Today was going to be the day. I could feel it in my bones and my stomach.
In the past 12 hours, I had not been thrown out of my bed while trying to sleep, and I hadn’t needed a death grip on the safety bar to take a shower. Come Wednesday evening, the forecast was for decreasing winds, and a swell that would finally get below 9 feet so we could dive again. For perspective, during the height of the storm, we had waves that sometimes crashed over the bridge of the ship, meaning they were over 30 feet tall. It takes the sea a long time to calm down after such a tumultuous event.
I woke up every 2 hours to check on weather conditions, and at 6 a.m., I stood on the back deck with Josh
We made a quick descent to the seafloor, about 600 meters east of Axial, and spent an hour and a half hovering above the seafloor, filling the virus sampler with seawater. This isn’t a glamorous sample, but it is critical for the microbiologists and virologists to understand what organisms are in the water that bathes and circulates through Axial Seamount, and how they are related to the organisms we detect in the vent fluids. We filtered over 300 liters, then made our trek west to the International District, an area of known high temperature venting at Axial Seamount.
We found our way to a large sulfide structure called Escargot, which is named after its shape. Escargot is a beautiful structure, covered in white filamentous microbial mats, purple ciliates, and all sorts of little worms and limpets. We used Giora’s Isobaric Gastight Samplers to capture low temperature fluid (~40°C) where microbes like to live, then high temperature fluid (~270°C) where microbes don’t like to live. By comparing the chemistry of the two, we can figure out what energy sources the microbes are using.
And that was that. We lifted off the bottom just shy of 10 p.m. ready for the return to the ship. The lab is busy tonight as we’re filtering water and measuring gas concentrations. But after so many days sidelined by weather, the optimist in me knows the science party is sleepy, but happy.