Introduction

Participants

 

R/V Pelagia Cruise SME 117 INDUS
	Diary overview
Thursday, 18 December 2008	Birthday of Cornelia
Since leaving Muscat, Oman we have been mostly surveying the region to the east of the Indus Canyon, close to the border with India. We tested our equipment at a deep-water site en route from Muscat that is being prepared for deep drilling at a later date and then proceeded to the Pakistan shelf itself. We have run a series of long profiles from the deep water up towards the territorial limit of Pakistan using the Chirp, Boomer and Sparker systems including one spectacular line across the Indus Canyon itself.
Images from the inner shelf showed a large prograding submarine delta front and a number of buried channels. We have had intermittent problems with the weather that forced us to take out the equipment and just use the multibeam bathymetric mapping equipment and the old fashioned but reliable 3.5 kHz seismic system. The night of 17-18th December was especially rough and windy, with waves up to 3 m making science and life onboard a little more difficult. We took one 6 m long core in the deep ocean, but so far only shallower cores on the shelf. Unfortunately the wire holding the piston core snapped and we lost this on the seafloor, at least until we can try to fish it up with the grappling hook. In the mean time our spirits were raised by the official birthday of scientist Cornelia Koehler from University of Bremen. The crew sang a rousing number of festive Dutch songs and everyone enjoyed a wonderful cream cake.
Camilo ‘sampling’ the Boxcore	Sparker deployment