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Comments
The ship is now doing scientific activities around the clock with most people working 12 hour shifts. Transfer of equipment between the decks in preparation for the CEAMARC sampling went smoothly yesterday and was completed by 1500 hrs. We started set-up of the first Polynya mooring at about 1600 hrs and this was deployed by 2030. During the night the remaining 3 moorings were prepared and deployed, with the last one in the water in the early hours of the morning (0400 hrs). We then moved through loose pack-ice to the first of the CEAMARC sites (Ceamarc-27) and at 0715 deployed the first of the CEAMARC sampling equipment - the very robust epibenthic sled which collects the top layer of seabed and anything living in it. The first organism to be photographed, tagged and bagged was an octopus. The sled contained enough sea-bed animals to keep a large team happily sorting for several hours - zoot alors! qu'est-ce que c'est? We have since collected a CTD water sample and used the box-corer to collect a relatively undisturbed sample of the seabed sediment. We have tested the procedure for deploying the beam trawl and are fine tuning the information read-out which tells us how much winch wire has been paid out and the tension on the wire. The next deployment will be the Geosciences Australia seabed camera so that we can see what the animals look like in their undisturbed habitat. Regards, Martin and Sarah.
Map
A map showing Australia and Antarctica. The map shows the journey of one voyage that has occured in the season, with each route highlighted in a distinct colour.