Tuesday, Sept. 29, 2009 – sub log
Dive to a brine pool with Zair Burris (Bunker Hill, Blossom Gulch, Madison Schools)
I pulled myself up and into the back of the sub, took my shoes off, wrapped myself in a blanket, and lay down so that my face would be next to the tiny porthole. I put my headset on and made sure my notebook and pencil were ready to write down everything I saw. As the sub slid into and under the water we were surrounded on all sides by bubbles, as if we were going through a car wash. The deeper we got the darker and colder it got, and so I layered on more clothes: my gloves, a scarf, a hat, an extra pair of socks, and another sweatshirt. When it was completely dark, the small animals in the water would wiz past us, glowing and flashing us with their bioluminescence like dancing stars. I can see how animals could be dazzled by this display and become something’s unsuspecting prey.
As we got to the ocean bottom (2180 feet deep) we came upon an underwater lake. A lake. UNDERWATER! Scientists have named this a brine pool. The water is very salty and very heavy; so heavy that it can’t mix with the surrounding sea water. There it has to stay: a pool of salty water under an already salty ocean. What’s even more incredible is that surrounding this lake a beach made of mussels has formed, making it impossible to see the muddy ocean floor. As the submersible glided over the lake and stopped in the middle, I could see through my porthole red shrimp, orange crabs, black mussels, brown snails, pink sea stars, grey eels and…a chubby white octopus. There it was, moving like a ghost over the center of the brine pool. Instead of shooting off quickly into the dark or squirting us with ink, it hovered close by. I could see its’ yellow eyes and light pink tentacles.
Our mission on the dive was to take mussels from different parts of the mussel bed, scoop up mud at the edge of the brine pool, and get a sample of the really salty water of the brine pool. The driver was so practiced at moving the robotic arm and the vacuum hose that this took no time at all. Then we were free to go exploring for more animals: a bright orange fish with a fat head waiting on the muddy sea floor, white long tubes housing long purple worms, rattail fish. And then all of a sudden, we had to go back to the surface- we had been there for 3 hours! We turned off all of the lights and the creatures outside my porthole streaked by again bursting with light.