Classroom@Sea JR224 Expedition

Waiting for departure

Sun, 11 Jan 2009 00:00:00 GMT

The team is now on board the James Clark Ross! It took over 36 hours of flights and airports to get from the UK, Portugal and Spain to Punta Arenas, in the southern fijords of Chile. On the way down south, the team had to face the �little� problem of loosing 13 bags with personal and work equipment! However, the spirits were kept up and the bags have now been located and are on their way to Punta Arenas.
In the meantime, the scientists and technicians have started organising the laboratories on board while the officers and crew prepare the ship for departure on Wednesday morning to Antarctic waters.
One of the nice things of being in the Southern hemisphere in January is that it is summer here! It is not hot (between 10� and 15� C) because we are at a latitude of almost 54�S, but we have many hours of day light and, so far, we have been very lucky with sunny days! See the sunset photo...this has been taken on Sunday at 22h30!

Penguins, Rheas and Dolphins from southern Chile

Mon, 12 Jan 2009 00:00:00 GMT

The RRS James Clark Ross is in port in Punta Arenas, southern Chile. This morning, Richard, the Purser Officer, gave a briefing about safety on board. Two extremely important things that we all have in our cabins are the life jacket and sea survival suit. These will save our life if we had to be in the freezing cold waters of Antarctica. Alex demonstrated for us how to put on the suit correctly...! Then, as the ship is getting ready to sail for scientific activities in Antarctic waters, some of us had the chance to visit a colony of Magellan penguins (Spheniscus magellanicus) close from Punta Arenas. The colony has around 5000 adults and a similar number of chicks in the hatching season. The adult penguins arrive from the Falkland Islands and Brazilian coast in mid September. Then they court and prepare the nests and they mate and lay eggs during the first two weeks of October. The eggs are brooded in November and the chicks hatch between mid November and mid December. In January and February the chicks change their feathers and start swimming and in March and April they all leave the colony and return back to the Falkland Islands and Brazil.

Falling foul of fishing

Thu, 15 Jan 2009 00:00:00 GMT

While in transit from the Strait of Magellan to South Georgia, the RRS James Clark Ross ran over a long set of rope attached at the far end to a cluster of buoys, the remains of a set of static fishing gear, probably deep-water longlines but possibly from pelagic longlines or traps. This incident means that we have to divert the ship to Port Stanley in the Falkland Islands to check that none of the fouled fishing gear remains around the propellers or rudder of the ship and that they have not been damaged. Benthic longlines are set for fish such as Patagonian toothfish, Dissostichus eleginoides, in waters off the SE coast of South America, the Falkland Islands, South Georgia and elsewhere in the Southern Ocean. They comprise of lines of baited hooks weighed down to sit near the bottom and attract valuable large predatory fish.
We will arrive in Stanley during the morning of Friday 16th and a diver will inspect the propeller to make sure everything is OK, before we depart southwards again, towards South Georgia Island.
During today's navigation, we were surrounded by lots of marine birds, amongst which we saw Wandering and Black-browed Albatrosses, White Chinned, Giant and Wilson's Storm Petrels and Prions, which was a real delight!

Checking the propellors!

Sat, 17 Jan 2009 00:00:00 GMT

We arrived in Port Stanley, Falklands Islands, on Friday 16 in the morning. Unfortunately, the wind was too strong (35-40 knots) to allow for safe diving to check the propellers, so we had to wait until Saturday morning, when the wind had calmed down and the divers could do their work.
After inspection, we had confirmation that there was no damage in the propellers caused by the longline, so we could leave immediately towards South Georgia Island, where we expect to arrive on Monday night.

Across the Polar Front

Sun, 18 Jan 2009 00:00:00 GMT

During the night between Sunday 18 and Monday 19 we crossed the Polar Front. This is a boundary where two water masses meet: the more salty and warmer water from the north meets the less salty and colder water from the Southern Ocean...and, if the weather is calm, the boundary can be seen with the naked eye! This means that, when we crossed the Polar Front, we went from a temperate environment to a polar one, which you can feel very easily by going out on deck...if the air temperature was cool yesterday, it is cold today! And the same is true for the surface seawater, which has being going down from the 9�C we had in Falklands to 7�C on the way and now only 5�C as we have crossed the Polar Front!

The team gets ready to sniff out vents!

Mon, 19 Jan 2009 00:00:00 GMT

The sensors team (C�dric, Alex and David) have been busy preparing the different sensors that we will use to 'sniff' the chemicals in the water column that will give us clues as to whether we are close to a hydrothermal vent or a cold seep. Vents and seeps expel fluids charged with reduced chemicals and metals. (See ChEss website for further details). In the case of vents, the fluid is buoyant because it is warmer than the surrounding water, so it creates a plume with specific chemical composition and temperature that rises until it is stable and diffuses horizontally. It is this plume that we are trying to smell with the different sensors and equipment on board, which will tell us that we are close to one of our targets!

Seamounts, SHRIMP and albatrosses!

Tue, 20 Jan 2009 00:00:00 GMT

This morning at 0700 we travel close to South Georgia, to our first station. We are going to test SHRIMP, a piece of equipment that is towed behind the ship very slowly close to the seafloor and it takes video that is fed directly to the laboratory on the ship, so we can see what type of seabed there is in the area and what animals live there!
During this SHRIMP deployment, we will explore a little seamount that we identified earlier with the swath bathymetry. The swath bathymetry is an acoustic system that sends a sound signal from the ship down to the seafloor. The signal reflects from the bottom and this reflection is received by the ship, which is then used to produce maps of the seafloor. The seamount we observed earlier could be an interesting topographic feature that could host a chemosynthetic habitat such as mud volcanoes.

Icebergs

Wed, 21 Jan 2009 00:00:00 GMT

Today we have been in transit towards the main exploration area, which is on the north end of the East Scotia Ridge. The weather has been very calm and foggy. We could not see South Georgia Island...but a surprise was waiting for us in the afternoon: icebergs! As we were crossing the edge of the self, where the continental margin's inclination increases significantly - so depth increases rapidly - we saw many small icebergs and some big ones. What we see of an iceberg from a ship is only the small tip that is above the water...90% of the iceberg is submerged under water! Because of this, the large icebergs get stuck on the shelf and accumulate over time, which is why there were so many in this region. There were also chin-strapped penguins swimming around us...today was very spectacular!

The excitement starts!

Thu, 22 Jan 2009 00:00:00 GMT

Today, the hunt for hydrothermal vents on the East Scotia Ridge has really started! We arrived on station very early this morning, over the northern part of the ridge, where 10 years ago Chris German from NOCS and Roy Livermore from BAS found evidence of hydrothermal plumes.
We have now started exploring the ridge. The first equipment we deployed was the CTD. This instrument is deployed on the side of the ship and lowered in the water column. All through its descent, the CTD measures constantly Conductivity, Temperature and Depth and the data can be seen on real time on a monitor in the ship's laboratory. The CTD also has 24 bottles that can take samples of water at different depths. The idea is to lower the CTD in the region where the plume was detected in 1999 and try to find the hydrothermal plume again.The plume has a different density, temperature and chemical composition than the surrounding water, so if the CTD goes through it, the temperature and conductivity will increase and the analyses of the water collected in the bottles will detect the chemicals from the hydrothermal fluid...The excitement started when we saw a signal in the CTD data there is something interesting down there!!

Storm in the Southern Ocean

Fri, 23 Jan 2009 00:00:00 GMT

Yesterday we were hit by strong seas and wind and since then our quest for hydrothermal vents had to be temporarily stopped. During the night we all felt the waves breaking against the ship walls but it was only this morning that we saw the ultimate proof: a wave chart for South Atlantic showing that we are having the highest waves in this part of the world, up to 48 feet (15 m) high! With this kind of weather, the only thing that we could do was hove to and wait for it to calm down...
In the morning the weather conditions improved and because the strong winds (we had up to 60 knots winds!) made us drift about 60 miles we now have to sail back to our working area before we can start deploying instruments. In the meanwhile we have started to interpret the data collected with BRIDGET and have more and more clues to where to look for vents.

The search for vents continues�

Mon, 26 Jan 2009 00:00:00 GMT

On Monday we conducted a detailed survey of the study doing CTD �tow-yo�, where the CTD is brought up and down in the water column, measuring its conductivity, temperature, depth, and the concentration of particles in the water with additional sensors. The variation of the readings of these sensor tell us if we are going through a different water mass, such as for example a hydrothermal plume with higher particle concentrations than the surrounding water. Doug and Sarah, with help from other scientists on watch, conducted this 20 hour long CTD tow-yo survey and narrowed down the area of potential vent location....

End of survey in the first study area

Mon, 02 Feb 2009 11:00:00 GMT

The survey of the first study area (E2) in the northern part of the East Scotia Ridge was completed successfully on Wednesday night, with good plume signals detected and the location of the potential hydrothermal vents narrowed down to a relatively small area for video exploration. We conducted a SHRIMP survey of the seabed in the area and we look forward to come with the ROV for further exploration and sampling next year!

On Thursday, we spent the night swathing along the axis on our way to the south study area (E2). This will provide the data to make good bathymetric maps that we can then use for the exploration with the CTD and SHRIMP. On the way to the southern end of the East Scotia Ridge, we stopped in two other ridge segments (E5 and E8) to conduct single CTD casts in two spots were previous cruises had detected plume signals. Unfortunately, this time we did not pick up those signals, so we moved on toward E9.