Far North Science

The Puma, or “plume mapper,” vehicle uses sonar,
lasers, and chemical sensors to search wide areas
near the ocean floor to detect the telltale temperature,
chemical, and turbidity signals from hydrothermal
vent plumes. Credit: Hanumant Singh/WHOI

The dispatch titles tell a compelling tale all their own: Life on the Edge and Echoes from the Deep. Or how about Puma is unveiled and unleashed?

A team of scientists and engineers on the Arctic Gakkel Vents Expedition have now ventured hundreds of miles into the shattered summer pack aboard the icebreaker Oden on their mission to seek out new volcanic vents, map oozing submarine lava, and maybe greet and catalog some strange abyssal life.

So far, they’ve logged 24 different updates with glimpses of life aboard the ship and insight into the knotty problems that accompany launching robot subs to cruise beneath ice floes.

Even in an age where every snow-tramping adventurer with a biology degree and a snazzy diga-cam uploads dispatches to their website, this project sponsored by the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI) has been exceptionally informative.

The slide shows have got narrative flow, with captions that further the story told by the image rather than simply repeating the obvious details in words.

Check out There and Back Again, posted on July 21:

Sometime after 7 a.m. Friday, about 3,700 meters, or 2.3 miles under the Arctic Ocean ice cap, the robotic vehicle Puma lost a thruster on a mission to search for plumes from hydrothermal vents on the seafloor. Scientists, engineers, and the crew of the icebreaker Oden all mobilized to try to get the hobbled vehicle back to the surface, to guide Puma to a rendezvous with Oden in the shifting ice pack, and to make a hole in the densely packed ice for Puma to surface safely.

With funding from NASA and the National Science Foundation, the 30-member team launched the expedition from the Norwegian island of Svalbaard on July 1 and have now spent more than two weeks launching the PUMA vehicle and conducting experiments, according to a story posted on-line.

Destination was the little-known Gakkel Ridge, a mid-ocean ridge formed by the inexorable spreading of the North American tectonic plate from the Eurasian plate — and helps cut off the Arctic Ocean from the world’s other seas.

“This is an exciting opportunity to explore and study a portion of Earth’s surface that has been largely inaccessible to science,” said WHOI geophysicist Robert Reves-Sohn in a story about the expedition. “Any biological habitats at hydrothermal vent fields along the Gakkel Ridge have likely evolved in isolation for tens of millions of years. We may have the opportunity to lay eyes on completely new life forms that have been living in the abyss beneath the Arctic ice pack.”

Map of the Arctic Ocean, looking down on the North Pole,
shows the Gakkel Ridge, Nansen Basin, and the proposed
cruise track of the Oden. Credit: WHOI

Here’s background from WHOI:

The Gakkel Ridge extends roughly 1,800 kilometers (1,100 miles) from north of Greenland toward Siberia. It is both the deepest ocean ridge — ranging from 3 to 5 kilometers (1.8 to 3 miles) beneath the ice cap — and the slowest spreading tectonic plate boundary anywhere on Earth. The ridge moves roughly one centimeter (1/3 inch) per year, about 20 times slower than most other ridges.

At most mid-ocean ridges, Earth’s crust spreads apart, allowing hot magma from the mantle to come up and form new ocean crust. The enormous heat sparks chemical reactions between crustal rocks and the seawater that seeps down into them.

These chemical reactions produce hot, mineral-rich fluids that spew like geysers from seafloor vents, as well as massive deposits of minerals, such as copper and zinc. These hydrothermal fluids also contain chemicals that sustain rich communities of unusual life forms, which thrive via chemosynthesis, rather than photosynthesis.

Many geologists believed the Gakkel Ridge region would be too geologically cold to produce hydrothermal vents. And yet during a 2001 expedition, researchers found signs of such venting in the Arctic. Where there are vents, there may be unusual seafloor life forms.

The Swedish icebreaker Oden will carry 30 researchers
from Longyearbyen, Svalbard, to the Gakkel Ridge and
back to Tromso, Norway. The ship is shown here steaming
across a break in the Arctic ice during an engineering
test cruise in June 2007.
Credit: Hanumant Singh / WHOI

The Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution is a private, independent organization in Falmouth, Mass., dedicated to marine research, engineering, and higher education. Established in 1930 on a recommendation from the National Academy of Sciences, its primary mission is to understand the oceans and their interaction with the Earth as a whole, and to communicate a basic understanding of the ocean’s role in the changing global environment.