Cruise Blog by Frances Cooke: Day 11
July 17th, 2021
Text and photo: Frances Cooke (PhD Candidate in the Gas Hydrates and Free Gas Reservoirs research group at CAGE, working within the SEAMSTRESS project).
We completed two seismic lines, at Svyatogor ridge in the night and there were no whales in sight. The wind speed was low for the first line and had gradually picked up by the start of the second line. We then recovered the guns and streamer just before breakfast, before heading back to our NKR active seismic site. During the first half of the day, the winds reached up to 18 m/s, which was far too much to redeploy the seismic at NKR, so we waited. There was no whale watching.
When the winds had dropped down to 11m/s, we decided to deploy the seismic and finally finish what we had started two days ago! We are nervously waiting for calm weather windows to appear so that we can get back the OBS. The OBS each have a programmed automatic release time, which is 16:00 tomorrow.
The wind dropped to a gentle breeze, and we swiftly recovered three out of the five OBS. The remaining two OBS from UiT are more difficult to see, and the fog had started to set in. We decided to leave them until the morning.
We shot our final seismic line after taking the break to recover the OBS, and after dinner, planned a water column survey over the NKR active seismic study area. Microbial mats discovered on the seafloor, during a previous cruise, suggest the release of methane gas and we might expect bubbles escaping from beneath the water bottom.
Fog and stillness
Read more about the SEAMSTRESS project here.
