Diary

R/V Pelagia Cruise CANYONS 2006

Tuesday/Wednesday, 19/20 Sep. 2006	The lander safely returned to the surface and was then recovered on deck… Deck processing of the piston core. From left to right: Antonio, Thomas, Joana, Henko (BOBO, supervising from above)
The cruise is slowly but surely coming to an end. Many people already "smell" the harbor, and the Portuguese cruise participants are making plans to show the Dutch ones some Lisbon nightlife once we are on shore. However, there is still a lot of scientific action in the last ~48 hours! Tuesday morning, we first recover the bottom lander which was deployed 12 days ago. After all, we have space on deck because his colleague was dropped yesterday. This one will have his next assignment during the following Pelagia cruise to another study area in the Gulf of Cadiz, the NIOZ lander flotilla is almost constantly recording data all over the oceans... . It is always "wait and see" if a lander actually comes up again, the photos below demonstrate that everything went well once again - well, almost everything, it later turned out that one out of many sensors attached to the frame was not working properly on the seafloor.
Next, we took a piston core at the same location. This time, we expected lots of fairly soft, easy to penetrate mud, and indeed the liner was filled with more than seven meters of sediment. Lots of material for the geologists to study - and in the first place, quite some work on deck to cut it into 'manageable' sections of 1.10m which were then carried to the shipboard laboratory. Then we performed a camera transect on the seafloor. The objective was to take pictures from a steep scarp identified previously on the multibeam map. This scarp was actually even steeper than we thought; Almost horizontal walls of bare hard rock. While the pictures taken were indeed spectacular, the station had to be abandoned earlier than planned to prevent damage to the equipment. Monday evening and Tuesday were less variable, we did one final CTD transect. This was deliberately chosen as final set of stations - water sampling is 'cleaner' than sediment sampling, so the labs could be cleaned up at the same time and would not become dirty again. During the last two days, we were also a bit worried about the weather, as hurricane Gordon was striking the Azores islands and its outliers might reach our area. However, finally there was little if any damage on the Azores, and the latest weather forecasts indicated that it would not reach the coast of the Portuguese mainland until after we will arrive in Lisbon harbor tomorrow. The next cruise may have a rough start, though - good luck to chief scientist Henk de Haas and his team!