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Weather Not Cooperating

August 19-20, 2023:  High winds and seas have prevented field operations from happening over the last two days. The waves have been so choppy and winds blustery that Queens College Assistant Professor Dax Soule reports that “students have been modeling a range of hues not commonly seen on dry land.”  Nonetheless, he also reports on…

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Work Continues in Spite of Weather

August 18th, 2023:  The attempt to dodge the weather fronts continues for the science team aboard the R/V Thomas G. Thompson.  With a break in the weather, Jason went into the water at 0936 for a naked dive (Dive J2-1524) to clean the digital still camera. There was a short loss of power. The team…

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Pink Sea Urchin Visits

August 17, 2023: A beautiful colony of light orange anemones grows on the shallow profiler Science Pod base, along with a pink sea urchin, and feather stars, branching hydroids to the far right hosting nudibranch eggs.

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Busy Day of Dives

August 16th, 2023: Throughout the night and into the early morning,  Jason completed a series of dives here at the Oregon Offshore site. Jason successfully completed an exchange of the Shallow Profiler Science Pods at 01:47 and 05:18 respectively, in the morning.  After a short transit to the ROV was back in the water at 06:50 for Dive J2-1518,…

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Students and Guests Ready to Roll

August 15, 2023: As the R/V Thomas G. Thompson cleared the channel and headed into the Pacific, VISIONS’ students and guests posed for a picture to memorialize the occasion. Watch as events aboard unfold live here.

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Safety First

August 13, 2023: With 40 knot winds offshore, the Thompson was kept inshore for an extra day and plans made to switch operations to the nearest site, the Oregon Shelf – only an hour offshore. During the stay in port, the Thompson crew conducted a Safety meeting, including a requirement for all team members to don their…

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Slight Weather Delay

After a one-day weather delay, the RCA team will be departing aboard the R/V Thompson today, August 14th at ~1315 to head out to the Oregon Shelf site at 80 m water depth. It is a short steam of ~ 1 hr. The first Jason dive (J2-1512) will be to test the Jason winch and to clean and…

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Blue Sharks Encounter

This clip of ROPOS ROV video from dives R2330 and R2331 (compiled by UW student Leilani Combs) shows some of the aggressive behavior by the blue sharks we encountered during the OOI Oregon Offshore Deep Profiler deployments. Credit: UW/NSF-OOI/CSSF #NSFfunded @NSF @UWOcean pic.twitter.com/l75wX2rw6H — VISIONS Expeditions (@VISIONSops) September 6, 2022

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Operational for 8 years at 200 meters

Recovery of the OOI Cabled Slope Base Shallow Profiler mooring. The platform normally sits at 200m depth, stable instruments on one side and the profiler pod and winch on the other. The mooring is being turned for the first time since deployment in 2014! 

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Sea Spider

A pycnogonid (sea spider, a kind of arthropod) recovered along with other macrofauna samples from the ASHES hydrothermal vent field on Axial Seamount, while we conducted our OOI work. This individual is carrying eggs below its body, so it is a male.

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