Monday, Sept. 28, 2009 – sub log
Diving with Kristina Sawyer (Hillcrest Elementary)
Chief scientist Craig Young in the sub
Hello to everyone from oil plot # 324 about 100 miles off the coast of Louisiana. We learned that the ocean floor is divided into 3 mile by 3 mile numbered plots that oil companies can purchase to drill for oil, and today I will dive on plot # 324, which also happens to be an area with a huge patch of cold seep tubeworms where scientist have been doing underwater experiments for over 15 years!
This morning has definitely been my favorite of the cruise so far! I got up at 6am so I could head out on deck and watch the sun come up behind the ship, as we steamed westward. I then came back inside to the ship’s galley (kitchen, one of my favorite places!) and had an amazing veggie omelet. I don’t eat meat, but the chef on board keeps making me these amazing vegetarian meals. Then we had a quick meeting at 8am to talk about the upcoming sub dive- the one I was going on! I was so excited to get on the sub and kept jumping up and down on the ship’s deck. Finally I climbed up through the hatch and into the cave like compartment where I would be spending the next 3 hours underwater! I put on my official headset so I could communicate with the other scientist (my advisor, Craig Young) in the forward bubble compartment. On the way down I saw lots of little clear animals that float in the water and then in only 25 minutes we were on the bottom at 1700ft!
Our mission was to collect deep sea tubeworms (Lamellibrachia lumesi) and the deep sea sponge that lives only on those tubeworms (Ectmixillan methanicola, discovered and named by none other than the man in the front of the sub, Craig Young!) and to look for a worm that only lives on the sponge that only lives on the tubeworm in the deep sea!
We landed at a cold seep in one of the largest patches of these tubeworms in the world! Out my window I could see clumps or “bushes” of tubeworms spreading out as far as I could see. They were smaller than I expected from seeing pictures and movies–only about 1-2 cm across, about as big as a dime. But Craig told me they can live 200-300 years and are the oldest living non-colonial organism known! They are also some of the slowest growing animals in the world! (This trait of cold seep tubeworms is very different from the hot vent tubeworms in other parts of the world which are some of the fastest growing animals!) The tubeworms we were seeing are able to survive in the deep sea because they have symbiotic bacteria that live inside them that are able to use the sulfides coming out of the ground at the cold seep to make food. The tubeworms even have root-like structures that go down into the soil just like a plant so the bacteria can absorb sulfide nutrients from the mud! They also use gills that they stick up out of the tube to “breathe” by absorbing oxygen and carbon dioxide from the water. All the hemoglobin circulating in the gills makes them red!
We saw some other really really cool animals too, like a stingray that was about 2ft across hanging out on the bottom on top of a cool patch of orange and white bacteria, and a see-through 2ft SQUID!! Our sub bumped along the bottom a bit and the others in the sub joked that I was jumping up and down again because I was so excited! I could also see the methane bubbling out of the mud which was super cool!
We cruised around for a while and it was so hard to pick which window to look out because everything looked so new and exciting and I was in a sub at the bottom of the ocean!!! At about 11am after being down at the bottom for almost 3 hours, the pilot said it was time to head up and we began our only 15-minute ascent. To sum up: awesome glowing bioluminescence, bubbles and more bubbles and then amazingly clear blue, blue water!
This was an amazing opportunity (we learned that there are only 8 submersibles like this that people can go down in in the world!) and I can’t wait to get to go again next week!
It’s almost dinnertime (or suppertime as they say in the south) and we still have tons of tubeworms to look at!
Peace, Kristina Sawyer