Mud – Chief Scientist Workshop http://csw.unols.org Mentoring our sea-going scientists Tue, 18 Oct 2016 16:28:21 +0000 en-US hourly 1 http://sites.udel.edu/?v=4.4.5 Coring at Sunset http://csw.unols.org/coring-a-sunset/ Fri, 19 Feb 2016 05:46:44 +0000 http://sites.udel.edu/chiefscientistworkshop/?p=1307 Continue reading →]]> 4 cores tonight. Here’s the recovery of the first, with the sun setting behind Catalina Island. The sun disappeared behind the island just as we began to extrude the cores. And here I thought I’d get to work in the daylight for once.

Sunset Core

 

Also, a Carnival Cruise ship passed by about an hour ago. All their lights were burning brightly, and they probably had big swimming pools and water slides and buffets and whatnot, but I think we all feel like we’ve got the better experience here, with all the mud and lack of sleep that comes with it. The food on this ship is definitely better, that’s for sure.

 

Posted by Chris

]]> Coring in the Deep http://csw.unols.org/coring-in-the-deep/ Wed, 17 Feb 2016 08:09:02 +0000 http://sites.udel.edu/chiefscientistworkshop/?p=1257 Continue reading →]]> Tonight we cored in deep water off the California shelf. The unique bathymetry of the California Borderlands means you don’t get a standard shelf-slope profile as you head offshore, but if you go west far enough, you finally get past all the Borderland basins and find a true shelf break, past which the water is DEEP. Almost 4000 meters. Not particularly deep for the abyssal plain, but certainly worth some respect. Spooling out wire at 35m/min, it took nearly 2 hours for the multicorer to reach the seafloor, and another two hours for it to come back up. We put it in the water around 4:30 pm, and just now finished extruding the cores and putting everything away at 11pm.

multicore in the water

The sediments here are unique, and form the most distal part of our onshore-offshore transect. They are unique from sediments we’ve seen so far, being comprised on mostly clay particles, with the only coarser grains being sand-sized foraminifera. You can see from the picture below that the sediments changes color about 10 cm down from the surface. This indicates a change from the oxygen-rich brown clay of the upper sediments to an area where all the oxygen is used up. All ocean sediments, below a certain oxygenated layer at the top, contain no oxygen, and have been altered chemically by the exotic (to oxygen-breathing organisms like us) chemical processes that occur without oxygen around. These sediments aren’t particularly smelly, so we know that there’s no sulfate reduction occurring, but we are guessing that the color change we observe here is the result of manganese reduction. But this is quickly getting too heavy for a blog post about mud written by a micropaleontologist.

mud

What’s cool to think about is that we got money from the NSF to take a big ship, with a whole crew that’s just there to help us go out to the middle of the ocean to study cool problems of climate and the resiliency of life to change. And that the answer to those questions is preserved in mud on the bottom of the ocean.

extruding

Posted by Chris

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