Southern Ocean

Scientists aboard the Royal Research Ship James Cook have discovered a new set of deep-sea volcanic vents in the chilly waters of the Southern Ocean. The discovery is the fourth made by the research team in three years, which suggests that deep-sea vents may be more common in our oceans than previously thought.

Vent Discovery in Adventure Caldera

Friday night in the SHRIMP* van and we have been videoing the seafloor for three hours inside the Adventure Caldera, which geophysicists from the British Antarctic Survey discovered in 2010.

Coring at night

We have videoed the many different areas of venting at the seafloor in the base of the Kemp Caldera and now are spending a cold, snowy night coring the mud from the seafloor. Our night shift work is to collect mud from around the areas of diffuse hydrothermal flow.

Sampling the Kemp Caldera

Our final site in the East Scotia Sea is an 8 km-diameter caldera on the flank of a shallow seamount at the southern end of the South Sandwich Island Arc.

RRS James Cook in transit to the South Sandwich Islands

We have finished our work in the Bransfield Strait and now have a three day passage to our next working area near the southern most South Sandwich Island, Thule.

The Axe, Bransfield Strait

Our final site within the Strait is aptly named ‘The Axe’. This is the least studied site that we have chosen to study and first we need to map the seafloor.

Three Sisters, Bransfield Strait

We 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.

Mud sampling: 28 January 2011

Pinpointing the Vents: 25 January 2011

By 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 Ridge.

Coring the seafloor: 23 January 2011

Sunday 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.