Deep Sea Vents: Sub

DO NOT USE UNTIL PROFESSIONAL TITLE IS CHANGED – Emeritus Professor Marine Biosciences

music
ambience: submarine, Alvin, Woods Hole

When you’re studying sea life at the bottom of the ocean, you can’t just step out of your submersible and take samples – the pressure and the extremes of temperature would be too great. Well, in the next few minutes, we’ll hear how it’s done. I’m Jim Metzner, and this is the Pulse of the Planet.

Craig Cary is an associate professor at the University of Delaware. He’s been investigating the life forms that exist around undersea hydrothermal vents. They’re pockets of extremely hot water, amidst an otherwise frigid environment.

“One of the most difficult things in doing this type of work is that you’re doing you’re doing all of the collection and all of the monitoring of the chemistry from inside a submersible using mechanical arms, and you’re two and a half kilometers down on the bottom of the ocean. The dives last nine hours and you’ve got five hours on the bottom. It’s a very constrained environment, and so we have to be very careful, and we have to design our strategies for collection on a day-to-day basis very carefully. That goes down to the instrumentation and the equipment that we use for collection. On the submersible, every day, will be mounted a a piece of equipment we call “the sipper”, and the sipper is basically a little gizmo that we developed that has 12 glass syringes, and a little pump. And what it does is, basically we can position a little wand. That wand has on it a thermometer, so we can get a very accurate temperature, and it also has a little tube at the end of the wand. That tube goes all the way back down and into a given syringe.”

Among the creatures that Craig Cary has been investigating are tube worms – sea worms that live in small, papery like tubes.

“So, we can do twelve samples on each dive, so we may go to one colony of worms and go in and sample twelve different tubes and then collect the worms.”

We’ll hear more on deep sea hydrothermal vents in future programs. Pulse of the Planet is made possible by the National Science Foundation. I’m Jim Metzner.

music

Deep Sea Vents: Sub

Working at the bottom of the ocean has its challenges.
Air Date:03/14/2008
Scientist:
Transcript:

DO NOT USE UNTIL PROFESSIONAL TITLE IS CHANGED - Emeritus Professor Marine Biosciences

music
ambience: submarine, Alvin, Woods Hole

When you're studying sea life at the bottom of the ocean, you can't just step out of your submersible and take samples - the pressure and the extremes of temperature would be too great. Well, in the next few minutes, we'll hear how it's done. I'm Jim Metzner, and this is the Pulse of the Planet.

Craig Cary is an associate professor at the University of Delaware. He's been investigating the life forms that exist around undersea hydrothermal vents. They're pockets of extremely hot water, amidst an otherwise frigid environment.

"One of the most difficult things in doing this type of work is that you're doing you're doing all of the collection and all of the monitoring of the chemistry from inside a submersible using mechanical arms, and you're two and a half kilometers down on the bottom of the ocean. The dives last nine hours and you've got five hours on the bottom. It's a very constrained environment, and so we have to be very careful, and we have to design our strategies for collection on a day-to-day basis very carefully. That goes down to the instrumentation and the equipment that we use for collection. On the submersible, every day, will be mounted a a piece of equipment we call "the sipper", and the sipper is basically a little gizmo that we developed that has 12 glass syringes, and a little pump. And what it does is, basically we can position a little wand. That wand has on it a thermometer, so we can get a very accurate temperature, and it also has a little tube at the end of the wand. That tube goes all the way back down and into a given syringe."

Among the creatures that Craig Cary has been investigating are tube worms - sea worms that live in small, papery like tubes.

"So, we can do twelve samples on each dive, so we may go to one colony of worms and go in and sample twelve different tubes and then collect the worms."

We'll hear more on deep sea hydrothermal vents in future programs. Pulse of the Planet is made possible by the National Science Foundation. I'm Jim Metzner.

music