Updates From Sea | Cruise 2007
February 5th
By Eric Simms, Education Outreach Coordinator
Cruise Report - A Resounding Success!
Everyone watches as we arrive in Manzanillo.
Thirty years have passed since the discovery of life at deep-sea hydrothermal vents in 1977 off the Galapagos Island. Since then, scientists have discovered a great deal about vent communities, but there is much more to be learned. This cruise was an incredibly successful step towards a better understanding of the dynamic ecosystems located at the East Pacific Rise Study site.
On this cruise, the combination of a great ship crew and talented scientists resulted in 22 successful dives to the seafloor using the Alvin submersible. During these dives six new areas of hydrothermal vents were discovered! In addition, thousands of images of the seafloor were taken using the TowCam and RatCam digital camera systems, eight ocean bottom seismometers were recovered from the seafloor, and a new thruster-driven 'super slurp gun' successfully collected 26 Bythitid fish during a single Alvin dive.
Teamwork makes it happen!
The large amount of data collected on this cruise has provided scientists with valuable information to better understand how bacteria and chemical nutrients affect the arrival (and survival) of animals at new vents. Numerous geological, chemical, and biological samples will keep the scientists busy for years to come, and allow future scientists to compare their data to the conditions here at the site right now.
We hope you've enjoyed learning about the exciting research that happened on this cruise, and have a better picture of what life is like at sea - I know we've enjoyed sharing it with you!
If you have been following along as part of your studies with the SEAS mussel lab, be sure to compare your dissection lab results with the deep-sea mussel data on this site - and don't forget to submit your mussel lab reports to the Student Report Fair! Click here for details. And thanks for submitting some great questions to the Ask-a-Scientist forum. We've enjoyed finding answers for you, and hope you found them useful!
Be sure to bookmark this site for future cruise updates, and also visit VentureDeepOcean (www.venturedeepocean.org) for more information about deep-sea hydrothermal vent research through the Ridge 2000 program.
