The Otter trawl did successful bring up a variety of marine life, including a lot of fish, shrimp, and starfish, but very little coral.
These fish were photographed by Dann Blackwood, and then returned back to their home in the sea.
A CTD was planned for immediately after the Otter trawl, but it was having some electronic problems, so it was postponed until those were fixed. The two Electronics Techs, Kevin and Victor, worked quickly to exchange parts and had the CTD working a couple of hours later. Tina was very excited because she was going to get her opportunity for a deep, over 4,000 meters, CTD. If you remember from the beginning of the trip, a CTD was done in about 2,000 meters of water, but Tina's main goal was to do one in over 4,000 meters of water. A CTD collects 12 different water samples at 12 specific depths in the water column, and then that water is analyzed using various geochemistry tests. The current water chemistry is used as a comparison to the geochemistry found in the fossilized corals, which helps compare the past water chemistry and composition from thousands of years ago to the present. Also, attached to the CTD were the Styrofoam cups!
The cups were stuffed with paper to help them keep their shape and put inside stockings before being secured to the CTD frame.
The cups along with the CTD went to a depth of about 4,200 meters, which is about 410 times atmospheric pressure. As a comparison for the depth and pressure, when a human goes to a depth of only 60 meters their lungs shrink to the size of grapefruits, which would most likely cause death. It is amazing that these little cups would even survive a depth of 4,200 meters. But here is the final result once they returned with the CTD to the ship.
They all mostly maintained their shape and decorations, but they just shrunk down to about half their previous size! AWESOME!
I actually put a scale on one of my cups. From the bottom to the top of my full sized cup was 7 centimeters, and now the same area is only 4 1/2 centimeters. We will be doing one more CTD in another area in a couple of days, and another batch of cups will go down with it. I will be busy decorating a couple more for possible student souvenirs.
The last news for the day was the huge boulders that were collected in rock dredge #19. The corals group is not trying for these huge rocks, but they do like the marine life that lives on them. Unfortunately, the rocks are so big and rough that all the life gets scraped off or destroyed. The current plan for tomorrow is to complete a couple more dredges around this location before traveling further west.