ocean floor

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…

Bottom trawling fishing boats have devastated many cold water coral reefs along the margin of the North East Atlantic Ocean. Now, researchers have found large cold water coral colonies clinging to the vertical and overhanging sides of submarine canyons 1,350 metres below the surface of the Bay of Biscay.

The overhanging canyon walls protect the…

A shipboard expedition off Norway, to determine how methane escapes from beneath the Arctic seabed, has discovered widespread pockets of the gas and numerous channels that allow it to reach the seafloor.

Methane is a powerful “greenhouse” gas and the research, carried out over the past week aboard the Royal Research Ship James Clark Ross…

Up in the Artic, at this time of the year, there are still 24 hours of light. It is such a weird sensation arriving to your cabin at 4am (after some hours looking at seismic lines, maps of the seafloor, and images of bubble plumes) and having to close the window blind!

Then, after a swaying sleep, a fusion of a blue-grey sky and the ocean covers you…

Cruise JR269A, west of Svalbard: Understanding gas escape from the ocean floor

Methane hydrate is formed from methane and water at high pressures and low temperatures, both of which are found at the bottom of the deep ocean.

It is very widespread in the parts of the deep ocean nearest to the continents. If the ocean warms…