Antje Boetius, Autun Purser, Yann Marcon During this 4-week expedition we have been very busy with studying traces of human activity at depth on scales of centimeters to kilometers. There was so much to be learned from this study site at 4150 m water depth. But it is important to remember that the ploughing […]
It may not always be easy to see, but the deep seafloor is teeming with life! Microbes and worms live inside the sediment and large sea cucumbers crawl over the sediment. This life will probably be heavily disturbed if the industry gets permission to collect manganese nodules and remove or plough through the top layer […]
(English version below) Globus? Verstaut. Bildschirme? Eingepackt. Lava-Brocken? Auch dabei… Ende September ist für uns traditionell eine Zeit des Packens. Nein, es geht noch nicht um Geschenke, auch wenn Weihnachten unaufhaltsam näher rückt. Doch vorher steht der Tag der Deutschen Einheit im Kalender. Jedes Jahr richtet ein anderes Bundesland das Bürgerfest zu diesem Anlass aus. […]
Being able to test brand new technology is always exciting. The Ecotone Scientific UHI (Underwater Hyperspectral Imager) brought from NTNU in Norway was finished only a week before the Sonne disembarked from Guayaquil. It is the first UHI to be designed for deep sea use (6000m). Any untested equipment will present some initial challenges. During […]
Questions from a school class A number of the scientists and crew taking part in SO242-2 are based in Bremen, Germany. We have received a number of interesting questions from year 6 students attending the International School Bremen, sent to us by their teacher, Martyn Robinson-Slater. We in this blog will try and answer some […]
To do list: – cleaning and organizing the Lab … check – organizing and building equipment … check – collecting animals … check – building pilot study set up … check – doing pilot study … check – building main study set up … check – becoming friends … check […]
Today we present the benthic crawler “Tramper” and it first steps at the seafloor in 4150m water depth. Tramper was designed and constructed within the HGF Allianz ROBEX (http://www.robex-allianz.de/) to measure oxygen concentration in the sediment autonomously over a longer period (up to one year). During this expedition we performed the first in situ test […]
“Wer bringt heute den Müll raus?” – an dieser Frage sollen schon WGs und sogar Ehen gescheitert sein. Müll ist lästig und kaum jemand beschäftigt sich gern mit ihm. Gleichzeitig produzieren wir alle so viel davon, dass er mittlerweile auch an unerwünschten Orten auftaucht, an Stränden und in den Meeren zum Beispiel. Eine gut organisierte […]
They say, being on the sea makes people creative. It happened to me as well and here is my story and a short video about jellyfish. “My English popular name is Jellyfish. Today I am going to tell you my amazing story, how we can build a jellyfish world under the sea. First of all, […]
In addition to a direct disturbance by an industrial collection of nodules at the seafloor, potential impacts of nodule mining are connected to the associated generation of sediment plumes and their dispersal. This may vastly extend the area that is affected by mining activities. Deep-sea sediments are typically very fine and easily eroded – it […]