Julia July 18
| We have reached our first high-intensity study area and it has been an exciting day – since last night/early morning our geophysical team on the bridge has more company than usual: we are mapping an area where an earlier expedition had found methane seep sites, and everybody is curious if these are still active and if we find new ones, and wants to see for themselves how it looks on the screens! We are not disappointed from what we see on the screens – we rediscover some of the known gas flares and see many new ones, and sometimes we even don’t have to go up to the bridge to see the methane bubbles coming up on the sonar’s screen – a look from the railing is enough to see them in the water! After hours of extensive mapping to get an idea of interesting features, we decide on our first station and the full action started: all kinds of sampling activities, most of them running in parallel, requiring a lot of concentration and coordination. Our methane team was running around – switching between taking samples from various CTD casts to get a high-resolution profile of the methane concentration in the water (we really set a new record in filling bottles today), analyzing the samples, choosing interesting depths for taking large samples with our GoFlo from the side off the ship. Celia has been trying to find good moments for air sampling in between and has been successful i that as well. Meanwhile, the sediment team is busy on the aft deck, we just saw them (covered in mud) when they dropped in to bring us samples to process. My stripping boards have been running since lunchtime, and now – 23:16 – I finish the last sample of the day. A lot of other activities have taken place as well – I couldn't really follow up on that, but have seen busy people in all corners of the ship. Now it's time to sleep again, because the next station is only 6h away and there are preparations to be done before – more in the next days. |
| by Julia Steinbach |
