Hard work, hard fun

2. August, 2014

After the CTD festival ended a little earlier than planned, we headed further north to the Schulz Massif – an area where rocks that you normally find in the mantle are exposed on the seafloor. A very interesting feature for both the geologists and the biologists on board, and both teams had to join forces to handle the enormously large pile of sponges and other sea-creatures that the biologist got in their final trawl from this area.

All hands on deck: a big catch for the biologists!

Our deck clothing needed some serious rinsing afterwards to remove the sponge spicules that apparently tend to move to places where you rather do not want them to be, particularly because we were about to get more fun on deck: the final gravity core, with a record length for this cruise of 363 cm (congratulations Steffen), that was sampled in the final minutes of the cruise time in a very deep basin close to the Loki’s Castle vent field. We had to hurry up, because bad weather was expected for our transit that would slow us down too much, so after the core was recovered by 2 am at night we headed off immediately to Tromsø.

The night that followed was short and bumpy with waves crashing into the ship, and sampling the core the next morning on deck in the stormy weather became an interesting battle against the elements. Even though we all crashed into tables and doors several times due to sudden big waves and had to protect the core with our bodies from the seawater that washed over the ship, the spirits were good and I actually had quite fun out there in the rough sea. These videos are nothing but an obvious proof of that.

Steffen and Michael sampling the sediment core.

Even though it was sometimes hard not to fall…

Ingeborg measuring oxygen concentrations in the sediment.

After the storm calmed down in the evening, we woke up in the harbor of Tromsø yesterday morning – ready to celebrate a successful first half of the CGB cruise. I think that the motto of one of the bars in Tromsø, “Hard work – Hard fun”,  was very appropriate for the scientific crew on this leg: we made good progress, got the samples that we wanted, but also laughed a lot together and had a good time. We will miss the guys that left the ship and are enjoying their well-deserved holidays right now, and welcome the new crew for a second and hopefully just as successful second leg of the cruise!

R/V G.O. Sars in the Breivika harbor in Tromsø

Celebrating the end of cruise leg 1