Aboard the R/V Atlantis: Log of a search for unknown life
Laura Preston, a ninth-grade earth sciences teacher at Salem High School in New Hampshire, has spent the last four weeks aboard a research vessel in the Pacific Ocean studying undersea volcanoes. During the voyage, which ended Friday, researchers aboard the R/V Atlantis, operated by the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, discovered a new "black smoker" about 8,500 feet underwater. They named their find the Medusa hydrothermal vent field because of a pink jellyfish, order Stauromedusae, they found on it, as well as spiky tubeworms that reminded them of the serpent-haired Medusa of Greek myth. There is great interest in studying hydrothermal vents right now because of this strange sea life, which manages to thrive in temperatures that can top 600 degrees (the water doesn't boil because of the pressure of two miles of water above it). Preston, who worked with researchers from Duke University and the University of New Hampshire , among others, kept an online blog of her journey, which is excerpted below:
March 24: Leaving Manzanillo, Mexico
At 9 a.m. sharp, the R/V Atlantis pushes off the dock. This will be our last view of land for the next 5 weeks . . . well, except for what we will see of the ocean floor through the eyes of Jason II, the ROV [a remotely controlled robotic vehicle].
March 25: In transit
Today it seems that the excitement is building on the ship. There are meetings about the science to be studied, about the equipment being used, who will be on "watch" during the first week, and just what they will be watching!
Tomorrow, the DSL-120 (sonar) will be deployed and begin its mapping exercise of the ocean floor. The scientists aboard want to find out the extent to which the new lava has erupted and changed the sea floor "face."
March 26: The initial launch
As all good scientists know . . . the waiting is the hardest part.
Teams of "watchstanders" monitored throughout the night as a new map of the sea floor, about a mile below, unfolded before their eyes. As Dan Fornari, a marine geologist from Woods Hole , explains, "this sonar gives us the same view as flying in an airplane at 20,000 feet. . . . For a marine geologist, this sonar system helps us realize a fantasy -- pulling the plug on the ocean and draining the water out so we can see the sea floor features. The side scan sonar allows us to see features about the size of a dining room table, so we can accurately interpret the relationships between lava flows, faults, and new and old volcanic terrain along the ridge axis."
April 5: Jason II launch
Today was just what many of us on the ship have been waiting to experience for a couple of weeks now -- a "walk" on the sea floor with Jason II. As the Jason team prepared for the launch, the rest of us learned our duties for the duration of our stay at sea. Some are logging events such as "ohh, there's a sea cucumber," and "that's a huge fissure." Some of us are making sure that everything gets recorded and labeled correctly. Others are piloting the robot and navigating its direction.
April 8: Happy Easter!
What a wonderful beginning to an Easter morning. . . . Pilot whales (a huge pod) came to visit our ship. It was as if they were saying, "Pick me, take my picture!"
April 9: Success!
Last night while most of us were asleep, Jason II was busy making new discoveries two kilometers below the Atlantis. In the stillness of the night, a bountiful treasure teeming with life was caught in action by the ROV. The creatures living in this cold, dark, desolate place are there because it is actually very warm. A hydrothermal vent is the source of their existence. They are odd creatures; life that needs no sunlight, nor plant-like food for survival -- they rely on each other for survival.
April 13: Record
We have made a new record this week with the Jason II ROV -- 100 hours on the sea floor without coming up for a break. The previous record was about 77 hours for the same vehicle.
April 14-15: The weekend report
I thought it might be interesting to take a step back and look at the volcanism that is being studied here at the OSC (Overlapping Spreading Center). Most folks know what a volcano looks like, right?
OK . . . that's not what the volcanoes look like on the sea floor! First of all, we are at a plate boundary of two oceanic plates (the Cocos plate and the Pacific plate), and secondly, the two plates are spreading apart from one another (here's a website on plate boundaries http://www.venturedeepocean.org/vents/moving.html). Where the spreading occurs, the magma underneath the sea floor escapes and is erupted onto the sea floor, making some very unique shapes due to the differences in temperature, composition , and viscosity. Remember, we are looking at temperatures at the sea floor of about 70 degrees Fahrenheit, and the magma comes up with an average temperature of 2000-2200 degrees!
April 21: On deck
As I woke this morning to the obnoxious bow thruster and the ping, ping of a transducer somewhere, I felt like something was probably happening on deck that I needed to know about.
The Jason II ROV was out of the water and on deck. This meant that the data-collecting portion of our trip was complete. Today is the 29th day of our journey , and as soon as Jason came out of the water, we headed north to San Diego at 13 knots. It's the fastest we've gone since we arrived four weeks ago. That seems like so long ago to me! It will take us 6 days to transit there.
April 23: Teaching about the ocean floor
What does the bottom of the ocean have in common with your own backyard?
For most kids, the closest they come to the ocean is a day or two at the beach. How do you help kids understand that although the deep ocean seems different (and indeed is different in many ways), it also functions under the same physical laws as operate in their own environment. When you peel back the layers, perhaps these very differences can help kids better understand certain concepts -- through comparison. This is the idea behind the FLEXE project [which I'm working with]. FLEXE stands for "From Local to EXtreme Environments" and is a new National Science Foundation-funded project (www.GLOBE.gov).
Perhaps the most important promise of the FLEXE project will be to help make science real for kids, to help them learn to make observations and ask questions about their own environment. Students are comparing what they learned collecting temperature data in their own environment with what they've learned about the deep sea.
April 25: Goodbye
Well , folks, it has been an adventure writing this journal over the past month, and it is now time to say so long.
Cheers!
Laura Preston
Correction: Because of a reporting error, this article provided the wrong temperature at the sea floor. The water was about 36 degrees Fahrenheit.
