Hello everybody!
We have been out at sea for only a week now and despite spending half of our time with steaming to reach our sample locations, we have already made great progress on the science side.
Our first sampling site was on the shelf and slope area off South America.
There we collected hundreds of fossil corals, all the way from 300m to 2000m water depth. This is an enormous success! Of course we will only know how great our catch really is, once we get back to the lab and start dating all these corals. It really is the combination of the right age and the right sample depth that makes fossil corals so precious for palaeoclimate work.
Next to the corals we also collected seawater along one depth profile (surface to 4000m water depth). From these waters we will measure a whole suite of characteristics that will tell us about the chemical environment and water masses the corals grow in today. This is an important parameter to understand for figuring out why cold water corals are found in certain locations and not in others (today and in the past).
We also deployed the camera systems we have onboard (towed camera and drop camera). I have never seen pictures from such camera systems before, and it has been truly fascinating to watch the live feed during the operation and see how cold water corals live in the deep abyss of the Southern Ocean, and have a happy community of organisms around them.
Overall the first of our sampling sites in the northern Drake Passage has been more than successful – it was a homerun! It is amazing to see what a capable ship’s crew and a group of motivated scientists can get done in a few days. Despite the hard work everybody puts in around the clock, there is always a smile in the room, a joke making the round, or that moment of silliness that will become more and more abundant as the cruise goes on… We have a wonderful team out here and lots of cool science to be done!