It’s the last day of the cruise!  I can’t believe it!  The time on board has flown by and – as we throw ourselves into packing and report writing – it’s also important to take a few moments to reflect…

I’ve had a few requests (mostly from other sponge enthusiasts!) for an update after my blog earlier in the cruise.  I can confirm that we’ve been successful in sampling lots of types of sponge from the different locations, all the…

We have just left Vayda Seamount and are now sampling on another seamount in the Researchers’ Seamount Chain.  The wonderful sampling that occurred at Vayda, inspired Mrs. Robinson to write an amazing poem:   The Vayda Seamount.   Four thousand…

This is the second part of the questions asked by school children from London. 2)   Corals and Climate What kinds of coral are there? This question could take a long time to answer so I will try my best to…

A few weeks ago, a class from a school in London got together to think up some questions to ask the scientists on board. Topics range from how a polystyrene cup shrinks when sent to the bottom of the ocean…

Sometimes we find pieces of sea urchin amongst the fossil coral rubble. Most often we get spines or fragments of exoskeleton (its round ‘shell’), but we did find one large whole exoskeleton and recently some tiny whole ones as well.…

Seven weeks is a long time at sea. However, I feel like it’s gone really very quickly! It’s amazing to think that we’ve got less than a couple of weeks left on our expedition. I asked a number of the…

I am of average height. I am well aware that I am dwarfed by many animals, like elephants and giraffes. In the oceans, organisms can even grow bigger than terrestrial animals as they are not limited by gravity like land…

We have visited two seamounts and successfully sampled for fossil and live corals, as well as a lot of seabed mud and water from different depths. It is great to have so many really valuable samples on board. There is…

Moin moin Vema! After a 4-day transit which included a small bonfire festivity we arrived just this morning at our next sampling location: the Vema transform fault. This transform fault displaces the Mid-Atlantic Ridge (MAR) axis by about 300 km…