charismaticmicrofauna

*I am still unable to post pictures because of the bandwidth. I will update when I get to land in November.

It’s been four days since I went to the ocean bottom at 2500 feet in the HOV ALVIN. I’m still in the afterglow of the adventure and processing the breadth and extent of the experience while also conducting experiments and doing work in preparation for the next collection of giant tubeworms that will come up with the sub in two days. It’s also difficult to appreciate the experience when I’m feeling so homesick. Everything without my husband around feels a little hollow. He’s my best friend and I’m completely ungrounded without him near. When I leave land, I leave a piece of my heart with Michael.

Things that are not allowed on the sub are synthetic materials, electronics that have not been pre-dusted, citrus fruits, and shoes. These are all flammability hazards, except for the shoes. Shoes are dirty and take up precious space in the 6’ sphere.

The ALVIN is lifted from the deck of the aft deck of the ship by the biggest rope loop that I have ever seen. It is looped around a hook on the top of the sub which then lifts the ALVIN and places it in the water. From inside the pilot/scientist sphere, we’re rocking back and forth from the moment the sub is lifted until we are completely submerged. Once we start to descend, the water quickly turn from blue to black. With the submarine lights off, at 730 feet below water there was bioluminescence all around us. We were surrounded by ctenophores. They flashed and danced bright green all around us.

When we reached the bottom, at 2517 feet, we landed on a basalt sheet from an eruption that happened in 2006. It was surreal to see the texture of the silicate glass that formed from the underwater volcanoes. Some of the features we sighted were hollow lobates that form further away from the eruption sites. They look like large striated mounds of black glass, covered in a fine dust of sediment. As we oriented ourselves by latitude and longitude with the navigation system, we were already being investigated by a black fish, several white crabs, and a few curious little pink shrimps.

We had a few objectives: survey the vent sites called Tica, P-vent, and Bio-9 for any recent eruption activity and most importantly for my research, locate giant tube worm communities for sample collection. As we hovered through the deep to our sites of interested, we saw anemone, octopuses, brittle stars, sea cucumber, and azooxanthellae coral.

There are advantages to working with a manned submersible versus a remotely operated vehicle (ROV). I have worked with both. One of the pros of working with a ROV is that there are not humans inside of the submersible, so there is more bottom time to collect samples. An advantage to working with a HOV, like ALVIN is that samples are seen in real time in their natural environment which potentially improves the quality of specimens collected for experiments. From my experience I was in awe of the textures, scale, and colors of everything. Seeing my study organism in its natural habitat with my own eyes was enlightening and fantastic. It’s difficult to appreciate the proportions and depth of the ocean unless you see it in real time. I wish everybody had the opportunity to see the deep ocean in order to truly appreciate the planet that lives beneath us.

Whenever a new scientist takes their first ALVIN dive there is a ritual that always happens after. When I, the newbie, got off the sub I was asked to take a seat (as all newbies are) and while I was distracted my mentor, who had gotten her arms drawn all over to mimic my tattoo sleeves, dumped a freezing bucket of seawater over my head. After which I immediately took a shower to warm up, and then spent the rest of the night and early morning conducting experiments on the giant tube worms that I had personally abducted with a giant robot arm from their beautiful deep sea lava volcano habitat.

I believe that I can say that I am officially a deep sea scientist now.