Diving with Josh Lord (Ocean Crest, Harbor Lights and Driftwood schools)

Today I had the amazing opportunity to go down to the bottom of the ocean in the deep sea submersible. Not only that, but I got to sit in the front, inside the 5 inch thick glass ball that separates the pilot and the scientist from the crushing weight of 1700 feet of water above us!

The descent takes about half an hour, with light slowly fading until up looks the same as down. There are instruments and switches everywhere, lit up with red light, and the pilot controls the sub with a small control box, much like a video game controller. As we reach 1600 feet below the surface, the pilot switches off the air supply and a few other items so that we have enough power to get the big light on the sub turned on. The light stretches 40-50 feet into the penetrating darkness that surrounds us at the bottom of the ocean. There are beds of tubeworms all over the bottom, about a centimeter wide but several feet high, some taller than me. There are small red fish everywhere amongst the tubes, unsure how to react to light that they’ve never seen before.

We move slowly around, looking for tubeworms that have a certain type of clam living on top of them. A huge swordfish comes flying out of nowhere and slams into the ground right in front of us—the pilot says that they don’t like the light. As we move over an edge, we spot something amazing. There’s a large chunk of methane hydrate, which is bright yellow and is the solid form of the gas methane—some people call it methane “ice.” As we move closer, we see bubbles coming out of the ground and small red worms living in holes in the methane “ice.” These worms are the hard to find “ice worm,” an animal that gets its energy from methane-eating bacteria that live inside of it. We see a few other neat fish and a couple crabs as we continue to look around.

It was amazing to watch the robotic arm in action, and watch the pilot use the different tools that are attached to it. As we moved back up through the water, bubbles rose around us and light slowly appeared from above. It was an amazing experience!

This entry was posted on Tuesday, October 6th, 2009 at 10:39 pm and is filed under Gulf of Mexico. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.