This short two week cruise has been very interesting. I have spent the majority of the time working with the Kongsberg EM-122 Multibeam system doing sea floor mapping and using the new water column data gathering portion of this system to track methane hydrate bubble plumes. I have learned to use a new type of satellite system that allows for 10Mb out and 512K inbound data streams. This system is monsterously faster than the current used HISEASNET systems that a majority of oceanographic vessels are equipted with.
The past few days have been rather rough seas, sometimes upwards of 20 foot swells with well over 40 kt sustained winds. Luckily we were able to recover all the (~20) Ocean Bottom Seismometers were recovered before this weather pattern stuck. The crew worked around the clock generally in 18 hour shifts getting this done with the hopes of being able to recover 2 lost OBS that a previous couple cruises were unable to find. The plan was to use the DSV JASON to drive the bottom canyons where the OBS’s were believed to be. Since the weather was so rough though this was not a possibility.
Tomorrow we go in to port a day early since the weather is not going to clear in time to allow us to attempt another go at the lost OBS’s. We tried sending accoustic commands to them in hopes that we could astablish comms. Using the ships hydrophones I sat watch listening to the soothing sounds of accoustic messages and water rushing past for hours in hopes of hearing a faint reply. Alas no reply was ever heard, so those two OBS’s are still lost and only Davey Jones may know where they are.