Dates: At sea July 28-Aug. 2, telepresence Aug. 2-8
Team: Bridgit Boulahanis
Loacation: Northeast Coast of the United States
Bridgit Boulahanis, a marine geophysics graduate student at Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, joins a team of early career scientists on their way to becoming chief scientists in a training cruise focused on seafloor exploration. They’ll be getting their first experiences working with submersibles as they dive into projects ranging from cephalopod collection to acoustic detection of methane bubbles to mapping and photographing methane vent sites and deep-sea coral communities.
(Image: Methane bubbles, NOAA)
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Rose Dufour, program director of ship operations at the National Science Foundation, talks with early career scientists aboard R/V Atlantis. Photo courtesy of Dan Fornari
By Bridgit Boulahanis
Rose Dufour loves science. “You have to,” she says, “to work this job for so long.” Rose is the program director of ship operations for the National Science Foundation (NSF), the government agency that funds most ocean science in the United States, and she is responsible for making our training cruise (among many other research cruises) possible.
Every earth scientist knows about NSF, but it can be rare for those of us early in our careers to get to actually chat with a representative of the funding agency. Rose knows that, so she tries to attend as many early career workshops as she can.
This was her first time going to sea with one of the workshops she funded, and she says the experience was beneficial in both directions. “It is crucial that we communicate with early career scientists about the NSF facilities available to them,” she emphasized, because that is one way to ensure young scientists learn to write effective proposals. On her end, the ability to experience firsthand the value of the program and see what interests early career scientists was fascinating. She also got to dive in Alvin, a research submarine, and she loved it.
“What I do at work every day is important, and I don’t ever go in and feel bored,” she said, but her favorite part is that she gets to spend days at sea. Like the scientists she came here to inform, she loves being on the ocean.
Early career scientist Katrina Twing with NSF’s Rose Dufour. Photo courtesy of Dan Fornari
Rose also mentioned her hope that other young scientists would be participating from afar through telepresence. Telepresence has been a crucial component of our experience during this workshop, and it is a growing aspect of ocean science. From the ship we conducted several “live streams” that anyone could tune into, making it possible for other scientists and the general public to remotely participate in our cruise. Combine those live video streams with interaction through social media, and suddenly the entire world had the capacity to be a part of our research in real time. Not only was this a great tool for showing the public the excitement of science in real time, but it also allowed early career scientists anywhere in the world to follow along with the exciting lessons we were learning aboard—and they are important lessons.
“I hope early career scientists will leave this with the confidence to write a proposal,” Rose said, “because NSF wants to fund them!” She assured us that there are plenty of opportunities for scientists at all levels, and that we should pursue them. Whether the person is an undergraduate looking to go to sea for a day or a new associate professor trying to lead his or her first full expedition, NSF has programs and funds that they should aim to use. “Also, we are all very friendly,” she said. She encouraged those who are applying to NSF programs to email their program director.
On our cruise, researchers gathered around whenever we got a moment free to pepper her with questions about how science gets funded. On that topic, Rose kept it incredibly simple: write an innovative, interesting scientific proposal.
Bridgit Boulahanis is a marine geophysics graduate student at Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory. Her research utilizes multichannel seismic reflection and refraction studies as well as multibeam mapping data to explore Mid-Ocean Ridge dynamics, submarine volcanic eruptions, and how oceanic crustal accretion changes through time. Read more about the training cruise in her first post.
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Amanda Netburn of NOAA (left) and Doreen McVeigh of North Carolina State University work in a lab aboard the R/V Atlantis. Photo: Bridgit Boulahanis
By Bridgit Boulahanis
Most of the year, marine geophysicists are indoor creatures—we can usually be found in our labs, working with data on our computers. This research cruise is different, because, while data collection is always a scientist’s prime directive in the field, this cruise has the added goal of training early career researchers to use the wide variety of tools and techniques represented on board.
That objective is what led to me leaning over the edge of the ship at 2:30 a.m., using a hook at the end of a very long pole to pull a gigantic camera platform onto the deck. The more we learn about how other researchers’ science is conducted, the more broadly skilled we become. Being early in our careers was a prerequisite to joining the University-National Oceanographic Laboratory System (UNOLS) Deep-Submergence Science Leadership Cruise, so every participant is eager to learn new techniques and find opportunities for collaboration.
Bridgit Boulahanis with the camera platform, just hoisted aboard ship. Photo courtesy of Bridgit Boulahanis
The mentors are shining examples of how teamwork across disciplines leads to more exciting science. Dan Fornari, a senior scientist in geology and geophysics at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, built the camera platform I was reeling in. It had been entirely re-purposed a few hours earlier. Dan’s research focuses on the seafloor, and the platform was designed for his projects, but when the scientists studying the water column began discussing ways to collect more samples, Dan stepped up. Over the course of a couple of hours, he attached extra cameras, removed seafloor sampling devices, and added a few lights to facilitate the study of the tiny particles floating in seawater. It was ready for water column sampling.
Interdisciplinary work was happening all over the ship. I spent much of the afternoon helping researchers transfer water from sampling bottles recently pulled from the ocean into large jugs. I was nervous, but Amanda Netburn, a pelagic ecologist at NOAA, assured me that there was no way I would mess up pouring water from one container to another.
As we filled the water bottles, we discussed our fields’ various sampling techniques. Our research couldn’t be more different—I study the rocks under the ocean; Amanda studies the fish swimming in it. Her cruises involve a large net being dipped well below the ocean surface and dragged behind the ship in order to catch a few fish that she will study. My research requires instruments pulled behind the ship that blow giant bubbles, which send sound waves through the earth that are recorded on specially designed microphones, telling us information about the rock layers below. We have plenty in common, though. We talked about how both of our fields once used dynamite—hers to catch fish, mine to create sound waves (both practices ended long ago, and we discussed the much better techniques and technology used today)—and we both want to increase human understanding of the planet we call home.
This cruise is important because of all of the great data we are collecting, but it is the learning and connections being made aboard that will serve the participants for many years to come. Collaborations are springing up between diverse fields, and everyone has learned new sampling techniques for future scientific endeavors. No matter what scientific discoveries come out of this cruise, the training aspect is already an unmitigated success.
Bridgit Boulahanis is a marine geophysics graduate student at Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory. Her research utilizes multichannel seismic reflection and refraction studies as well as multibeam mapping data to explore Mid-Ocean Ridge dynamics, submarine volcanic eruptions, and how oceanic crustal accretion changes through time. Read more about the training cruise in her first post.
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Stephanie Bush of Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute (left) and Chiara Borelli of the University of Rochester emerge from the research submarine Alvin after the first dive of the training cruise. Photo: Bridgit Boulahanis
By Bridgit Boulahanis
There’s something magical about being under the sea. I believe if we could transport every member of Congress to see the ocean floor by submarine, even once, funding to marine science would skyrocket.
On Saturday, two of my colleagues, both early-career scientists, got the opportunity to spend eight hours in the research submarine Alvin, roving the seafloor almost a mile below the surface, grabbing creatures, sediment, and water samples to advance the research of our science team.
It was their first submarine dive, and as they stood on the ship’s deck waiting to climb into the sub, their excitement was contagious. Much of the science party gathered on deck to watch the submarine’s launch: first carried to the edge of the deck by tracks not unlike a train, next hoisted upwards by a rope that could lift one and a half blue whales, and then lowered gently into the rolling sea where it bobbed and dipped as the Alvin team swam around it, doing a final check before descent.
Even with Alvin at the depths, those of us left behind on the ship were involved with their exploration. Radio communication between the submarine and the ship has been possible for years, but our expedition is the first to utilize text and picture messaging between the seafloor and the ship. The text communication is still so slow that the average millennial would demand a new phone before using this system for even a day, but it allows the science party to stay in contact throughout the dive, conferring on discoveries and important places to stop and take samples.
Mussels brought back from the seafloor by the submarine team. Photo: Bridgit Boulahanis
By mid-morning, texts from the deep had sent word: coral and mussels had been found and sampled! In the afternoon, I was sent to the top lab, where Alvin communications happens, to add an extra stop to Alvin’s sampling tour. I radioed down to give them coordinates and to request a sediment core. I will not be diving in Alvin on this expedition, but even speaking over a radio to the team at the bottom of the sea gave me a heady rush of excitement.
When the submarine finally surfaced, a small boat was deployed with crew members who dove into the water and helped tie ropes to the submarine in order to hoist it back onto the ship. Those of us gathered on deck gave a round of applause to Chiara Borelli and Stephanie Bush, the scientists returning from their first mission to the deep. They seemed enthralled to the point of giddiness with both what they had just done and with the wealth of samples they had to offer: a basket full of corals and mussels, mud, sand, and water. They recounted to us the experience of dropping deeper and deeper, to the point where light no longer penetrates from the surface, and watching the green blinking of bioluminescence float into view out of their portholes.
Corals collected from the seafloor go into an oven for drying. Photo: Bridgit Boulahanis
It’s midnight now aboard the R/V Atlantis, yet in the Main Lab, the Hydro Lab, and the Wet Lab, every single workstation is full.
At the far end of the Main Lab, Mercer Brugler of the American Museum of Natural History has just removed a surprise anemone from a mussel. He carefully transports it via razor blade into a test tube and screws on a lid. Mercer works on corals and anemones, but his goal was to collect corals on our cruise. He hadn’t even hoped to get an anemone, and he is clearly elated. Across from him, Katlin Bowman of UC-Santa Cruz is looking through a microscope at tiny spikes on her coral sample, exclaiming that now she knows what was poking her hand through her gloves. Her workbench is covered with paper towels, yet still damp, and she uses gentle precision to scrub coral branches with a toothbrush. Once they are sufficiently clean she moves them into an oven where they sit to dry.
On the other side of the table, Jeffrey Marlow of Harvard and Sean Jungbluth of the University of Southern California are bent over pushcores, pulling each clear tube from one bucket and cataloging it before placing it into a box for further analysis. Cores are cylinders shaped just like PVC pipe that Alvin pushes straight down into the seafloor. This technique provides an excellent way to understand the ocean floor because it keeps the mud layers in the same order they had at the bottom of the ocean. Once they’ve cataloged each core as a whole, Jeffrey and Sean will remove the sediment from the pipe in inch long slices and begin their analysis of each of those subsamples. They laugh as they work even though they have a very long night ahead of them.
A pushcore arrives for sampling. Photo: Bridgit Boulahanis
Across the hall in the Wet Lab, Doreen McVeigh of the North Carolina State University is sorting mussels. She has a tub full of them; some so small you can’t even see them, others as big as my fist. She is cheerily arranging them based on their size, an indicator of age. She is going to try to keep the older mussels alive until she gets back to her lab so that she can undertake better understanding their life cycle. As she sorts them she moves the ones that are old enough for her study into buckets of cool sea water, and for the rest of the cruise she will be making sure that the water remains an environment where her mussels can thrive. Nearby Amanda Netburn, from NOAA, is carefully planning out her mission aboard Alvin for tomorrow, making sure each sample collection device will fit aboard the submarine.
Dan Fornari of Woods Hole is hurrying through the main lab carrying a power drill, while Chiara follows close behind him with a clipboard. They have just pulled a new gravity core out of the ocean. Gravity cores are much longer than the push cores that Jeffrey and Sean are working on, and Chiara is thrilled that they pulled in a few feet of mud for her research. She selected the site earlier that day from aboard Alvin—close enough to a methane seep to pick up the chemical signal, but far enough away to miss hitting the rocks and biology that are so common near these features.
Saturday night aboard a research vessel is not like a Saturday night on the town, but the scientists on board are about as happy and excited as any average person on the dance floor. It’s not so bad working crazy hours when you’re doing what you love. I know that as I go to sleep tonight, in the pitch black of my on ship bunk below the water line, I’ll be imagining bioluminescence dancing before my eyes, and an inconceivably massive underwater world waiting for me to explore.
Bridgit Boulahanis is a marine geophysics graduate student at Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory. Her research utilizes multichannel seismic reflection and refraction studies as well as multibeam mapping data to explore Mid-Ocean Ridge dynamics, submarine volcanic eruptions, and how oceanic crustal accretion changes through time. Read more about the training cruise in her first post.
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Scientists work around the clock aboard research cruises to make use of every precious second of sea time. Bridgit Boulahanis’s team launches the AUV Sentry in the evening and monitors its progress through the night. Photo: Bridgit Boulahanis
By Bridgit Boulahanis
“Whenever I find myself growing grim about the mouth; whenever it is a damp, drizzly November in my soul; … then, I account it high time to get to sea as soon as I can.”
― Herman Melville, Moby-Dick
Being drawn to the sea appears to be a part of the human condition, but marine scientists seem especially enticed by the mystery and power of the open ocean. Evidence for this is abundant aboard any research expedition—you have to really love the ocean to want to go to sea as a scientist.
When scientists say “research cruise,” they aren’t talking about sunny afternoons of shuffleboard and margaritas on deck. Life aboard a research vessel means tight spaces, few amenities, and workdays that can easily last 24 hours or more.
At sea, the scientists got a preliminary look at the seafloor’s bathymetry. Back on land, further processing of Sentry‘s data will refine the view.
Research expeditions are expensive, and scientific funding is limited, so it is crucial that scientists make the most of the little time that we get at sea. Research vessels take advantage of the entire day, with a portion of the science party working during daylight hours and the rest working through the night. Many researchers work not just their own shift, but a portion of the next one, as well. Sleep is limited, meals are abbreviated, and the work often requires hours of physical labor. Sometimes life aboard the vessel feels like an exhausting slog.
There are also aspects of being at sea that are enthralling, wonderful, fascinating. When you’re aboard a research vessel, the lines between senior faculty and graduate students become thin, and collaboration is immediate and constant. The excitement of data streaming in real time and looking at preliminary results can be intoxicating. There are moments of panic when it looks like things won’t go as planned, and then there are also moments of absolute joy when everything falls into place.
Friday morning fell into the absolute joy category—during the previous night we had collected shipboard multibeam data, over 600 gigabytes of data from the autonomous underwater vehicle (AUV) Sentry, and successfully deployed a multicore that collected several feet of sediment. We found exactly what we expected and hoped for—a spot on the seafloor where methane bubbles up from below. Methane, a greenhouse gas that many people associate with cows, naturally seeps out of the seafloor in many places.
The AUV Sentry captured images of marine life as it collected seafloor data.
Even though current scientific understanding suggests that this particular source of methane doesn’t significantly contribute to climate change, it is important for scientists to understand and quantify all of the various sources of methane, and this is one difficult type to find. These vent sites are also fascinating because they are so often home to a wide variety of marine life: microbial communities, deep sea corals and crustaceans can be found around them. Sentry‘s photos from our first dive show that these creatures are present (and some even abundant) in the region where Alvin, the human-occupied submersible that we’re also working with, will descend with two scientists on Saturday.
Usually by the time scientists leave a ship after a research cruise, we are drained to the point of collapse, but exhilarated with the results to come. That exhilarating thrill of discovery may be why, for many of us, going to sea feels like coming home.
Bridgit Boulahanis is a marine geophysics graduate student at Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory. Her research utilizes multichannel seismic reflection and refraction studies as well as multibeam mapping data to explore Mid-Ocean Ridge dynamics, submarine volcanic eruptions, and how oceanic crustal accretion changes through time. Read more about the training cruise in her first post.
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The training cruise team’s first mission with the autonomous underwater vehicle (AUV) Sentry discovered an area of seafloor where methane is bubbling up, similar to this photo. The data will be used to plan the team’s next dive, this one with scientists inside a submersible. Photo: NOAA
By Bridgit Boulahanis
Nothing about Sentry‘s transition from ship to seafloor is simple or easy, but the group of engineers behind the autonomous underwater vehicle approaches the process like an Olympic synchronized swimming team. They dive in head first, understand their positions and roles, approach with unabashed enthusiasm, and know how to get the job done. Their coordination and skill made my belly flop into Sentry coordination look like a graceful swan dive.
At the center of this team is Carl Kaiser, program manager for the Sentry AUV. Carl became the program manager in 2011 and made a point to be a part of this training cruise because he believes that young scientists need to understand the power and versatility of AUVs. His expertise in autonomous underwater technology is invaluable to our diverse research group, and his passion is palpable.
Carl Kaiser stands in front of Sentry during an earlier mission in which the AUV became entangled in rope. Photo courtesy of Carl Kaiser.
“As early career scientists, you all want to make your mark, and to become world class researchers you will have to establish yourselves uniquely within your field,” he says, while checking over a proposed dive survey. “We have barely scratched the surface of what Sentry can do—she wasn’t available to previous generations—and in the coming years we will see what autonomous vehicles are truly capable of.”
Seeing Sentry in action makes it easy to see why Carl and his cohort are so excited about their jobs. AUVs can be incredibly customizable: While we are primarily using Sentry to map the seafloor and take high resolution photos of our research sites, it also is capable of oxygen measurements, current speed tracking, magnetic anomaly measurements, sub-bottom profiling and plankton collection, just to name a few. It is programmed from a command station aboard the ship, given a set of locations and sampling goals, and set free overboard to complete its directive before returning to the surface.
If diving in Alvin, a submersible that can carry two scientists to the seafloor, is like an astronaut’s trip into space, Sentry is similar to a planetary rover—nothing can replace the appeal of manned missions, but most of our real discoveries come from slightly less glamorous but incredibly important unmanned probes. Last night, while Sentry floated through the abyss gathering crucial data to help us understand the ocean, somewhere incredibly far away Curiosity roved across the Martian landscape, similarly transmitting information back to the scientists at NASA. I like to think that if Sentry and Curiosity could communicate across their vast and inhospitable separation they would end up close friends.
The autonomous underwater vehicle Sentry is controlled from this mobile command center. Photo: Bridgit Boulahanis
Our first Sentry mission returned this morning and was a rousing success. Right now, scientists aboard the ship and our colleagues on shore are excitedly processing the data. We will use the maps, photos and water column data that we extract from this to plan tomorrow’s Alvin dive.
Looking at the map the Sentry operations group has generated from last night’s dive, it is apparent that this powerful tool is going to play a key role in the scientific goals of many of us aboard this training cruise.
In fact, our first scientific meeting of the day started with chief scientist Adam Skarke holding up Sentry data showing that we have identified a spot where methane gas is currently seeping out of the ocean floor, leading to excited applause from everyone in the room. Those methane gas bubbles will be where we start our Alvin dive tomorrow, and they will be the research focus of many of the scientists here in the years to come.
Bridgit Boulahanis is a marine geophysics graduate student at Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory. Her research utilizes multichannel seismic reflection and refraction studies as well as multibeam mapping data to explore Mid-Ocean Ridge dynamics, submarine volcanic eruptions, and how oceanic crustal accretion changes through time. Read more about the training cruise in her first post.
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Lamont’s Bridgit Boulahanis, Sentry coordinator for the University-National Oceanographic Laboratory System (UNOLS) Deep-Submergence Science Leadership Cruise, gives a presentation aboard ship. Sentry is a AUV the team is using to explore the sea floor.
By Bridgit Boulahanis
My first official day as Sentry coordinator started with a 6 a.m. gathering on deck to watch the R/V Atlantis slide away from our dock at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution. Clutching my thermos of coffee, I stumbled onto the main deck to find Chief Scientist Adam Skarke looking alert enough to suggest he’d been up for hours.
“Everyone,” he called to the gathered crew of young scientists, “our departure is being delayed due to fog. We are now scheduled to leave port at 10:30 a.m.” The deck was smothered by mist, rendering it impossible for us to even successfully wave goodbye to the on-shore team who had gathered to see us off.
Adam’s announcement is met with a fair amount of concern from most of the scientists on board. We are an eager bunch, with a full schedule of data collection booked 24 hours a day once we arrive at our first science station. Skarke is in training too, but as chief scientist, he understands the need to keep his team inspired. After assuring us that most of our sampling plans should not be significantly hindered, he reminded us of what will likely be our motto in the coming days: “Science at sea requires constant adaptation.”
The underwater autonomous vehicle Sentry in the morning fog. Photo: Bridgit Boulahanis
Adam’s words rang particularly true—later in the morning, I sat with him and the Sentry engineers reevaluating the dive we planned for the night. We would be arriving on station only two hours later than scheduled, but that still meant we would need to make cuts in our mapping plan, according to Carl Kaiser (Sentry expedition leader) and Zac Berkowtiz (Sentry expedition leader-in-training), from their command center in the Hydrolab. Together we discussed options: We could make a smaller map, we could allow larger gaps in our high resolution photos of the seafloor, or we could change the shape of our survey altogether. In the end, we decided to keep our large map and high-resolution data, but we will have to take photos over a smaller region of seafloor.
Hours later, after leaving a finally sunny Woods Hole port and conducting several safety drills, the scientists on board were once again busily planning missions and creating data collection spreadsheets. We gathered in the ship’s library and shared our mission plans for the coming days, and then at 9:50 p.m., we completed our first launch of Sentry. Barring any new “opportunities for adaptation,” she will return to the surface at 6 a.m. on Day 2 with the data we requested. For now, we have to keep our fingers crossed and wait.
Bridgit Boulahanis is a marine geophysics graduate student at Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory. Her research utilizes multichannel seismic reflection and refraction studies as well as multibeam mapping data to explore Mid-Ocean Ridge dynamics, submarine volcanic eruptions, and how oceanic crustal accretion changes through time. Read more about the training cruise in her first post.
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Bridgit Boulahanis will be planning the deep sea explorations and sea floor mapping work of the AUV Sentry during this training cruise. Photo: Bridgit Boulahanis
By Bridgit Boulahanis
“You are the future of deep submergence science,” mentors Dan Fornari and Cindy Van Dover tell our group of 24 ocean scientists gathered for our first pre-cruise meetings for the University-National Oceanographic Laboratory System (UNOLS) Deep-Submergence Science Leadership Cruise. Deep submergence science can mean a plethora of things, and this is reflected in the varied interests and goals of our group. Present in the room are Ph.D. students aiming to snatch octopuses from their deep-sea homes, postdoctoral researchers hoping to measure near-bottom ocean currents, associate professors attempting to record the sounds made by methane bubbles as they seep out of the seafloor, and researchers of many career stages and scientific interests in between.
We’ll have some help in the deep, and we’re all pretty excited about it: This training cruise aims to give early career scientists experience with two deep submergence assets—Alvin, a Human Occupied Vehicle (HOV) that can carry two scientists at a time to the ocean floor, and Sentry, an Autonomous Underwater Vehicle (AUV) that can roam for hours, collecting images and data. The scientists all came aboard R/V Atlantis this week with data collection goals designed to use these incredible machines while advancing science.
Marine scientists get the rare opportunity to explore the sea floor up close in the HOV Alvin. Photo: Bridgit Boulahanis
Alvin is famous for its role in exploring the wreckage of the RMS Titanic, but is an icon among scientists for its unique direct observation opportunities and sample collection capabilities. Alvin’s maneuverable arms can grab rocks, corals, and critters, and it has a variety of sensors to pick up information about the water surrounding the submarine. Of course, the draw goes well beyond data—scientists who strap themselves into Alvin for a dive get to directly experience the environment that our data describes. It’s often compared to an astronaut’s trip into space. Alvin gives scientists the opportunity to be immersed in the world we have dedicated our lives to but otherwise cannot explore first-hand.
Sentry, though less well known than Alvin, is no less powerful a tool for scientific discovery. It can be illustrative to think of Sentry as a submarine drone—scientists plan out missions in advance and provide Sentry with a map of locations for data collection before launching the AUV to conduct operations without human intervention for upwards of 40 hours. Sentry can function at depths up to 6,000 meters, and can be customized to collect data for versatile science goals. For a geophysicist, this is where the real excitement lives. We’ve all heard the statistic that less than 5 percent of the ocean has been explored, and Sentry has the power to change that, creating maps and taking photos at a resolution and scale that is impossible by almost any other means. Every time Sentry is launched we make another dent in that 95 percent left to be explored, and so every mission feels like a battle won for science. We will be launching Sentry at night to collect high-resolution photos and data mapping the seafloor. That valuable data will then inform Alvin’s later dives.
Bridgit Boulahanis
My role on this cruise is as Sentry’s coordinator, so I will be helping plan missions and process the mapping data that Sentry collects. I will also be acting as science liaison to the Sentry operations team. The first stop is a fascinating patch of seafloor called Veatch Canyon 2, where gas bubbles leach out of the seafloor and sea life has been spotted gathering. Past missions have identified corals, mussels and bacterial mats at this site, all of which are indicative of active gas seepage. We leave port at 6 a.m., and after 13 hours of transit we will arrive above our launch site—that is when my team will have to jump into action, getting Sentry overboard as quickly as possible to maximize our mapping and photo-taking time.
Stay tuned for updates on research life at sea, what it is like to work with Alvin and Sentry, and why all of this is so important for the future of marine science.
Bridgit Boulahanis is a marine geophysics graduate student at Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory. Her research utilizes multichannel seismic reflection and refraction studies as well as multibeam mapping data to explore Mid-Ocean Ridge dynamics, submarine volcanic eruptions, and how oceanic crustal accretion changes through time.
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