Last night Mirko had the opportunity to use his multi-corer for the first time at a depth of 3500 meters. Normally the multi-corer is used in shallow coastal waters. To me, scientific monitoring is like making a movie, “hurry up and wait”.  It takes an hour each way to lower one of the instruments to 3,000 meters. So there are lots of activity going on during the “casting” of the CTD carousel and when it is brought back to the surface. In the meantime the scientists are either waiting, or marking sample test tubes and bottles with the appropriate information.

Back to the multi-corer which consists of four clear plastic tubes.  When it reaches the bottom, it is automatically activated by a computer to drive the cylinders into the seabed and is then brought up. Unfortunately only three of the cylinders were full of sediment.  This was a different station from yesterday and the sediment color was completely different from that brought up yesterday:  a more yellow, reddish color. On top of each cylinder there was about 8 cm of sea water, which captures a pristine picture of the sea bottom, completely untouched. This was rather mind boggling when you think at which depth it came from. Mirko then took one of the cylinders and inserted another one in the middle, to get a inner core sediment sample.

Multi Corer with Mirko Magagnini, Francesco Tropea, Giuseppe Siena

Then different layers were scraped off the top and put into petri dishes to be frozen. Mirko told me that some of this sediment might be 1 million years old; generally speaking a core of 15-20 cm covers 1 million years.   Just a comment on yesterdays ‘box corer’, core samples were made with plastic tubes which were inserted into the box and pulled out. Then the remaining sediment-mud was put into a sieve, while water was used to sort of pan for gastropods ("cute" half centimeter hard shell gray organisms in this case) and other meiofauna.

Rosario Lavezza and Giovanna Maimone at work backstage

Today I got the opportunity to help with the CTD casting, that is what they call the carousel with the 1 meter bottles attached to it. These special plastic bottles do have a name: they are called “Niskin Bottles” and run around 1,000 euro each. While 'CTD' stands for Conductivity, Depth, and Temperature, there are other scientific instruments attached to the carousel, which record fluorescence, salinity, and currents. All the monitoring is tracked by sophisticated computer software. A green line tracks fluorescence, red line tracks temperature, blue oxygen and yellow salinity. All this can be seen in real-time. Taking the water samples is called firing the bottles.  Again this is triggered by computer, at different sea levels. The fact that this is a ‘multi-disciplinary” cruise is great, because everyone can compare notes and results, using the same water from the same levels, and generate interesting questions. Or the data can easily be merged to get a global picture a particular area under study.

Lionel Guidi cast his plankton nets this afternoon and the finds were remarkable for me as they captured some transparent worms that were the size of a large sewing needle. With red bands surrounded their bodies and their very large red eyes, they were easy to see.  There was also small transparent jellyfish and a very tiny shrimp: this was all at about 200 meter level.

Just a quick update on our position on the map, we have now sampled the vertical line and will be heading Southwest toward Sicily. Well that's all for now, I am Siri Campbell reporting from the CIESM SUB1 cruise.