CRUISE BLOG

As well as in the form of lava domes and seamounts (see earlier post), there is a third way magma can erupt onto the seafloor: as a fissure eruption. Fissure eruptions generally conjure up images of lava fountains erupting from long rifts in Iceland, and an underwater version of this eruption occurs 3000m deep at the […]

Throughout the cruise we’ve been deploying ocean-bottom seismographs (OBSs) onto the seabed.  We have now finished a total of 81 deployments and, to date, we have successfully recovered 48 of those, each with its own multi-component dataset from three geophone sensors used to measure three-dimensional ground motion, and a hydrophone which measures pressure waves in the […]

***This blog post follows on from the previous post (Part 1), so if anything sounds unfamiliar, check that one out too!*** We have been using three different sources of seismic energy during the cruise, all of which our ocean-bottom seismographs (OBSs) have recorded:i) a GI-gun array to image the sediment layers and the upper part of […]

For five days we had something new to look at on the horizon – sehr schön. The new German Science vessel, RV Sonne, joined us as we led a merry dance from drill site 504B to the Costa Rica Rift and back, then up to the Rift one more time. Following at a distance of ~9 km, the German […]

By Richard Hobbs, OSCAR PI Most scientists that study the ocean crust will have heard of the 504B. I heard about the site during my PhD when on a 6-month visit to Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, as it is now called, a research institute just north of New York in the United States. The drilling at […]

The Cook has just sailed under the Bridge of the Americas and safely docked in Balboa, drawing to a close three hugely successful cruises for the OSCAR project. On JC114 alone we’ve built up some impressive statistics, with:5280 nautical miles sailed,83 OBS’s deployed and recovered (plus two vertical arrays),95,500 airguns shots fired,11 billion cubic inches of […]