At sea, we work 24 hours a day. That means we take turns on survey and dredge watches. Part of the science party do 8 hours of work with 16 hours of rest, while theContinue reading
Author: Benjamin Wernette
A rescue in the equatorial Pacific
Yesterday was an extraordinary day for a research cruise. We broke off work to help a vessel in distress! The Captain of the R/V Sally Ride was alerted several days ago by the US CoastContinue reading
Just Another Magma Monday!
Yesterday’s first dredge produced some spectacular pieces of lava pillows from a depth of over 3,200 m (10,000 feet) on the East Pacific Rise, just west of the Cocos Nazca gore tip. The lava piecesContinue reading
Behind the scenes of life aboard
The crew on the ship have different duties and one of them is general upkeep. The science party is usually busy doing, well, science and we sometimes do not notice all the efforts that goContinue reading
Let the dredging begin!
At around 11:00 pm local time we will arrive at the East Pacific Rise having successfully surveyed a large portion of the Cocos-Nazca spreading center. We will begin dredging the EPR this evening, andContinue reading
Photo Day!
Map (left) outlines our current progress towards one of the goals for this cruise – mapping the Cocos-Nazca spreading center. The red star indicates our approximate location and the red dashed line shows how farContinue reading
Update
Currently we are comfortably situated at ~ 2°04N and 99°53W, heading south-southwest as we collect multibeam (bathymetric) data from the spreading center. As mentioned in a previous post, this information allows to us to glean informationContinue reading
Dredging (with misc. photos!)
Although we use the magnetometer and the multibeam echosounder, we do in the end need to get our hands on some of the rocks from the ocean floor. We do this in a truly ancientContinue reading