Shinkai 6500, Dive 1223 to Archaean Vent

7-Sep-2010

Today I am so thankful and appreciative of the opportunity to dive to the seafloor at Archaean Vent. We were successful in placing the JAMSTEC demersal plankton pump near an active vent with a robust faunal community. In the photo taken before the dive, you can see me and my collaborator Hiromi Watanabe standing next to the pump on the Shinkai basket (the pump has reflective tape on the frame). Accompanying me on Dive 1223 were pilot Chida-san and co-pilot Yanagitani-san (see photo inside of Shinkai). The third photo below shows sampling at one of the active black smokers atop the Archaean sulfide mound.

Photo courtesy JAMSTEC

Lunch time (Gohan ga oishii desu)

Gohan ga oishii desu (Goh-hahn gah oh-ee-sheee deh-soo) means “The meals are delicious.” After working so hard processing the samples, a good meal is so very appreciated. The food on R/V Yokosuka is beautifully prepared and with great variety, as you can see in the photo of today’s lunch.

We have larvae!

Photo courtesy JAMSTEC

5-Sep-2010. Today we successfully recovered the first of our plankton pump moorings. The pump worked flawlessly, and you can see in the accompanying image that there was a lot of material collected onto the filter. We can’t tell you yet what we found, but suffice it to say that we and our colleagues spent many hours processing the sample – including video of larvae swimming. We had to stop in order to get a couple hours of sleep before the second pump mooring recovery.

First Shinkai Dive of the cruise

Today was the first dive of the cruise for the submersible Shinkai 6500. Our colleague, Hiromi Watanabe, and two pilots went down to Snail site. They observed all three moorings at the seafloor. These dives to hydrothermal vents in the southern Mariana Trough are funded by the Japanese multi-disciplinary program TAIGA (Trans-crustal Advection and In-situ biogeochemical proceses of Global sub-sea floor Aquifer). You can also follow the TAIGA blog in Japanese at:

http://www-gbs.eps.s.u-tokyo.ac.jp/~taiga/Blog/index.html

Mooring deployments

Within seven hours of leaving port, we successfully deployed three moorings (2 pump moorings and 1 current meter mooring) to the seafloor near Snail vent. This ambitious feat was made possible due to months of planning ahead of time, then meeting yesterday with the Captain and officers to discuss the mooring configurations, and today by the excellent skills of the crew on deck. The photo shows a plankton pump on the line above an acoustic release and anchor weight before going over the fantail.

R/V Yokosuka

Today we loaded our gear on board the research vessel R/V Yokosuka. Yokosuka is the mother ship for the deep-diving submersible Shinkai 6500. The ship and sub are operated by JAMSTEC (http://www.jamstec.go.jp ). Yokosuka is a large research vessel, about 100 m in length, and holds a crew of about 30, plus 13 members of the Shinkai operations team and 15 scientists.

Yoroshiku onegaishimasu (pleased to meet you)

Today we were very pleased to meet the other scientists for cruise YK10-11. In the photo, from left, are the biologists: Takenori Sasaki, Shigeaki Kojima (our Chief Scientist from University of Tokyo), Hiromi Watanabe (our collaborator at JAMSTEC), me, Tomomi Ogura, Hiroka Hidaka, MiHye Seo, Florence Pradillon(our collaborator at JAMSTEC), and Sayaka Mino (Susan is taking the photo).