The excitement on board is currently about Hybis, rather than Autosub. After our 36 hour ride South, we’re now on the Casablanca Seamount, halfway between Madeira and Morocco. The water is warm, and a lovely shade of blue, and the crew even spotted a turtle paddling by yesterday.
The seamount rises up from a depth of around 4500m all the way to just 600m below the surface, and has lots of steep slopes and cliffs to challenge the navigation and obstacle avoidance on Autosub. That’s why we’re here, plus the fact that there happens to be reasonably good mapping of the area available.
Autosub has now been on two dives here, buth pretty similar, on the flat bottom around the edge of the seamount, with a maximum depth being 4360m. The team have been testing out various parts of the navigation system and obstacle avoidance – they did a run only 4m from the bottom in this morning’s test.
In the mean time, however, Hybis has finally made it to the bottom. Yesterday evening it visited the relatively flat areas, spending about three hours gently driving over a pretty featureless muddy plain. We saw a couple of large shrimps, quite a few sea cucumbers and sea anemones, and what we think was a sea slug. We also saw about half a dozen assorted cans and bottles. 🙁
At the end of the dive, Hybis touched down and used its scoop to gather up a large quantity of the bottom sediment, along with a mystery object sitting on the surface. We then patiently waited the 90 minutes of so it takes to wind in 4.5km of cable to find out what we’d captured. It turned out to be less interesting than we hoped – most likely a piece of ‘clinker’, the waste product from the coal-fired boilers of the old steamships. Apparently there are trails of the stuff on old steamship routes.
Today Hybis went down again, this time on the side of the seamount. It turns out that it’s seriously steep. Most of the video looks like shots of a ski area, with rocks, and steep sediment-covered slopes. Again, we’ve seen a few shrimps, and the occasional fish, but this time there have been whip corals and crinoids on the rocks as well.
Hybis has two horizontal thrusters for mobility, but relies on the cable from the ship to move any serious distances, and to keep it from hitting the bottom and stirring up the sediment. That’s pretty much fine for flat bottoms, but the vehicle has had quite an exciting time on the cliffs of the seamount. At one point Hybis touched down to try to collect a bucket full of samples. Unfortunately, the cable then pulled it off the rock and over a small cliff. Apparently it went completely upside down in the process! It still seems to be OK, although one of its lights has become detached.
I’ve included a couple of pictures from Hybis in this report. Sorry the quality is so poor – they are photographs of the live video from the vehicle.
The pics from hybis are amazing!! Would the shrimp at that depth be huge at the surface (like the coffee cup?). It would be the size of a large dog, and really difficult to walk down the park 😯 😯
Yellow wellies ❓ 😎
That’s not yellow, that’s pure imitation leather with fake fur lining ❗ 🙄 No expense spared in buying the cheapest steel toed rigger boots I could find 😯
It’s amazing.
Do Bramley and Viet cave? They look very at home looking at that mud – maybe they’d enjoy some peak caves?
How big is a “large shrimp”? 😯
It does look a lot like peak cave mud. Would you like me to ship you a sample back for comparison purposes? 🙂
Big shrimp? It’s hard to say from the pictures because it’s a bit difficult to judge distance, but my guess is around 8cm long. Some biology expert will probably come on here now and tell me its only 1cm long!
Am I remembering right… when I did that introduction dive, everything seemed bigger than it really was. Then maybe 1cm might be right – too small for a bbq then. 😀
Amazing pixs from the depths Richard!
Be cool if Hybis got a picture of an Atlantian, mermaid, or even Poseidon though… 😛
Do you think that can be arranged? It would be a scoop for the blog! 😆