We’ve just taken delivery of very big, beautiful…?
Posted: June 28, 2012 Filed under: Investigator, RV Southern Surveyor, The Future Research Vessel Project 1 CommentHere’s the latest photo from the shipyard. I’ve never seen a trailer with so many wheels!
And, what we took delivery of, will be all under wraps for a few more weeks…
First map of floating plastics to help save baby turtles.
Posted: June 25, 2012 Filed under: Home, Investigator, Marine National Facility, RV Southern Surveyor Leave a comment- A manta net is deployed over the side of RV Southern Surveyor to detect floating plastics while the ship is underway..
- Julia Reisser stands next to the manta net onboard RV Southern Surveyor.
- Some of the plastic pieces collected during the research.
- UWA PhD student Julia Reisser, with a flatback turtle hatchling.
- A flatback turtle hatchling in a beach called Eco Beach, which is close to Broome.
A PhD student at The University of Western Australia is creating the first map to show the distribution of floating marine plastics in Australian waters, and models that chart the likely pathways of these plastics and sea turtle hatchlings.
“The early life of sea turtles occurs at the ocean’s surface, where there’s an increasing amount of floating plastics that are proving fatal to hatchlings,” PhD student Julia Reisser said.
Ms Reisser, who is also a CSIRO researcher, has been studying sea turtles for nine years and in 2010 she broadened her research to include marine plastics.
“My work is identifying the places contributing most to the increase in plastics in Australia’s oceans and how this links to sea turtle life cycles,” Ms Reisser said.
“We’re quantifying plastic pollution hazards and its distribution throughout Australia’s oceans, and contribute to a national marine debris audit being undertaken by CSIRO’s Wealth from Oceans National Research Flagship.”
The research is been undertaken onboard the Marine National Facility vessel Southern Surveyor, which is owned and operated by CSIRO, and available to all Australian scientists. Securing research time on board is highly competitive and allocated to quality science projects that are internationally peer reviewed and in the national interest. Once major voyages are allocated, the transit time between these is offered to early career researchers and students under the ‘Next Wave’ program.
“It’s an incredible experience as a PhD student to be the Chief Scientist onboard Southern Surveyor for a transit voyage, and to have access to a research vessel equipped with modern laboratory facilities and deep-water research technology,” Ms Reisser said.
The Southern Surveyor will be replaced in 2013 by Investigator, a new state-of-the-art 93.9-metre research vessel capable of spending up to 300 days a year at sea, and able to support scientific research across the oceanographic, climate, geological, fisheries and ecosystems disciplines.
- Trawl map
- Map of plastic concentrations
Southern Surveyor like you’ve never seen her
Posted: June 22, 2012 Filed under: Marine National Facility, Media Releases, RV Southern Surveyor Leave a commentBesides being one of Australia’s leading volcano experts, Professor Richard Arculus, from the Research School of Earth Sciences, which is part of the ANU College of Physical and Mathematical Sciences, is also a dab hand at photography.
He stitched together some great images of Southern Surveyor he took while he was on his recent voyage.
Enjoy!
Getting to the bottom of the Fijian Ocean
Posted: June 22, 2012 Filed under: Home, Investigator, Marine National Facility, RV Southern Surveyor, The Future Research Vessel Project Leave a commentAUSTRALIAN NATIONAL UNIVERSITY MEDIA RELEASE DISTRIBUTED Friday, June 15, 2012
Scientists will soon have a greater understanding of the dramatically spreading, rifting and faulting boundary of the Australian and Pacific tectonic plates, thanks to research from The Australian National University.
Professor Richard Arculus from the Research School of Earth Sciences, part of the ANU College of Physical and Mathematical Sciences, led a research team of geologists on a three-week research voyage over May to June.
In the waters between Fiji and the French territory of Futuna, Professor Arculus and his team have been investigating the widespread submarine volcanism and hydrothermal activity along this highly active part of the Australian-Pacific tectonic plate boundary.
“The area has long been regarded as a geological anomaly. If you look at any map of the world’s oceans that shows depths, Fiji and its basins to the east and west look really strange: anomalously shallow, with Fiji itself looking like the centre of a geological hurricane,” Professor Arculus said.
“What we found was the region to the north of Fiji is one that joins the colliding Pacific and Australian plates. These plates are respectively being driven beneath each other, the Pacific beneath Australia along the Tonga Trench, and Australia beneath the Pacific along the New Hebrides Trench. In between the ends of the trenches is a zone of faults and ridges where huge amounts of magma have erupted on the ocean floor, forming lots of underwater volcanoes and mineral-laden hot spring deposits.”
The research targeting this region was done on board Australia’s Marine National Facility (MNF) research vessel, Southern Surveyor, which is owned and operated by CSIRO, and is available to all Australian scientists.
“On this voyage, we made detailed maps of the seafloor with the ship’s high resolution multi-beam sonar system. Using these maps, we targeted areas of particularly intense volcanic, hydrothermal, and tectonic activity, obtaining samples of the seafloor and the water above the hot springs,” Professor Arculus said.
“We focused on recovering volcanic rock samples whose compositions will mirror those of their source regions in the Earth’s mantle. Now we have rock samples from a 1000km swathe from east to west that have tapped different mantle sources, giving us a window through space and time of the flow patterns of the mantle.
“With these samples, we have all the materials we need to be able to understand what’s been happening through time deep in the Earth beneath Fiji. The research could help us understand the distribution of seismic activity, tsunamis in the Pacific region, potentially rich deposits of copper and gold, and how the Earth works.”
In 2013 RV Southern Surveyor will be replaced by RV Investigator, a new state-of-the-art 93.9-metre research vessel capable of spending up to 300 days a year at sea, and able to support scientific research across the oceanographic, climate, geological, fisheries and ecosystems disciplines.
Photo by Charles Tambiah. Charles is a ARC “Engaging Visions” Researcher and a Science Photographer for the Australian National Centre for the Public Awareness of Science.
Ship building doesn’t get any faster than this!
Posted: June 20, 2012 Filed under: Home, Investigator 5 CommentsConstruction of RV Investigator is moving along quickly and here’s the first installment of time lapse footage from the Sembawang Shipyard, where Australia’s new marine research vessel is being built.
Fast Fact!
Posted: June 18, 2012 Filed under: Fast Fact!, Home, Investigator Leave a commentThe sheets of steel being used to construct RV Investigator weigh between 1.4 and 2.45 tonne and are 2.4 metres wide and 9.1 metres long.
Congratulations to Natalie Strickland!
Posted: June 12, 2012 Filed under: Home, Investigator Leave a commentCongratulations to Natalie Strickland who won our World Oceans Day competition.
Her prize is a LEGO® Investigator, which she won by subscribing to this blog.