Getting Underway

 

Meteor Blog, 9:30 2 March 2015

94o20.7'W 19o55.8'N



F/S METEOR in the Port of Veracruz - she seems big
to us scientists, but tiny next to the ships that mostly come here.

There is a lot to do when moving aboard a research ship for a three week expedition. This is the start of Leg 2 of cruise M114, continuing after an 8-day mapping effort during Leg 1. F/S METEOR sat in the harbor at Veracruz for four days while containers of equipment, pallets of food and other consumables, and 28 scientists with all their instruments were stowed away and made at home. As busy as the ship was, it was dwarfed by the more usual ship traffic at the port - giant ore carriers and automobile transport ships were constantly unloading and shifting massive pieces of gear.

The customs and port control in Veracruz were very rigorous. All the crew and scientists had to sign in and out and pass through a metal detector to get into the port area. Several shipments were detained by customs until the last minute. One box full of supplies for the microbiologists were inexplicably stuck with the agents and was not released before the ship sailed.

Finally on Sunday, 1 March at 8:30, METEOR untied her lines and sailed out of harbor under sunny skies. Then we all had to get busy arranging gear and organizing our tasks. The scientists had to be briefed on shipboard life and safety. German ships are different in several ways from the U.S. scientific fleet. Meal times include breakfast, lunch, dinner, but also time for coffee and cakes at 10:00 and 15:00. The crew spaces include the mess-hall and gym, but also a cozy bar with comfy chairs and beer taps.

Chief Scientist Gerhard Bohrmann held the first of what will likely be daily science meetings. We all introduced ourselves and had a couple of nice introductory talks about past German-Mexican-American expeditions and the results of Leg 1. The overarching idea for this cruise is that the southern Gulf of Mexico hosts the largest and most extensive series of asphalt volcanoes known to science. These deep-sea features are unusual in that massive eruptions of asphalt generate rock-like, chemically active substrata that become the habitat for a diverse and productive ecosystem. Our mission over the next three weeks is to explore and quantify dozens of possible features to learn about the geology, chemistry, and biology.

This blog will explain more details of what the many scientists and technicians are doing. I feel like so many things have already happened! But for now, the important thing is to get everything organized and ready to go. And write this first blog piece so I don't fall any further behind.

While not in meetings and briefings, I spent Sunday assembling my video time lapse cameras, a high resolution macro camera, and rack that holds a series of niskin bottles (water samplers). It was well pas 22:00 when I sat down on the back deck with the ROV crew and had a Budweiser - no, not the pale American version, but the original Czech beer!

This morning I was up at 05:00 to attach one of my video cameras to the METEOR's TV sled. All night long, the acoustic survey team searched for traces of bubbles in the water column and came up with three "hot spots" where the echosounders spotted "flares" of bubbles rising from the seafloor.

Heiko, Adriana and Hubart monitoring the TV sled.
Asphalt at last.

We launched it around 06:00 and now as I sit and type this we are watching fuzzy black and white pictures of the ocean bottom, more than 1200 meters deep, slowly pass under the TV sled's camera. The sled has weight hanging from a 1.8 m long piece of rope. The seafloor appears to rise and fall as the swell lifts the sled and then lowers it down again. So far we found several large fields of asphalt with seafans, shells, and possibly some tubeworms. We will have to wait until the camera is recovered to look at the HD video from my camera and get a more precise description. But after weeks of planning and days of setting up, we're finally on-station and doing our job.