Ready, set, go! Next stop – Vestnesa Ridge in the Fram Strait
All photos and text by Mariana Esteves.
Blog originally posted on CAGE website.
The coring equipment on deck. To the left you have the steel core barrels for the giant calypso corer, and to the right you have the core liners that will be placed inside the corer and used for the collection of the marine sediment cores.
The final preparations for the core flow – which is a procedure we will undertake when the long cores of ocean floor sediments arrive on deck – and sampling strategies were completed on the morning of Sunday 20th October. Equipment in the laboratories and in the hangar were set up ready for arrival to the first station. This involved a lot of creative thinking and planning to make sure that the core flow would be efficient once the first sediment core arrived on-board later this evening.
Preparations in the lab included setting up the equipment, and labelling thousands of vials and sample bags. Here we see Renata Lucchi, Simone Sauer, Nessim Douss and Przemyslaw Domel hard at work getting everything ready.
By lunch time, we set off from Longyearbyen and sailed towards the center of Isfjorden to test the new calypso corer deployment system. These tests are important to ensure that the equipment will work once we get to our first sites. By 3pm (cake break time!!), the deployment instrument tests are completed and we set sail towards Vestnesa Ridge, Fram Strait, where we will arrive after 9 hours of sailing. There is a lot of excitement on board now that everything is in place and ready to go! Just a few more hours to go before we arrive at the first station and begin our shifts.
Martin Klug and Stig Monsen preparing the area where the cores will be washed, labelled and cut into 1m sections, preliminary samples taken, all prior to the cores being stored for future analyses.