Saturday, Sept. 26, 2009 – ship log
On the ship with Josh Lord (Ocean Crest, Harbor Lights and Driftwood Schools)
The recovered lander!
Today we did the first of the dives with the submersible! Richard Emlet from OIMB was the main scientist and Kira Triebergs the first GK-12 fellow to go down in the submersible. We got up bright and early for a pre-dive meeting, to discuss what the submersible crew was going to do. We had a special item added to this morning’s dive agenda: the submersible was going to attempt to rescue a lander (a 12 foot tall piece of sampling equipment) that a previous research team was not able to pick up from the ocean floor. It was really cool watching the submersible being lowered by a crane into the water, with the pilot and scientist barely visible through the glass sphere. Half an hour after they went down, they radioed up that they had released the weights from the lander and it was floating to the top, successfully rescued! The boat crew lifted the lander out of the water with a crane. We looked at some really interesting things that were growing on it, since it had been down in the ocean for a year.
Looking at animals off the lander
When the sub came back up, they brought back so many amazing animals! There were several kinds of deep sea urchins, sea stars, and coral. We brought them into a cold room to get a better look at them. Later in the day, we tried to get the sea urchins and sea stars to spawn, so we could see and describe the baby sea urchin/sea star larvae! This didn’t work, but all the animals were really cool to look at!
The second submersible dive of the day featured former OIMB GK-12 fellow Katie Bennett as the main scientist, controlling the cameras and directing the mission. This time the sub came back up at night, which was amazing to see, since the ocean glowed where the sub was coming up. Katie and this crew picked up the biggest deep sea urchin that any of us have ever seen in all these years of cruises! They also picked up some corals, whelks, and little amphipods (related to roly-polies) that build tubes to live in! It was a long but exciting day, since I got to see so many cool things that I’ve never seen or even heard of before.
spawning sea urchins
Finally, scientist Kelly Goodwin would like to say hi to her son, Kai Johnson, and all of Ms. Samuel’s first grade class at Sage Canyon Elementary in San Diego, California! It’s great how many schools, kids and even adults get to hear about all of the interesting things that we’re doing here. I’m looking forward to the rest of the trip!