Southampton

Ahoy, everyone! A couple of days ago, we finally left the Porcupine Abyssal Plain after a very successful sampling regime of megacoring, trawling, and the deployment of various other instruments over the past few weeks.

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Ambient noise in North European seas: monitoring, impact, management (3–5 October 2011, National Oceanography Centre, Southampton) – conference experts highlight how noise affects marine life.

Jacques Cousteau called the oceans the ‘Silent World’. Today, we know that they are anything but. If you think our towns are noisy places, then spare a…

Ahoy, everyone! Today, you are in for a treat. As you know already, we are deploying a whole range of instruments to get an idea about what type of creatures live at about 4,800 metres depth here at the PAP site.

One of these instruments is the Baited Camera Lander. It’s a large steel frame with two high-definition cameras attached to it and, most…

Quite a few of the samples being brought up from the deep are being preserved in ethanol for DNA analysis when we’re back on land.

Chrysa is preserving the sea cucumbers and sea stars from the trawl samples and amphipods from the amphipod trap, Claire is keeping some of the animals from the mud cores, and I’m sampling all the fish and the other…

The days when we take the trawl samples seem to be a somewhat confusing mixture of sleeplessness, excitement and a lot of hard work! For me, these trawls are really the reason I’ve been out here for the last two weeks as I gather samples of abyssal fish for my PhD.

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On 12 August in Golden, Colorado, USA, Dr Angus Best of the National Oceanography Centre’s Marine Geoscience Research Group made a successful bid to host the biennial Second International Workshop on Rock Physics at NOC in Southampton in May 2013.

The First International Workshop on Rock Physics, held last week at the Colorado School of Mines, was a…

Scientists of the National Oceanography Centre (NOC) have been exploring the depths of the Cayman Trough without leaving Southampton, thanks to a ‘telepresence’ link from a US ship in the Caribbean.

Last year a UK research cruise led by Dr Doug Connelly of NOC found and sampled hydrothermal vent fields on the Mid-Cayman Spreading Centre (MCSC) for…

The deep sea is a reservoir of unknown biodiversity, particularly among invertebrates living inside the mud with many species new to science and in many ways rivalling the discovery of new insect species in rainforests.

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An entry from Alexander Hart our Irish Foreign Vessel Observer.

It’s my responsibility to ensure that any research during JC062 that takes place in Irish waters (i.e., at Goban Spur) is done in an open way.

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It’s 6 o’clock in the morning and the entire science party is dressed in brightly coloured waterproofs, steel-capped boots, and hard hats, waiting impatiently in the hanger.

We are not allowed out onto the aft deck, since the crew is busy hauling in the trawl. Over the past few hours, the OTSB (Otter Trawl Semi Balloon) collected a representative…