Introduction

Participants

 

R/V Pelagia Cruise SME 117 INDUS
	Diary overview
Wednesday, 31 December 2008	Yvo and Marcel     ‘Pelagia Sunset’
New Year's Eve began as a windy and foggy day here in the Arabian Sea. The breaking of the waves and the rocking of the ship in the early morning hours reminded us that we are at sea and not navigating on a mirror-surface water lake, as we might have thought in the past days. Low numbers were seen at the breakfast table today at 7:30am. Only 4 members of the scientific party and 6 members of the crew were there. Perhaps people were squeezing out the last minutes of sleep before activities began or perhaps the milk-deprived breakfast menu is holding back the crowd. But not to worry about provisions, we still have plenty of grapefruits and oranges and scurvy will not be an issue. As for other food, Sander was up early preparing traditional Dutch fried treats. We have a steady supply of ‘Oliebollen’ and ‘Appelflappen’ to last all year, or what is left of it.
Promptly after breakfast we headed to our first coring site for the day. We are on the West side of the canyon very close to the head, and barely 12.000001 miles off the Pakistani coast. We attempted a box core in a site where the Chirp data indicate almost no sediment cover, but only a hard surface layer. We have been tracking this layer under a thick sediment cover back from the outer shelf, and it could likely represent the Last Glacial Maximum low sea level stand. Our expert sedimentologist Liviu Giosan predicted it will be a shell layer. And sure enough we recovered 25cm of pure shell gravels. It will be very interesting to see what is the age of this layer. We recovered some beautiful examples of large mollusk shells. Among the more noticeable ones are specimens of gastropods (snails) from the genre Conus and Murex and several pelecypods (clams and oysters), including articulated specimens, that our geophysical technician but today "Resident Benthic Ecologist" John Davis picked out from the gravels with the help of a hand lens.   Shortly after, the sun rose up high in the sky and started to shine, while the Pelagia cruised to the next coring site, marking the beginning of a true coring extravaganza. In the following hours the entire Pelagia crew and scientific party worked like a well-oiled- machine, retrieving and processing multi-cores and gravity cores from five sites like if there was no tomorrow. Unfortunately we encountered sandy sediments and did not manage to recover gravity cores at two sites. After a light lunch (in preparations for tonight's events) we attempted a last coring site with similar results: beautiful multi-cores but no recovery on the gravity core. Given our truly efficient work in the morning we had some time in our hands and decided to conduct another Chirp survey crossing to the East side of the canyon, while still remaining in shallow waters. Finally the (in)famous Pod was deployed again, in another attempt to study the suspended sediment load of bottom waters.   By 6 pm the Pelagia was anchored and the party lights were out on deck. It was a quick "dropping of the tools and opening of the cans" just as our Chief Scientist predicted this morning. The BBQ pits are soon to be fired. We are sure this is going to be a splendid New Year's Party with plenty of grilled food and good company.   HAPPY NEY YEAR!