A couple of new deep-sea expedition blogs to add to your RSS feeds…
An excellent and and often funny blog about a recent hadal expedition
After their triumph in 2008 obtaining footage of the deepest fish ever caught on camera, the team behind the Hadeep project, run by the University of Aberdeen’s Oceanlab, are back. This time they’re off the coast of New Zealand, looking to send Alfie, their plucky deep-sea camera-equipped lander, down into the lightless depths of the Kermadec Trench. Several thousand metres down, surrounded by crushing pressure, the unmanned submersible will attempt to take more film of the deep-dwelling creatures attracted to the bait it carries. This time, though, Alfie will be joined by other, newer equipment, including the top-secret experimental Hadal-Lander C, only recently built by Voyage Leader Dr Alan Jamieson! The team will be providing regular updates from the New Zealand Research Vessel Kaharoa of what they find.
A new blog just from an expedition to cold seeps and whale-falls off Japan
Nick Higgs is on a research cruise off Japan to find out more about the amazing ecosystems that form around dead whales on the seabed. He is a PhD student at the Natural History Museum and the University of Leeds. The team are going to visit the sunken remains of two sperm whales that were experimentally implanted in 2005 at a depth of 925m in Sagami Bay Japan – they had previously died after being stranded on the seashore. Nick is investigating the bone-eating ‘zombie worms’, Osedax, and how they bore into the whale bones. He wants to understand what these borings look like so that I might be able to find them in fossil whale bones. He also wants to know how much damage these worms do to the bones and how that might have affected the fossil record of whales. Might there be gaps in the fossil record?
I had no idea that Alan (I mean the Supreme Commander) was such a witty writer. I knew he was a funny guy, but the Hadal Expedition blog is a triumph of science writing.