BOWLS Cruise Blog

Day 10
July 1, 2014
47° 40' N 125° 28' W

Team members working with the multicore

Today was beautiful – sunny, a calm sea, and snow-capped mountains faintly visible in the distance. We have been out of sight of land for most of this cruise.

With the lander operations complete, we have turned our attention to multi-coring as described in the earlier blogs.  Today we visited two different stations and did 3 sets of multi-cores at each; all but two cores worked (going 46/48 if pretty good).  With mud collected at different depths, we will get an idea of whom was in the sediment around the landers.  Fortunately, processing the mud goes fairly quickly. Once the corer is on deck, we take the tubes off and put them on an extruder. This allows us to push the mud up the tube, out the top and sample it in a very controlled and precise way.  Importantly, not all mud is the same. It turns out that most sediment-dwelling organisms live in the top few centimeters (this is even more true in the deep sea or below 1000m). Of course to keep the ship neat, all of the mud processing happens on the back deck.

Northern Right Whale Dolphin

And it was a great day to be on deck – good weather and lots to look at. I had never seen a Northern Right Whale Dolphin before today, and it is an odd-looking dolphin.  There is no dorsal fin and the snout is very different from a typical dolphin. We must have seen about 20 around the ship and several more off in the distance jumping and breaching. In addition to the dolphins we also saw several Pacific White-Sided Dolphins, albatross and a few sharks.  As has been the case all trip, lots of Velella velella, the gelatinous by-the-wind sailors. Interestingly many of the crew, who have spent A LOT of time on the water in this area, have said they have never seen a Vellela bloom of the magnitude. For me, a day like to day is one of the perks of going to sea. Even though I have been a biologist for a long time and have been on many cruises, the wildlife is still amazing….we really need to take care of the world’s oceans.

Ken Halanych
Auburn University

Last updated: 07/02/2014