Cruise Blog

We arrived off the Big Island of Hawaii about 6am this morning. We could see the plumes of steam coming from the edge of the lava flows. We hope to see some red lava flows at night from here.

Science spent several hours circling the areas that the sensors are location on the bottom of the ocean floor. The are being “pinged” by the transponders here on the ship to “wake “ the up. Then we will circle around each one for several hours collecting data on their location and comparing them through triangulation, to each other and then to their locations two years ago and four years ago. This gives the scientists an idea of the speed and direction of movement in this area.

Diagram of deformation measuring equipment being used by Dr. Phillips on this cruise.

Ship is the Revelle, the three devices on the seafloor are the measurement packages and the one on shore is the device they set up on Volcano National Park.

We sent a CTD down at noon to about 2000m to collect water samples, as well as temperature and salinity. We sent 2 styrofoam heads down with the CTD that we all helped decorate. The pressure will crush the heads almost uniformly..and they will look like shrunken heads!

Dr. Katie’s Styrofoam head……BEFORE

Dr. Katie’s head …. AFTER being sent down to 2000 m!!!!!

Dr. Robert Knox looks on as they prepare to launch a CTD

We will be doing another CTD cast tomorrow and I will be sending down the other half of my classes Styrofoam cups.

Today is Sunday and the highlight will be the chief engineer, Paul Mauricio, will be BBQing steaks on the back deck!

Travis Meador is still collecting and filtering water and the incubation tank is working out on the side deck. Within the incubation aquarium he has divided it into compartment with different light level to simulate the different levels they have been sampled from.

This is the incubator on the deck, it is covered with foil to protect the plankton from direct sunlight.

We had a Coral Talk from Dr. Dave Clague of MBARI at 1:30. His talk was titled: Birth, life and death of Hawaiian volcanoes. The reason the western side of the Liluea volcano looks like a desert it that the sulfur gas plumes turn the rainfall in that area to a pH of 3.0, very acidic , so the plants don’t grow. Most of the eruptions are long fissure eruptions…looks like a wall of lava. One of Mrs. Reeves, students asked how long before Loihi will surface and become the newest Hawaiian Island…..most geologists believe it will be anywhere between 10,000 and 100,000 years. Due to caldera collapse a few years ago…Loihi is actually deeper today than it was 6 years ago. We are looking at pillow lava flows under the ocean as well as lava lakes that form off the coast.

May 26,2006

Honolulu,HI

R/V Roger Revelle

We started fueling at noon and will be leaving Honolulu at 4pm. We are going to be going about a mile off the coast of Oahu and dredging for Drowned Reefs. These are coral reefs that sunk as the island subsided. We will be dredging all night. Chief Scientist Dr Katie Phillips and Dr. Jerry Winterer have decided to do half of the dredges at the beginning of the cruise and half as we come back into Honolulu at the end.

As part of the dredging operations the grad students from SIO will be learning how to set up and use the dredge as well as monitoring the dredge along the bottom. The dredge is a large metal box with metal teeth and a chain link mesh bag at on end. You drop it off the stern ( back) of the ship and lower it to the ocean floor and then drag it along the bottom to try to capture rock , or in this case, coral samples. Depending on the depth of the dredge site it can take 2 to 6 hours or more to do a dredge. Hopefully you won't get the dredge caught on the bottom and snap the wire or flip the bag and dump all your treasures!

Dr. Winterer's first dredge was off a shelf at about 1000m depth. We did not get any coral, only a couple of volcanic rocks that were coated with manganese. They would dredge here again to see if they could find any evidence of the coral reefs.

They would dredge until 10am the next morning. We will then sail to the Big Island of Hawaii to work on Dr. Phillips' project.

Lunch was a nice bar-b-que chicken and our cook, Dax is wonderful. The graduate students aboard the Revelle have never gone to sea before and are anxious to see and learn as much as possible.