NeMO July 30, 2001

Logbook: July 30, 2001

Brown: ASHES vent field, last dive!
Wecoma: Dr. Joe Resing
Teacher logbooks: Science liason & shrunken heads
Perspective today: Verena Tunnicliffe, Marine Biologist

Science News | Teacher At Sea | Participant Perspective

Cruise Calendar

July-August 2001

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Science News

NOAA Ship Ron Brown - ROV Cruise

image of sulfide worms, click for full story

After 40 hours of high winds and seas, ROPOS is finally back in the water for dive 632, the last dive of the NeMO 2001 expedition. We recovered the transponders from CASM this morning, once it became obvious that we no longer had enough time to dive there in addition to ASHES. The final dive at ASHES will mainly recover experiments that have been down since the beginning of the cruise (larval and bacterial traps) and will deploy experiments that will stay down until next summer (larval settlement arrays and temperature probes). More...

R/V Wecoma - CTD Cruise

I am an ocean chemist and when I take water from the hydrocasts that Ed mentioned, I look for chemical clues that will tell me about the volcano. I measure Fe and Mn which are leached out of the solid lava. I also measure pH. Differences in pH tell me how much carbon dioxide gas is coming out of the volcanoes. When I combine these chemical clues with other physical measurements, I get a very good idea about the magmatic state of the volcano. More...

Teacher Logbooks

NOAA Ship Ron Brown - Jeff Goodrich

Patience is a virtue. The winds have dropped, the swells have lessened and ROPOS is back in the water for it's last dive of the NeMO 2002 cruise, which will be at ASHES vent field. In the NeMO tradition I'm conducting my own deep-sea experiment. I've sent down a colored Styrofoam head attached to the cage. Pressure at the Earth's surface is around one atmosphere (14.6 pounds per square inch). As my head descends, it will be subjected to one more atmosphere of pressure for every 10 meters it drops. By the time it reaches Axial Volcano around 1500 meters depth, it will experience 150 atmospheres of pressure (about 2200 pounds per square inch). My Styrofoam head should come up at about a quarter of its original volume. Talk about a headache. I'll have the Tylenol ready. More...

R/V Wecoma - Missy Holzer

The NeMO CTD Cruise is currently at the Blanco Fracture Zone, which is its final location along the Juan de Fuca Ridge. Since the water depth is greater than 4500 meters at this location, we'll be deploying CTD casts, but no tow-yo's. Tow-yo's at that depth tend to take a long period of time due to the fact that the fish is lowered and raised in the water column a number of times. The Blanco Fracture Zone is an area in the seafloor where the Pacific plate and the Juan deFuca plate are sliding past one another, and are pulling apart slightly too. Helium measurements made here at Blanco over the past years have shown that there is some hydrothermal activity worth sampling, and these samples will help to determine the extent of such activity along the entire ridge system. More...

Participant Perspective

Interview with Verena Tunnicliffe
Marine Biologist - University of Victoria

Jeff G: Do the tubeworms eat their symbiotic bacteria or just absorb their byproducts?

Verena: It turns out that bacteria are notoriously leaky cells. We don't know whether or not tubeworms induce the bacteria to leak products out, if it just naturally happens, or if the worm is actually digesting some of the bacteria. We don't actually see a lot of digestive processes going on in the worms. It's probable that there's just a transfer of organic matter through the cell wall. This is similar to corals and their symbionts. More...