[Music plays]
[Ship engine humms]
(Rod Quinn) Land Ho! We have Meyer Rock
and McDonald Island just out just fine off the starboard bow.
It’s the first land we’ve sighted in about 20 odd days
so everyone will be excited to see some terra firma.
[People chatter]
(Mike Coffin) So it’s been a very fine morning for science.
We’ve circumnavigated McDonald Islands nearly twice now
and we’ve identified six plumes detonating from the sea floor
which we presume are hyper thermal vents.
So we’re really excited about going back to them and sampling them.
[Ship enging humms]
Three days ago we arrived in the vicinity of the McDonald Islands
and the sea floor around these islands has never been mapped before.
We’ve just completed our fifth
circumnavigation of the Island’s mapping
and we’ve found a number of fascinating features on the sea floor
that are probably small volcanoes circling the island
and we’ve observed the first evidence for
hydrothermal systems on some of these volcanoes
but also on flat sea floor around the Islands. So we’re very excited
to be able to go and sample those when the weather allows us.
The southern ocean is iron deficient and iron is required for phytoplankton
to grow and bloom and it’s
very important for the earth’s ecosystem
that these phytoplankton produce half the oxygen that we breathe.
So this is part of the base of the food chain with phytoplankton
and the iron is needed to nourish them and
our hypothesis is that the iron coming out of these
volcanic systems is nourishing the phytoplankton
and that is what we’re trying to test.
(Sally Watson) So we’re constantly mapping 24 hours a day
and we’re monitoring both the sea floor imagery
and the water column.
So we’ve got to make sure we keep an eye on both things
and as we were going across some [indistinct 03:59] we saw
what looked like some... a plume signature in the water column
so we interrogated that a little bit
and we went across it a few times and we found that
in fact there is quite a strong ascending
bubble signature in the water column.
Male: If they can turn across here,
so how much [indistinct 04:22] do you need?
(Male) I don’t know
(Female) Some big control that [indistinct 04:30] escalating.
(Male) That’s the baby right there isn’t it?
That part’s the part that moves, 17.
(Male) Yep the one with the hole in it. That’s two isn’t it?
(Female) Upwelling and spreading ranks and stuff like that. I mean...
[Ships engine humms]