Saturday 29th January
Today's contributor: Jon Copley
Our initial survey at Three Sisters continues... We spent today switching between survey lines with the CTD probe, and resuming our sonar mapping of the seafloor when fog allowed. The fog is patchy - at one point the bow of the ship was in bright sunshine, but her stern was wreathed in gloom. After the t-shirt weather that we enjoyed in the sunshine at Hook Ridge, it's much colder on deck in the fog.
The CTD survey overnight produced some signals that warrant further investigation, and so we have been planning the strategy for our next survey lines, in preparation for eventually sending down SHRIMP to see what is happening - and living - on the seafloor here.
The sediment cores start to reveal their secrets
Our team has also had time to reflect on what we found at Hook Ridge. The geochemists have compared the initial data from their sediment cores with those published for cores taken from Hook Ridge a decade ago, to see how vent activity there has changed over time. The results are starting to build a coherent picture, and also seem to fit with what we've seen in biology of the area.