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Three Sisters, Bransfield StraitWe have spent the weekend surveying our second volcanic target in Bransfield Strait: the Middle of the Three Sisters. Again we use the plume sniffing approach followed by video surveys of the seafloor before choosing our coring sites.The fog has come down on the…
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Mud sampling: 28 January 2011Alfred Aquilina and the sediment sampling team have been working hard in the cold temperature lab to extract water from the stinking mud from around the hydrothermal sites. “The most exciting thing is to see the data that we process on board” says Alfred, “we are really…
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Pinpointing the Vents: 25 January 2011By Wednesday we have criss-crossed the seafloor with our towed video sled and have mapped out the animal and substrate distribution on the seafloor. The shimmering water, chimneys and areas of hydrothermal mineralization are all clustered near the top of Hook…
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Coring the seafloor: 23 January 2011Sunday starts with a steam to a new position nearer to the Antarctic Peninsula where we have chosen a site to core the seafloor. Overnight we homed in on the chemical anomalies in the water column that tell us where the vent and seep sites are on the seafloor.The…
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Statement by the National Oceanography Centre: The National Oceanography Centre in Southampton, UK, can confirm that there has been an incident involving the RRS James Cook in which the remotely operated vehicle (ROV) Isis came into contact with the ship’s port propeller.The accident occurred…
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.field--name-field-image img { border-radius: 50%;}A major Southampton-led consortium project to study past and possible future sea-level rise has received a major grant award of £3.3 million over five years from the UK’s Natural Environment Research Council (NERC).“The vulnerability of extensive…
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Day 3 – Monday 17 January 2011 – Crossing Drake PassageMonday and we are out in the Drake Passage: a strong head wind slowing us slightly. Drake Passage, between Cape Horn at the tip of Chile and the Antarctica Peninsular, is a choke point for the Antarctic Circumpolar Current that travels around…
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Three PhD students of the University of Southampton’s School of Ocean and Earth Science (SOES) based at the National Oceanography Centre in Southampton have won awards for presentations given at scientific conferences.In January, second year PhD student Casey Nixon attended the Tectonic Studies…
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Professor Sir David King will chair the National Oceanography Centre’s newly formed Advisory Council. The inaugural meeting took place on Monday 12 January at the Institute of Physics in London, where Terms of Reference were agreed.Sir David is Director of the Smith School of Enterprise and the…
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Day 1 – Saturday 15 January 2011 – Crossing Drake PassageWe wake on Saturday morning having navigated the Magellan Straits and now we start to cross the Drake Passage to Antarctica. Paul Tyler is in charge of this expedition and we have a busy schedule ahead of us.Paul has been going to sea as a…
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We are here to carry out a 41 day expedition in the Southern Ocean to explore the newly discovered hydrothermal vents in this remote region. Our principal scientist or expedition leader is Paul Tyler from the University of Southampton who has vast amounts of experience of working in this hostile…
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The House of Commons Select Committee for Energy and Climate Change has published its Second Report ‘UK Deepwater Drilling – Implications of the Gulf of Mexico Oil Spill’.The written evidence provided by Research Councils UK (RCUK) to the inquiry incorporated scientific knowledge offered by the…