Teacher Logbook - NOAA Ship Ron Brown

Sebastian Durand from the University of Quebec at Montreal, is swapping out a transducer on the ROPOS, to improve the ROV navigation. Sebastian works as a navigator on this cruise, and is also collecting data for his masters degree in biology. Susan Kulp from the University of Florida at Gainesville inserts the wax cutters into the rock corer. When ROPOS is out of the water other research operations take advantage of the ship to collect samples. 129 wax-corer previous samples have been collected on the NeMO cruises.

Jeff Goodrich's Sealog:
Axial Volcano South Rift Zone
July 19, 2001

Suddenly ROPOS appears from the dark abyss below. ROPOS's huge winch is almost finished with the laborious task of raising the vehicle for the hour and a half that it takes to reach the surface. It slowly coils the metal cable around and around. The seven person deck crew is ready to retrieve and safely get the ROV back on deck. Once the 18,000 pound vehicle is tightly tethered down the action doesn't stop. The scientists eagerly await its arrival to collect their samples, getting the live specimens in the refrigerator as soon as possible.

Under the intense conditions of the ocean floor and with day and a half long dives, ROPOS takes a beating. The ROPOS crew works around the clock and when not flying the vehicle at the bottom, maintenance calls. The goal is always to keep the turnaround time small and keep it in the water as much as possible. As the scientists are busy with their samples, checking equipment, and planning the next dive the ROPOS crew are fixing the feedback in the 7-function arm, changing out the transducer for the PS 8000 navigation system (see photo top right), taking the hot fluid sampler off and exchanging it for the bio-box and changing fibers in the down umbilical. Quite a lot to do in a short period of time. This will take a couple more hours than the usual 2-hour turn around time. When the action isn't on the seafloor, it's on deck. This makes ship operations a 24-hour job.

No time is wasted during maintenance. Geologist Susan Kulp (photo right) directs the ship to steam an hour south of the caldera to the southern rift zone of Axial Volcano (about 27 km) to conduct a basalt core. She sends a large rocket-looking piston corer down 1922 meters to ram the bottom. On the core are five cutters, or metal cups, that are filled with wax. The basalt shards in the wax can then be brought up to the surface for mineral analysis. 124 basalt wax-core samples have been taken during the NeMO program, which lends insight into the spatial and temporal patterns in the geochemistry in the region, as well as the different magma sources for the Axial Volcano rift zone eruptions.