There's an element of risk in doing this voyage because this was a very violent eruption,
the likes of which the world hadn't seen for many, many decades.
The risk of erupting through the water column is probably the most likely risk.
You can also get large discharges of gas,
which makes it not particularly buoyant for ships,
and sometimes you can get pumice rafts
and a few additional things like that.
And the obvious risks, of course, that any mariner faces when they come to
small islands in the middle of the Pacific is shoaling, or shallow water.
Initially, what we hope to do is to circumnavigate the rim of the caldera.
The caldera is about five kilometers in diameter,
and will stay at about 200 meters water depth.
And the reason we do that is because
that's a depth that mitigates most eruptions.
It's that pressure of the water column sitting on top of any eruption
tends to suppress it so it doesn't reach the surface
So we'll do that first.
Then we're most likely to go right through the center of the caldera
because previously maps show that that was the deepest part of the water column
over the caldera itself.
About 150 meters.
Once we've done that and we've established that there is
some reasonable depth there, then the ship will map continuously
across the caldera and then come back.
But it'll always come back over a piece of ground
that it had mapped previously.
So there is known bathymetry or seafloor
under the hull at all times.
We're also going to ensure that each night that we're parked
off the volcano,
so we'll go some distance,
probably ten nautical miles off the volcano.
So we're never actually sitting stationary on the volcano at night time.
We will also ensure that equally, all the work
is done in daylight hours.
So we can see what's going on around us.
So us on the boat will be the first people
really to know if something's happening, if there’s a change.
This is an extremely
opportunistic, very rare event.
These eruptions, for example, these part subaerial,
part submarine eruptions, are quite rare.
And this one was particularly violent,
and it did a couple of strange things.
It produced an incredible blast in the atmosphere,
but also dislodged a lot of material.
So it was all sliding off the volcano
and disrupted a lot of telecommunication cables.
So it's a very rare event, probably once
in a lifetime for a career scientist.
So for us, this is an opportunity that we can't miss, but obviously
we need to follow all the protocols to do it safely.
So we're here in Hicks Bay, up in the northern part of East Cape.
We had a little bit of a lumpy ride for a couple of days coming up here,
and we've got about 70 nautical miles north of here
and realised that we can't hear the multibeam, the mulitbeam’s not
talking to the the software.
So we don't know what's gone wrong.
We don't think it's a software problem.
We think it's a hardware problem.
So you can see behind me there’s a vessel coming in
with three divers in from Auckland
who are going to go and have a look at the bottom of the hull
and check out the unit and see if we can...
We'll go from there.
So hopefully it can be resolved.
If not, it's a bit of a game breaker
So the multibeam unit effectively maps the seafloor
like we met topography on land.
But it uses sound signals that bounce off the seafloor to tell us
what the shape of that land is.
For this mission its importance is about a ten out of ten.
And without it, it's probably a bust.
What did he say?
Not there
So it's got busted off.
So we've just heard that it's got broken off.
The transducer.
So that's the worst possible thing that could happen,
which means obviously we have no multibeam.
So if we have no multibeam, we have no voyage at the moment.
So unless there's a plan C,
this might be the end of the road for us,
which is really unfortunate after all this effort.
How do I feel about it?
So how do I feel about all of this?
Well, very mixed emotions, I guess.
There’s been an enormous amount of effort to get to this point.
and obviously, if it's kaput, then it's all over.
And that will be very sad. But I can't fault everything that's been done by everybody.
A tremendous amount of effort by all.
Its guttering, of course.
I mean
enormous amount of effort
by many, many people
to get us to where we are today.
All in a very short amount of time.
We usually do this over about 18 months.
We did it in six weeks.
So a lot of people came to the party and a lot of people really performed.
But in the end you can still be caught out by something
that was completely unpredictable.