Caribbean Sea

Helping assess volcanic hazards is the next task for National Oceanography Centre scientists working in the Caribbean Sea.

Following the successful investigation of hydrothermal vents in the Cayman Trough, scientists on board the RRS James Cook have moved on to study the volcanic island of Montserrat for the next leg of the expedition.…

We have just left the waters of Martinique at the start of our two day transit to our final port of Curacao - and so ends our six-week sojourn in the sunny Caribbean.

We have cored over twenty holes at nine different sites off the islands of Montserrat, Dominica and Martinique. This activity has yielded nearly three kilometres of core at a recovery…

We are now approaching the last week of the expedition and this time next week we will (hopefully!) be relaxing in the hotel bar in Curaçao.

In the meantime, we are coring large mass flow deposits off the coast of Martinique. These are difficult sites to get material from as they tend to be made up of layers of coarse sand, lying between muddier…

There are a total of about 120 people on board the RV Joides Resolution, with scientists making up about a quarter of the crew. The scientific party is divided into two shifts – one half from midnight to midday, and the other covering the day shift – that are essentially mirror images of each other.

Given the nature of the sediments we are…

We are now at the halfway point in the cruise and focused on the drill sites off of Martinique. However, Montserrat is still very much on our minds.

Adam Stinton of the Montserrat Volcano Observatory is on board and has been accessing the real time data from the island’s seismic stations and remote cameras. These showed that shortly after we left…

The second weekly update from IODP leg 340.

At about 5 o’clock this morning (local time) we finished drilling the final site around Montserrat and are preparing the ship for a 12-hour transit to our next site off the coast of Dominica.

The relatively shallow depths in which we are working mean that cores have been arriving on deck every 45…

Scientists based at the National Oceanography Centre, NOC, are onboard the RV JOIDES Resolution as part of the Integrated Ocean Drilling Program, IODP. Expedition 340 will look at volcanism and landslides around the Lesser Antilles.

Professor Martin Palmer, Ocean and Earth Science University of Southampton and Dr Pete Talling, NOC, will be…

University of Southampton researchers based the National Oceanography Centre, Southampton, with colleagues from Bristol and Penn State Universities, have produced the first image of the magma chamber (body of molten rock) beneath the active Soufrière Hills Volcano on the island of Montserrat in the Caribbean.

The group used seismic waves to detect…