1 June 2011 – Pretty corals and rocky seas!

High seas in the Drake Passage. Photo credit: Andrew Margolin.

 

The last five days had everything the title of this blog promises – pretty corals and rocky seas.

A few days ago, we had our first ‘bad’ weather. It was actually not that bad, but 40 to 50 knot winds (75 to 90 km/hr) are enough to stop our science operations, and to start the chairs and containers in the labs to move around. Under these conditions it is simply not safe anymore to work on the deck and hence we all are stuck inside. Sleeping can also be a bit challenging – I had one night, where I woke up a lot because my duvet kept falling off the bed. Luckily people did not really get seasick anymore as by now everybody has ‘grown their sea legs’ – a sailor’s expression for getting used to the motion on a ship.

We could however make good use of the days with a bit less sampling activity to square away all the corals we collected so far. Here a little bit of statistics on our achievements so far: The count up to today is a total of 110 deployments. Most of these are dredges (see picture) to collect corals, but we also did about 30 camera deployments to map and observe the deep-sea habitats down here, four CTDs to collect seawater, and a number of coring activities to collect sediments from the seafloor. The areas visited so far reach from the shelf off Chile, down to the shelf off the Antarctic Peninsula, and a number of locations in the middle of the Drake Passage (mainly seamounts). We found the pretty coral in the picture, Desmophyllum dianthus, at multiple locations, as well as a large variety of other solitary scleractinians – a type of cold water corals that is very well suited for our palaeoclimate work. Together with the samples we obtained from a cruise down here three years ago, we can now cover all mayor water masses in the Drake Passage, and with a bit of luck this will enable us to fully reconstruct the water mass structure down here on glacial-interglacial time scales – a big deal when trying to understand mechanisms of climate change in the past! We also found lots of interesting biology, and there will be many new species to be described from this trip.

The journey, science, and fun continues …

Fossil cold water coral Desmophyllum dianthus. Photo credit: Andrew Margolin.

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