Saturday June 5

Today was the first full day back at work after our short, but thoroughly enjoyed, break in the Galapagos. Everyone is getting back into the swing of things as dredging is back in action! Our two new watch leaders, Chris Sinton and Mark Kurz experienced their first full watches, and thanks to their awesome watch group fell right into place. Today we did 3 more dredges, bringing our total up to 10. Dredge 8 did not produce as many rocks as the previous dredges, but the rocks that were brought up were covered in glass, which is one of the various forms of lava we need to collect for our studies. Dredge 9 brought up a lot of rocks of various sizes, and dredge 10 is currently in the water, but we have high hopes!

Carbone diligently looking for glass on the rock samples.

Will is really excited to finally be working with rocks!

We also planned 10 more dredges, including several dredges designed by various students on the Cheerio-Nubbin Lineament. We had to redesign some of the dredge angles due to the change in current. Dennis and Dave discuss possible dredge routes.

We are all getting excited as the time for our personal dredges nears. Along with planning future dredge sites we also began discussing where future tow-cam sites could take place. Our last tow-cam was successful and produced some awesome images .

A picture from the first tow-cam; this is what t he bottom of the ocean looks like!
Another image of the sea floor. If you look close you can see a blue fish.

Tomorrow will be a busy day for the Flamingo Cruise (our official cruise name). We will dredge through the night and arrive at Wolf Island tomorrow. The ship will stop about 1 mile off shore where Chief scientist Karen and Dennis will board a small boat and go ashore in order to set up a GPS receiver at a benchmark. This receiver will collect the exact position of the antenna within just a few millimeters, comparing this location with a location that was recorded in 2002. With this data we can figure out if the island is possibly moving southwest due to spreading faults. We will then return to Wolf island 24 hours later and pick up the receiver.

This is what happens wheny ou have been on a boat for too long!
Gretchen in a suit of orange.