R/V Melville
Today we
took thousands of pictures of the ocean floor with our RabbitCam
and took several samples with wax balls, wax cores and one dredge.
We processed samples all day by categorizing, breaking and sawing
them into useful pieces (see photo). The major excitement of the
day was when Red Shift (Betsy Williams, Jenny McGuire and Carrie
Donnelly) detected, by observing that the tensiometer on the wire
attached to the dredge jumped by several thousand pounds, that
the dredge had hit an obstacle on the seafloor (see photo). We
all hoped that this would indicate that either we would collect
a huge amount of sample, or that we had caught a giant squid.
It turned out that the former was the case, and Red Shift happily
left the deck at midnight to allow “Mel’s Angels” (Wenlu Zhu,
Clare Williams and Meagan Polluck) to deal with the boulders on
the fan tail. By Carrie Donnelly
