Today’s activity focused on the exchange of personnel and equipment during a brief port call. We arrived in Cocodrie at around 6:00am and left for the USM facility at the Stennis Space Center (3 hours’ drive each way) in preparation for the next leg of the cruise. Planned sampling activities include:
- Towed Acrobat profiling vehicle fitted with CDOM fluorometer intended to produce two dimensional sections of physical properties as well as a qualitative indication of the presence of hydrocarbons.
- HARP, a seafloor-mounted acoustic monitoring device that will be placed in the research section of MC118 where it will record marine mammal calls for later analyses
- ASD, a multispectral sensor that will be used to measure the intensity and color of light from the sun and reflected from the sea surface; these data will be used to ground-truth NASA over-flights that are scheduled to start tomorrow
- CO2 sensor, a large sensor intended for buoy mounting but, in our case, will be suspended from the side at each station
- Trace metal sampling to determine whether trace metals can be used to track the dispersal of the hydrocarbons.
- An ROV to measure the concentration of oil aggregates at various depths in the upper water column
- Box coring for more samples and with additional subsampling for specific programs.
- Other water sampling to fulfill requests from various investigators.
As these samples are acquired, I will provide more detail and will provide some background on the individuals for whom the samples are being taken. As of this writing, we are en route to our first station near the Southwest Pass of the Mississippi River with an anticipated 07:00 arrival. At this station, we will use the small boat to collect baseline surface water samples for trace metal analyses and we will test some of the other gear to assure that it is ready for the deeper stations later in the morning.