Extremely excited about my first ever experience on a research vessel. It’s been a few days now since we arrived in the tropical Ecuador. We were lucky to have a day to acclimate before heading off to the ship. Monday morning we were driven through Guayaquil passing lots of colorful houses and finally reached the […]

‘Here we are again‘ was a phrase that I heard several times yesterday when we boarded RV SONNE in Guayaquil (Ecuador) in the morning after being picked up by the agent exactly on time. We are about to start with SONNE 242-1, the first of two legs to the DISCOL area during which we will […]

Mining Mn-nodules is certainly a debatable topic. Whether it will happen depends on metal market prices, governmental and industry interests, environmental & societal acceptance but also on technological feasibility. In this respect, one of the various unknows are the mechanical properties of Mn-nodules, which are of great importance because they determine how the nodules can […]

“Time flies when you have fun”, this might be even truer when you have fun while working with the most modern research vessel of Europe (the world?) equipped with the best hydroacoustic systems available at the moment. I am a marine geologist and for my work I need to know the morphology of the sea […]

44,000 images: That is the result of one single dive with the camera-equipped Autonomous Underwater Vehicle called “Abyss”. During the current Cruise of FS Sonne, six of those camera dives are planned, but, time permitting, there will hopefully be even more. The brand new high-resolution camera and strong LED lighting setup in “Abyss” allow acquiring […]

(Deutsche Version s.u.) After eight days of transit we reached our first station in the German licensing area. Shortly after our arrival the DOS Lander (Deep Sea Observatory System) was deployed for its first of two missions.  The possibility to use different sets of measurement devices makes the DOS Lander a flexible platform for longer […]

Almost exactly one week ago, my colleague Tim and I started our journey to join cruise SO239 to the Mn-nodule belt in the middle of the Pacific Ocean (117W, 12N) onboard the new SONNE. We flew from Hamburg to Frankfurt and headed on to Mexico City, where we stayed the night to catch a flight […]