CAMERAS ON THE SEAFLOOR
In addition to the camera that glides over the seafloor, we have cameras on the “megacore”- the collection of tubes we send to the bottom to grab mud. The cameras help us know why cores come up the way they do. Not being able to punch down into the seafloor at a rocky site is a different challenge than if the seafloor mud is so watery that it leaks out of the tubes.
Holly’s team is one of two using the megacore to study what’s happening at different depths in the seafloor. For the first time on any expedition that we know of, she asked for the cameras to point out, so we can see what’s happening on the seafloor around the cores. Here’s a collection of videos from the megacore cameras.
Your questions (I'll answer more tomorrow!):
- “Do the animals collected on the seafloor survive the trek to the surface?” Yep! This is one of the neat things about studying here- temperature (not pressure) is usually what kills our study organisms when we try to collect them from other deep-sea sites, but in Antarctica we can study them alive! One of our teams set up a “Crustacean Cottage” for 2 critters they named Pedro [as in Pascal] and El Guapo. They want to study their burrowing behavior, so they lined the Cottage (an aquarium tank) with lots of cameras.
- “Could we see these creatures in an aquarium somewhere?” Onboard our ship! But it’s not Holly’s group studying these things alive, so I don’t have pictures of the tank. There are some aquariums around the world that have deep-sea creatures on display- I think I remember reading about a deep-sea giant isopod in Japan somewhere.
- “Why aren't there any plants?” There’s no light down there in the deep. The light only reaches to about 200 m (660 ft) deep in the ocean. And the light in Antarctica is also blocked by ice seasonally in the shallower spots- krill can survive 200 days of starvation to make it through the winter.
- “Is anyone measuring microbes?” Yep! One of teams on this ship is looking at what bacteria are doing on top of the mud and comparing it to what they’re doing down in the mud, and what all that means for how food and vitamins move through the whole ecosystem. Holly’s team is looking at bacteria that live on the skin of her nematodes- they look like fur or scales under the scope.
- “Does anything photosynthesize in the Antarctic?” Only plankton where we are. They’re a little like microscopic plants or algae and you can find them in pretty much any water on Earth that has sunlight. We see them in the deep-sea once they die and sink to the bottom- they’re like the dust bunnies of the ocean.
👩🌾 (what emoji do I use for "mud"??) Virginia
Getting cores this way takes at least an hour at 400 m (1,300 ft)- it takes a long time for the megacore to travel to the bottom and then get pulled back in.
- 0:00 crew photobomb
- 0:08 overboard
- 0:15 the most interesting thing we’ve seen on the way to the seafloor- isn’t it beautiful?
- 0:20 camera pointing in to show the core tubes jamming down into the mud
- 0:28 camera pointing out to show the seafloor around the core tubes
- 0:32 my favorite megacore video!! Look in the bottom right- it’s a sea pig and it’s spiral poop piles! Oh no the megacore blows it all away………
- 0:39 the squares you can see at 0:20 slap the seafloor and get the whole instrument started upward toward the surface, then slide over the bottom of the tubes to close the core tubes
- 0:43 back at the surface
- 0:50 stick the landing