Hello, I'm Vera. I have a passion for mud, since my early childhood days! Sorry Mum, think I'm never going to grow out of this playing-with-dirt-phase! Besides that, I am a PhD Student of the EUROPROX Graduate School at the University of Bremen. Daniel has invited me to this expedition, because I work on marine sediment sources and transport processes on the Galician continental slope and how these have been influenced by climatic changes in the past. Or let me put it like this: where does this sticky, soft, brown stuff we find on the bottom of the ocean come from, what is it made of, and how did it get there, where we find it today…? It's a bit of a Sherlock Holmes thing :) I admit.
Well let's put out to sea and get ourselves some material to study! This sounds easier than it actually is… It's certainly not my first time on a research vessel! However it is my first time on a vessel, whose mother tongue I don't speak nor understand, my first time on a Spanish vessel! An absolutely new experience in so many different ways! To be honest it took me a few days to cope with this totally different style of work and way of communication.
I came here with a little sampling priority list. One thing quite highly ranked was to get a surface sample (say the upper 30cm of the sediment layer at the bottom of the sea) from a certain position approximately 80km off the Ria de Vigo. I rather spare you the complicated science why this sample is of very importance for my data set… However it turned out that this expedition apparently had some difficulties to recover surface samples, meaning we weren’t able to pull a single surface sample on our deck so far! And by the time we reached "my" position yesterday evening nobody knew if it would work this time. Can anyone imagine my excitement!!! Finally 8:30 p.m. start of the first deployment, gear: a 6 tube Multicorer (in short MUC), fancy thing, samples the upper most tens of centimeter of sediment plus bottom water while preserving the sediment-water interface perfectly well (usually). 2000m water depth, heyho let's go! After ca. two hours of waiting and keeping my fingers crossed, finally the MUC surfaced again! There it is, you see the first shackles that attach the device to the winch rope, slowly more and more of the frame rises from the water, the hydraulics of the ships A-frame make hissing noises as they pull the device closer to the ships aft, and there you see the tubes: empty! empty. hmpf. Soon there was a theory why it failed to sample, so only a few minutes later the MUC was back in the water with a different strategy! Another two long hours of waiting. This time I decided to give my fingers a break, since it obviously didn't help anyway, so I spent the time watching "Shaun the Sheep" (Alle lieben Shaun das Schaaf… :) ). Well, roughly around midnight the second try was back on deck, and you know what: it was empty :(… again… because of some additional problems with the winch we were now left with two last throws only! So this time, for the third try, the decision fell for the Box Corer (presses a top and bottom open box into the ground and automatically shifts a shovel underneath, thus closing the bottom, before removing from the ground). Not such a fancy piece of technique like the MUC, rather robust actually, but does a petty good job on hard terrains, however also this one failed in all other tries before on this cruise… well, my expectations weren't all that high anyway anymore… But this time we had a special additional part fixed to it! An old food can!! Yes an empty open food can. That piece was supposed to prevent the shovel from releasing before the device penetrated the ground, which would in turn prevent any sampling, and we think was the problem with this device during earlier deployments. Everybody was hoping that this little food can would do the trick! Again roughly two hours of waiting, there it is again! You can already see some brownish gray mud on the outside of the box, it definitely was in the ground, oh please, let it be filled!! Carefully the box is removed from the device, one look, it's filled! By close to 2:30 in the morning I was the happiest girl on board!! I spent the rest of the "night" with my colleagues from the early morning shift sampling and securely storing away the material, we were waiting for so many hours! Very tired but still happy I fell into my bed by close to seven.
Finally I am very thankful to everyone onboard and at home making this cruise experience possible, muchas gracias a todos!