August 11, 2026
Today I woke up and just missed the end of the science survey for Southern Hydrate Ridge. I was a little sad about it, but I needed to get some sleep and there are plenty more things to look forward to! I ate a quick breakfast and went down to the Main Lab to catch up on blogging while we transited to Slope Base, our fourth site.
Once we arrived, I went up to the ROV control van and Jason was launched for our deepest dive of the trip, down to 2900 meters! Jason descends at ~30 meters / minute, so most of my shift was spent watching it descend through the water column. During that time, I got to try controlling Jason’s arm, which was awesome. The control is essentially a small model of the actual arm, with joints you can move around and buttons to open and close the jaws. Eventually Jason reached to the bottom, where we found the junction box to be turned and saw an adorable octopus, as well as a couple Venus fly trap anemones, a sea cucumber, and a crab.
My shift ended and I grabbed a yummy bean and rice burrito before heading back to lab to wash off some camera parts and scrape thousands of barnacles off one of the 2025 BEPs. I made some pretty good mileage with my tiny plastic scraper! After I had felt the sun a bit too long and started worrying about getting burnt, I went back inside to grab some more coffee and a snack. I think I’ve been averaging around 4 (tiny) cups of coffee per day, which isn’t too dreadful at all. The 24/7 accessibility is sweet.
After watching Jason get reeled back up onto the ship, I learned about the CTD profile process and how to take water samples from the Niskin bottles. We did two casts, a shallow one down to 280 meters, followed by a deep one down to ~2900 meters. For the deep cast, we put all our Styrofoam cups in a bag and secured it to the frame so that they would shrink! I love how mine came out.
This cruise has been a great opportunity to learn about different pathways into marine science; I’ve been talking to a lot of the people on board about their careers and it seems like there’s a lot of variation in how one can get involved in these kinds of research cruises.
Some people were playing Mario Kart today. I need to get in on that.
August 10th, 2026
Last night we transited 4 hours to our second site, Oregon Offshore! The rocking of the waves against the boat was a lot more violent when we were transiting, so I had a hard time getting to sleep. My room is on the starboard side of the boat, so I hear the waves extra well at night.
This morning, I woke up and grabbed a quick breakfast before heading to the ROV van for my first shift of the day! There were a ton of albatross on the water, which I associate with “Albatross Soup,” so that puzzle became a topic of conversation between myself, Alex, and Maddy.
On my watch, Jason dove to a depth of ~573 meters to retrieve a BEP installed in 2025 and replace it with a 2026 BEP. There were tons of sable fish at the bottom, and still some particles in the water, but less ctenophores at that depth. Learning how to log events and take pictures of cool things has been really fun!
For lunch I had a lifechanging vegetarian patty melt sandwich (I don’t know what meat substitutes the galley uses yet, but it was incredible!!) and then I headed back to the Main Lab. At our next stop, Slope Base (2900 m water depth), we’re going to send down some Styrofoam cups on a deep CTD cast, and the pressure will crush all the air out of the cups and shrink them down. So, most of my afternoon was spent drawing various sea creatures on cups. We had our group meeting at 14:00 and learned a little about how sextants work.
I also watched some chlorophyll processing happen! We learned more about how Mariela and Joe collect the data they need from the water samples we’ve been gathering. I think watching them do things in the lab is healing the part of me that was disheartened by college chemistry lab classes.
After a couple hours of transit, we got to the Southern Hydrate Ridge and started a long dive to turn a digital still camera and survey the site. Most of my time in the ROV van was spent watching Jason descend ~700 meters to the bottom. On the way down, we saw some cool creatures, including sharks! They swam down with us to around ~140 meters depth before losing interest. Further down we saw tons of lantern fish swimming around. Once we made it to the sea floor, we saw bright red rockfish, a couple other weird looking fish, and a crab! I got pretty sleepy by the end of my shift at midnight, so I went back down to the lab, finished drawing on my second cup, and went to sleep. The curtains around my bed have been a gamechanger. I’m still finding my way around the ship, which is hard when all the doors look the same, but it’s getting easier.
August 9, 2026
Today at 10:00, VISIONS ‘26 departed from Newport, Oregon on the Revelle. On our way out, we passed a few green channel markers, and the last one had a few sea lions sleeping on it! As soon as we got out onto the open ocean, the waves got pretty big and it took some time for me to adjust to the rocking. En route to our first site, the Oregon Shelf (depth of 80 meters), we learned more about the ROV Jason and our role in logging the dives. We also learned about how to set up the CTD for deployment. We took turns hopping up onto the yellow frame containing the CTD and other instruments. Once we got to the site, we had our abandon ship drill and tried on our beautiful orange emergency suits.
During the first dive, a barnacle-clad BEP (Benthic Experiment Platform) deployed in 2025 was replaced with a new BEP, and a few sea stars were displaced from their house in the process. I was surprised by the density of ctenophores/cnidarians/other invertebrates in the water; throughout the entire descent from the ocean surface to the bottom, small creatures were floating around everywhere. They varied in size a decent amount, although it’s hard for me to tell the exact scale of things so far. It’ll be interesting to see how this compares to the deeper sites we’re visiting later in the expedition.
During the afternoon, I watched Jason get reeled up out of the water after its first dive with the 2025 BEP attached to it. Close to the ROV, there are a bunch of football-shaped objects that get clipped onto the cable when it descends and removed when it comes up. These footballs keep the cable suspended away from Jason when it’s the water, so that it doesn’t get wrapped up in the equipment. When Jason came up, the water became a lot more turbid at the surface even before the ROV became visible. A lot of mud made it up to the surface as well. Then, I walked around the boat for a while and practiced taking some photos, and did some computer work in the Main Lab.
My first shift in the ROV control van (which looks suspiciously like a shipping container from the outside) started at 20:00 and I learned how to do camera logging. There were some technical issues getting to the bioacoustic sonar, but we made it down eventually and now (22:00) we’re currently watching the Jason team working with the equipment.
I’m looking forward to taking more photos and documenting this trip. Today is (almost) gone, today was SO fun, tomorrow is another one! I love science.