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MISSION DISPATCH 10 • 09/05/01 Today's Weather - images courtesy of NOAA & RSMAS Dispatch by Rebecca Johnson - HARBOR BRANCH Oceanographic Institution Latitude: 40°23'59"N • Longitude: 68°8'40"W Are you wondering what it's like to explore the deep sea in a submersible, to drop beneath the surface and spend several hours in a world that is so very different from our own? Come join us on a dive in Oceanographer Canyon. 
All traces of the sunset's colors have ebbed from the western horizon. Overhead, the Milky Way is a pale brushstroke curving across the night sky. The JOHNSON-SEA-LINK perches on the main deck, awash in bright light, a compact bundle gleaming metal and acrylic against a backdrop of dark water, dark sky. The pilot is ready, the crew poised for action. You ease yourself down through a circular opening into the sphere and settle into your seat. The hatch overhead is closed, as is the one on the aft chamber, and the launch commences. The sub is slowly lifted upward and back out over the stern. For a moment you hang suspended just above the heaving surface of the sea. Then with a gentle splash, the sub enters the water and descends. The submersible sinks slowly, bathed in its own pool of incandescent light, beyond which all is inky blackness. You wait and watch - and are rewarded. Some of the drifters of the deep soon 
appear. Ghostlike, they glide into view for a few fleeting seconds before being swallowed up
by the darkness that surrounds the sub. There are tiny fish clothed in eerie green polka dots.
Neon-eyed shrimp with sharply angled antennae. A lone squid that shoots out a puff of glowing
ink. Impossibly slim snipefish that undulate like ribbons in an unseen breeze.
Gelatinous medusae (jellyfish), ctenophores, and salps pulse by, some bulbous, some petite, but nearly all as transparent as glass. And they are numerous - just the opposite of what you'd expect based on the MOCNESS tows. At 1300 feet you spot your first Nanomia, its curtain of tentacles deployed, waiting for a meal. Soon there are several colonies in view, each twisting this way and that, with their swimming bells pumping as they flee from the sub's light. The pilot maneuvers the sub to capture one siphonophore after another until the canisters are full. 
At 2100 feet, a tiny flash of scarlet! It's another of the remarkably red ctenophores that was
collected a few days ago, which is very likely a new species. The sub's video cameras record its
behavior.
The hours pass quickly and then too soon it's time to return to the surface. About thirty minutes later you're back on deck in the familiar world of air and light, carrying a precious cargo of fragile inhabitants from the wondrous realm you encountered on your excursion far below. Do you have a question for the researchers or the ships crew on this ocean expedition? Just ask a question @Sea in our MISSION FORUM!  | |
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