Wednesday 26th December 2007
By Margot Foster
The weather pattern changed overnight and the captain hove to at 0300 in the face of gale force winds gusting to 50 knots with snowstorms and sleet limiting visibility. The swell rose to 6metres. We woke up to the news that operations have been postponed and all decks closed until it’s safe to work…which may take 12 hours.
There’s some time off for those on day shift. Musicians gather in the bar, which is the most stable part of the ship, for a jam.
Four of us met there later in the day for a yoga session, our mats placed to follow the rolling of the ship, and the focus on sitting positions.
I spent time on the bridge watching the ice crystals begin to form mounds across the window ledges and beyond them the frisking sea sending spray into the wind. Dr Bertrand Richer De Forges is an authority on marine biology. He spends twelve hours a day bent over creatures found in the trawls. He has a feather star named after him ‘Gymnocrinus richeri’, and there’s a mollusc gastropoda he’s quite pleased with too ‘Petrochus deforgesi’.
Bertrand answers my question “How deep is ‘deep’?” without hesitation and my vocabulary grows a bit more. The littoral section of the seabed is from the seashore to 200m. This is the ‘shelf’. The bathyal section is between 200m to 2000m deep and makes up the ‘slope’. Then there’s the ‘abyssal’, which plummets to 6000 m. Beyond that lie the mysterious ‘hadal’ valleys, some 11000m below the surface of the ocean.
I’m told the deepest trawl took place near the Solomon Islands back in 1952 by the Danish vessel the Galathea. It trawled deeper than 10,000m. It was pointed out that such a trawl would require 15,000m of cable because you need one and half time times the depth to pay out behind. We carry 6,500 and the CTD has been dropped several kilometers to the sea floor.
Margot Foster is a journalist currently on board the Australian Aurora Australis, an Australian research vessel currently participating in the Census of Antarctic Marine Life (CAML, IPY project 53). She works with the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC).
