A busy afternoon on the fantail (back deck). While engineers prepare ROPOS for its first dive (center), workers (left) are deploying the RAS (Remote Access Sampler) recovery mooring. ROPOS will connect the mooring to the RAS so that it can be recovered at the surface.

We Have Arrived!

Well, after steaming out to sea for 24 hours, and observing a beautiful whale and dolphin show along the way, our trusty marine technicians, Mike Realander and Rob Hagg, guided the ship to the location where ROPOS will be diving at Axial Volcano. Hooray! We're here! As we hover over a caldera at the top edge of the volcano, I have difficulty imagining that somehow the plethora of equipment on the aft deck will soon be in the deep blue sea. This site is amazing! The caldera shows up colorfully on our computers as a big sunken spot near the top of Axial, which is an active volcano and the location where we'll begin our work. The colored lines and patterns on the mapping computer show us the depth and bathymetry of the seafloor. We're all excited to deploy the new equipment for the first time, and also to retrieve equipment set down during prior research cruises that will provide scientists with valuable information about the volcano.

Anna Metaxas (right) , larval biologist from Dalhousie University, and her graduate student Noreen Kelley (left) prepare the larval settling arrays for deployment at Axial Volcano. The arrays are in the "elevator" basket, to the left of Noreen, awaiting their trip to the bottom of the sea.

Right now, though, there are so many pieces of equipment on deck that it looks like a mechanical forest with the scientist hikers in orange work vests and hard hats trying to establish a trail through it. Everything is so neat, tidy, clean and tied down really well. It's hard to believe that within a week, most of it will be gone and some of that clean, shiny equipment will be replaced by slippery and wet instruments that we're retrieving from the bottom. I find out that I am not the only one who is full of questions. Like Dr. Chadwick, I wonder if ROPOS will make it all the way to the bottom on the first dive. Once there, we plan to retrieve a variety of sampling gear that has been down there since last year. For example, we will be recovering Dr. Metaxas' experiment on which larvae of vent animals may have settled and started to grow. We're also retrieving Dr. Moyer's bacterial traps. Will we be able to find all of the equipment that's already down there? What if the sampling gear didn't collect anything? What if Dr. Moyer's traps became infested with bacteria-eating creatures? Dr. Butterfield's group is concerned because a piece of their equipment known as RAS (Remote Access Sampler) stopped communicating with the NeMO NET surface buoy a year ago. What happened to it? Is it still down there? Did it collect anything? What will everybody's collections look like when they come up? The anticipation is driving me crazy!

Student's Question of the Day:

S.S., Age 16, Miller Place, New York, asks: How deep are the volcanoes you'
ll be studying?

The caldera of Axial Volcano is about 1,500 meters below the ocean's surface, which is about a mile. That's about the length of 100 school buses lined up end to end! Axial Volcano is a seamount, so it is actually shallower than most other volcanic areas on the Juan de Fuca Ridge, which are about 2200-2500 meters deep (1-1/2 miles). It takes ROPOS about an hour to get to the bottom when diving at Axial Volcano. Did you know that most of the ocean is about 4000 meters deep? Can you guess how many school buses would have to line up end to end to reach 4000 meters?