BOWLS Cruise Blog

Day 9
June 30, 2014

The megacorer

Benthic scientists love mud!

With our landers successfully recovered, all work into the cold van done and bone and wood animals preserved, we have started sediment sampling of background deep-sea with a megacorer at our 2600 m northern BOWL station. The megacorer is a piece of equipment with by eight acrylic tubes that is deployed on the bottom to sample surface sediments (up to about 40 cm). The tubes filled with sediment are then brought back to the ship almost intact, which is really good for a number of faunal, microbial and geochemical analyses. Sediment from megacorer tubes are processed much faster by our 13 member team than compared to the long time of faunal picking and bone and wood weighting carried in each of our landers. It is also quite confortable to work on deck in a beatiful sunny Monday! I guess we all feel that it is great to have mud on board!

Processing samples from the megacorer

We have now only 3 days left to work on sediment samples from this BOWL cruise, which will be used to sample macrofaunal and meiofaunal communities from this area of the US continental margin. These samples will be very useful to compare with the communities found on our organic substrates, and will help us to identify faunal dissimilarities. The end of cruises are quite relieving because of the long hours of work and usually unpleasant seas, although we have only gotten 2-4 ft seas and calm winds. Personally, I cannot wait to be able to sit in the front of a TV to watch ate least a couple games of the World Cup! So far we have only been following the scores of World Cup games or by listening to games during free time between sampling stations. Brazilians are quite disappointed and worried with our team's last results while German's and US parties are highly confident for better results!

Aloha
Prof. Angelo Bernardino
Universidade Federal do Espirito Santo - Brazil

Last updated: 07/01/2014