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Logbook
August 30, 1998


Contents:

  • Today's Science News
  • Participant Perspective
  • Logbook from Teacher at Sea
  • Question/Answer from shore to sea

  • Science Report

    Scientists have filed this brief report:

    The second ROPOS dive is now in progress, the first of which was over 24 hours long. We have been concentrating our efforts in the southeast section of the caldera. Between dives a CTD cast was made and 5 rock cores were taken. A detailed scientific report of ROPOS dive #2 will be posted tomorrow. Dive #2 has been on the bottom over 12 hours. Activities include mapping, bio-sampling, 2 gas-tight water samples taken and deployed a marker (#33). Stay Tuned.

    Susan Merle, NOAA Vents Program

    Apparently the ship is very busy taking photographs of an biologically abundant area on Dive #2. They are in the process of dive #2 which is occurring on the eastern caldera wall of Axial Volcano. Examining the Axial map indicates they could be in the Axial Gardens or Sonne Vent field on the eastern side which is a known area of hydrothermal vents and biology.

    The following is a collage of images sent from ROPOS, taken on Dive #2 (exact species identifications not available yet):
    "Bag creature"
    "Lump Fish"
    Snails
    Worms & Snails
    Biology collection box
    Non-smoking chimney spire

    Listing of all Science News postings


    Life at Sea: Participant Perspective

    Gary Massoth

    Research Associate, NOAA Vents Program

    Hello from the Northeast Pacific! My name is Gary Massoth and I am a Chemical Oceanographer with NOAA's Pacific Marine Environmental Laboratory in Seattle. I am a member of the Vents Program's team of interdisciplinary scientists who are trying to understand how undersea volcanoes work and, in particular, how they effect the oceans. A discovery we made in 1986 has changed the way we view how some of these effects are generated. By serendipity (we were in the right place at the right time), we then witnessed the first megaplume, a huge burp of heat and chemicals delivered to the oceans. That burp transferred sufficient heat to electrify New York City for a year, or, in terms oceanographer's use, was equivalent to the annual output of a hydrothermal vent field, only it happened over hours to days. We have since come to understand that megaplume emissions are associated with lava eruptions, and besides being an important process for the transfer of heat and mass from the interior of the earth to the oceans they provide unique glimpses into the underworkings of volcanoes. Most recently we have learned that megaplumes provide insight into the realm of the subseafloor biosphere, which you will hear about later from some of my colleagues on this expedition. So how do we get from Megaplumes to Project NeMO? We conceived this project and located it at Axial Volcano because we anticipated that Axial was ripe for a lava eruption (based on hard-earned geophysical sleuthing performed by my Vents co-investigators) and thus was a good candidate for studying megaplume-type emissions. If you have been following my shipmate's commentaries, you know that is exactly what happened, even and right before we had this, our inaugural NeMO experiment! So now we are out here doing the event response research we dreamed of and proposed.

    My niche in all this as a chemist is to operate SUAVE (Submersible System Used to Assess Vented Emissions). SUAVE is a miniature chemistry lab that actually goes underwater to measure the concentrations of key chemical species (like hydrogen sulfide, which energetically drives the bulk of the microbes within the biosphere and also the vent communities) right where they vent into the ocean. Because some of these species are difficult to collect and preserve, SUAVE not only provides us with an improved view but also a broader one, as it spews a continuous stream of concentration information for wherever it's intake probe is placed during a deep-sea deployment. Four months ago, SUAVE and I were in the South Pacific between Easter Island and Tahiti prospecting for plumes from a surface ship in a region where seafloor lava eruptions may be the most common on Earth. Two weeks ago I was on ALVIN using SUAVE to measure the environment where tube worms grow. And now, I am on the NOAA Ship BROWN using SUAVE on what I think is the optimal type of deep-sea platform for it s deployment: an ROV (Remotely Operated Vehicle, here ROPOS-II, a real beauty!). Having the opportunity to explore in this way is exciting, but it is also demanding. Planning the expeditions, preparing SUAVE, and getting it and supporting chemicals and equipment to the various ships can take as much time as the expeditions themselves. I've just left a 13-hour SUAVE watch to write this, that was only half of one ROPOS dive (thankfully, I have co-worker, Stacy Maenner, who you will hear from later, to relieve me). That was preceded by a frantic 12-hour maintenance period (for SUAVE and ROPOS) and another day-long dive. And so it will go. We come home from cruises exhausted, but scientifically re-charged. In the end, the balance is strongly in favor of being a SUAVE guy. I wish you all could share the experience and hope that by reading our commentaries we can include you in spirit! Time to relieve Stacy so long!

    Gary

    Listing of all Perspectives postings


    Teacher At Sea Logbook

    August 30- Summary

    We had a very busy day today and I did not even get near a computer until late in the day. It is also my intent to get a full night's sleep tonight, so I am going to give you a brief idea of what we were up to today and what tomorrow will bring. We are ending our first seven days on this project. It's hard to believe that 25% of our time at sea has already passed by. ROPOS was down for another long dive yesterday. We were covering the same areas that had been surveyed and marked during the first dive. This time ROPOS went back for a closer look, better video records (up to seven video machines running at one time), and outfitted to recover samples of organisms that are found around the warm water vents. Although we do see some fish, we are not attempting to capture these. The two species I have seen while on duty are the rattail fish and the ugly rockfish. As you may have guessed, neither of these is a fish you would proudly display in an aquarium. We have also seen spider crabs, hundreds of sea cucumbers, a patch of about two dozen small snails and limpets, lots of tube worms, scale worms, palm worms, and bacterial mats. (see Aug. 30 picture gallery of biology) The animal types we see fall into two groups: vent and non-vent. As we traverse the seafloor, we see the 'normal fauna - rattailes, crabes, cukes, brittles stars, sponges small corals - they are sparse because the food sources is limited. But near a vent, the fauna and abundance changes. More food, more animals. As vents are toxic, a specialized fauna has developed. Everything you see near a vent is only seen at vents - they are specially adapted to the conditions .

    The bacteria make up the base of the chemosynthetic food chain, and so they are of special interest to the microbiologists on board. We even place "bacteria traps" near the vents. These are recovered either toward the end of this mission or by later expeditions. The traps are essentially plugs of spun glass. This creates a lot of new surface to be colonized and the bacteria move right in. Scientists want to know who the first colonizers are, and who eventually replaces them to dominate the population. This is the study of succession.

    I remember about 15 years ago listening to a brilliant scientist from Oregon State University by the name of Jack Corliss. Dr. Corliss was proposing that life on earth not only started in the sea, but that it started in the vent areas with chemosynthesizing organisms. For years that theory was largely ignored, but now is gaining wider and wider acceptance. Much of what is studied in the vent area is used to support or refute this hypothesis. As I was juggling video tapes I had a chance to talk briefly with Dr. Verena Tunnicliffe of the University of Victoria. Dr. Tunnicliffe is one of the biological scientists aboard. She studies the distribution of organisms around vent areas and then compares these animals to the animals found around other vent areas. What she told me was a real eye-opener. I asked her if the animals were the same here and around other vents. She told me that many of the animals found here are found nowhere else in the world. Some are unique to a specific vent system, not even showing up at neighboring vents. Today the distance separating vents is too great for species to move from one to another. Later we will offer some ideas about how these animals may have moved from vent to vent.

    While not all the mechanisms are understood, Dr. Tunnicliffe explained that an event that took place some 30 million years ago divided the animals in the vent systems off Mexico and South America from the vents that we are now studying. That event was the migration of North America onto and over a portion of the ridge system in the Pacific. The famous San Andreas fault in California is essentially a long fracture zone in that ridge system. The intrusion of the land mass separated organisms in the south from those in the north, and today there are organisms here that belong to the same genus as organisms found at the Galapagos Rift, but they are a different species. In some cases they are the same family, but they are a different genus and species. I can just see the headlines from The Vent Times 30,000,000years ago. "Continent Divides Communities: Organisms Left to Evolve Differently" Well, there is a reason I became a teacher and not a newspaper reporter.

    The chief scientist, Dr. Embley, has just asked me, weather permitting and with permission from the Captain, if I would be willing to go out in a small boat and photograph the recovery of the ROPOS from the water looking back at the ship. I hope to be able to do this, and I'm very glad it will be over and done with before my wife reads this page. This is the reason they bring old guys on these trips. Somebody has to deal with the sharks. More of this on my return Dr Tunnicliffe says "Cobb Seamount is about 30 miles from here. It is a nursery for the Great White....be careful!" I will.

    Logbook of all Teacher At Sea postings


    Question/Answer of the Day

    August 30, 1998

    Question:

    Hi,

    I am Christopher Wallace. I am 6 1/2. My Dad Kim told us a new vent was discovered while he was flying ROPOS. What are you looking for at a new vent? Do you expect to see a chimney form? Does that always happen? When will we see some pictures from the bottom? That's all

    Christopher

    Answer:

    Your Dad was flying ROPOS when "Cloud" vent was discovered. There are scientists out here with many different interests, so we look for several things when we explore hydrothermal vents. If one is a geologist they would be interested in the rocks in the area of the vents. Is there new lava in the area due to an eruption? What is the chemical composition of the rocks in the area? What types of lavas do we see around the vent? How old are the rocks? If one is a chemist they would be interested in the chemical composition of the water coming out of the vents. Does the water rise up from the vents and form a plume after an eruption? If one is a biologist they would be interested in the types of animals and bacteria that live around the vents in these harsh environments. Chimneys don't always form around hydrothermal vents. Most of the vents we have been observing so far are called "diffuse" vents. We have seen a few chimneys near lava columns on this expedition. They form when there is an eruption due to the heat that is escaping through the cracks in the lava. These are lower temperature vents (2 - 50 degrees C) We are seeing diffuse vents in the area where the latest eruption occurred (February 98). Chimneys form in areas where there is high temperature water and lots of it rising up from a more focused source. They take longer to establish and last longer than the "diffuse" vents. They have a good "plumbing system", so lots of hot water is forced up and out of them. They form near longer lasting geological features like faults (cracks in the seafloor due to movement of the seafloor by long term forces. They can get very hot (350 degrees celsius)!!! They last longer than the "diffuse" vents.

    ps-Christopher's dad is currently aboard the Ron Brown and is a member of the ROPOS team.

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