The November, 2012, ECOGIG research cruise aboard the R/V Falkor has been successfully fulfilling its mission to study the repercussions of the Macondo blowout on Gulf of Mexico benthic ecosystems. Below are some pictures from the cruise taken by Debbie Nail Meyer (of Schmidt Ocean Institute, owner and operator of R/V Falkor and contributor of the operations of R/V Falkor, all of its embedded equipment, ROV Global Explorer MK3, as well as the associated technical and logistical support for this ECOGIG research cruise). Debbie's cruise log includes these entries:
Departing Pascagoula, November 6
Equipment Testing and Calibration, November 7
Diving for Deep-Sea Corals, November 8
Detecting Oil from Sky and Sea, November 10
Planning on the Fly, November 12
Deep-Sea Corals Under Stress, November 13
Diving on the Megaplume, November 14
Landing the Lander, November 15
Percolating Seeps, November 16
OC26 Lander Recovered, November 18
Completing the Lander Leg, November 19
Collecting Corals, November 21
Monitoring Corals Impacted by Oil, November 22
University of Georgia Post Doc Sara Kleindienst (middle) and PhD student Maggie Esch (left) are part of the twelve-person science team on the first leg of the cruise. Here they are pictured with Beth Orcutt (right), a senior research scientist at Bigelow Laboratory for Ocean Sciences. (Image by Debbie Nail Meyer, Schmidt Ocean Institute)
Recovering the multicorer after it collected sediment samples from the seafloor. See the cruise log entry titled Mucking in Mud for an explanation of core subsampling. (Image by Debbie Nail Meyer, Schmidt Ocean Institute)
ROV Global Explorer MK3 is part of the instrumentation supplied by the Schmidt Ocean Institute for the research cruise. See the cruise log titled Deep-sea Surprises for an explanation of its imaging capabilities. (Image by Debbie Nail Meyer, Schmidt Ocean Institute)
The entire shipboard party aboard the R/V Falkor. It takes much more than the twelve scientists aboard to operate successfully. (Image by Debbie Nail Meyer, Schmidt Ocean Institute)
R/V Falkor. (Image by Debbie Nail Meyer, Schmidt Ocean Institute)