. As Ian MacDonald says, “When you do challenging science at sea, it is certain that sometimes things won’t work the way you planned. The weather will go bad; equipment will fail; the crucial instrument will have accidentally been left in the … Continued
Oozing samples of seafloor sediments from multicore casts and ROV push cores are brought into the wet lab for processing. The scientists working on these samples get quite muddy in the process, but have a great sense of humor for their dirty work. While working on a recent push core sample, biological technician Jennie McClain … Continued
Benthic landers, shipboard mapping, and ROVs give underwater views of the seafloor, but aerial remote sensing platforms provide another vantage point for finding evidence of seafloor processes like seeps. Dr. Ian MacDonald and the ECOGIG team have collected and analyzed imagery from satellites and airplanes to document the oil spill and natural seep oil slicks … Continued
The second ROV dive of the expedition took place today. Its primary objective was servicing a benthic lander that has been collecting measurements on the seafloor near the Macondo wellhead since April 2012. Dr. Beth Orcutt, a microbiologist, has a collection of sampling equipment onboard the lander and she was in charge of the ROV … 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
Our first night at sea was spent offshore about 140 kilometers (88 nautical miles) south of Pascagoula mapping the seafloor. R/V Falkor has a state-of-the-art multibeam echosounder that is designed to map almost all of the ocean floors excepting the deep trenches (up to 7 kilometers or nearly 4.5 miles). During mapping, the ship transits along … Continued
