Greeny News

dig through the seafloor sediments and looking back in time that the planet was thousands of years

Readers can ask questions of the expedition's scientists about their work and experiences at sea in a boat directly to the land Q & A session Tuesday, April 24

53 ° 46.74

S, 38 ° 06.67 W

It was the week of the mud. It's amazing what geologists can draw from the depths of the sea, taking account of a tower and a drainage tube glorified. Throughout this journey, the ship's public address systems were painting a picture of the ocean floor miles below us, showing us the mountains and valleys of depth. However, hidden in holes and trenches in the landscape are underground geological treasure bags, and this week the ship was looking for treasures.

One of the strangest concepts of oceanography is something called marine snow. There are small organisms that live near the ocean surface to be constructed from carbonate and silica in water. When they die, leaving behind fragments of thin shells, but solid, and they have nowhere to go but down. Throughout the vast oceans of the world, unimaginable amounts of these fragments of life flows slowly until you can not sink any lower. They settled on the ocean floor, above last year billions and billions of last year. The ocean is a cemetery.

But this cemetery has a story to tell. When the organisms are alive and construction of themselves, use their surroundings, and in so doing, we build the chemistry of the ocean in their own shells. If carbon-14 than carbon-12 in the ocean, nothing in the tank too. These chemical signals we talk about the weather, ice ages, ecology and more. Down below me in this boat, there is a history book. If only I could dig through the layers in the ocean, you can look back in time and see what the planet was like tens or hundreds of thousands of years.

This is where we get the drain pipe When geologists have discovered a bag of sediment, the team reached a weight on the shape of the back of a dart with a metal pipe up to 18 meters long. This is lowered onto the ship's side, nose down, and off you go. It sinks until it reaches the soft sediment on the speed and the club down on it. It functions as an apple corer, and when you remove a core of mud stabbed comes with it. And that's it. A replay of the geological mud. Today cores were collected from six to 18 meters long and geologists think that's enough for dozens of mud and possibly hundreds of thousands of years. Interestingly, this does not necessarily mean the mud while being pretty bad. We spent the week sailing around South Georgia in search of good places to pick up these books the history of clay library ocean floor. There was very little to do with the ocean surface, but flat and gray clouds and haze. I can easily see how seafarers in the early mists changing superstitious could turn into monsters.

The routine of the ship begins to take its toll on us. There may be little to distinguish one day from the next. Our latitude and longitude of change, and when our job changes slightly, but only a limited number of different things that occur. When the vessel is always the same as we travel east and west, so the sunset and sunrise times change, but otherwise it really would not know we were heading. A few days ago while I was at the gym, do the same thing I do most of the time, my iPod shuffled to the Eagles song "Hotel California" and felt a chill feeling of empathy. You can check in anytime you want, but you can never leave ...

load was carried out along the pier, sea lions and penguins last resting intact. Penguins anything less entertaining. Everyone can see them and their antics for hours. But we had hours. Soon it was time to return to the ship and the land disappeared into the mist again.

There is only one week marine science to go south.