 |
|
 |
 |
 |
|
 |
|
 |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
 |
DISPATCH 4: "Deep Vision" - 6.03.2006 | Mark Carroll 
The Miami Terrace is a craggy place. From its deepest point at 2,200 feet in the Straights of Florida,
the terrace quickly shoots upward over a thousand feet to its apex. Along the steep slope, dark overhangs
and caves are hidden among massive rock slabs and boulders. Flat terrain in such an unwelcoming landscape
is hard to come by. But, that was exactly what Erika Raymond of the Ocean Research & Conservation
Association hoped to find.
Luckily, a previous recon dive had found what promised to be a suitable site for an intriguing project called the Eye-in-the-Sea. In its simplest form, Eye-in-the-Sea is a video camera...on steroids. It has all the capabilities of a traditional camera, but it is capable of operating deep underwater (up to 3,000 feet down) for days at a time. Such an extreme environment requires that the unit withstand tremendous crushing forces, as well as the whims of deep-sea animals. So, it is mounted within the protection of a steel structure and anchored to the seafloor by its own weight. Still, Raymond shared one video clip from a past mission of a Pacific sleeper shark knocking around the 200-pound unit like it was nothing. Raymond and her fellow researchers, including Tammy Frank and Tracey Sutton from the Harbor Branch Oceanographic Institution, hoped to use the Eye-in-the-Sea to track day-to-night changes in fish and crustacean movements. "What's down there?" said Raymond, as she clicked through some video files on her laptop. "What's the behavior of these animals? What are their rhythms? That, on the simplest level, is what we want to find out." 
That was the reason the team needed to study not only the animals, but the differences in their habits and numbers as the cycles of day and night unfolded in almost complete darkness deep beneath the sea. Without such information, any ecological picture of the deep-water reef system would be incomplete. On the aft deck, Raymond waited for the sub to surface from its morning dive. The pilot had radioed that they had recovered the Eye-in-the-Sea that Raymond had placed on a dive the day before. She was anxious to see how the unit had fared. After the sub had been hoisted back aboard ship and secured to the deck, Raymond and her colleagues wrestled the unit off the front of the sub (like a fork lift, the Johnson-Sea-Link had used a set of spike-like arms to lift the Eye-in-the-Sea from the seafloor). The plan was to prep and re-deploy the camera as soon as possible, but Raymond needed to review the initial footage first. "Video provides instant gratification," Raymond said, as she poured over the images. "It's something real to show people what it is like down there. A picture is worth a thousand words...or a thousand data points, I suppose." Blog 4: "Early or Late" - 6.03.2006 Four a.m. Blog hard. Coffee useless. On the deck, the scientists are relentlessly chasing plankton. Copepods sleep, don't they? It's not so bad. I like the dawn (but prefer to actually wake up to it). It's a crazy schedule everyone is keeping really. There are ops on the boat just about around the clock... so much to do, to discover and to uncover. What was I saying about tranquility at sea? 
|
|
| ||
