Today not only marks the end of Cruise AR049 but the end of the field component of the entire ADEON program.

Days are long aboard a research vessel with work going on 24 hours a day. There is time, however, during the few hours when not working (or sleeping) to relax and take care of ourselves. So what do we do in these non-work times?

Measuring the acoustic signatures of animals involves sending a soundwave into an aquarium and measuring the echo that returns from the animal. This echo allows us to measure the ‘target strength’ of an animal, which can be thought of as their acoustic signature. We can infer target strength for entire taxonomic groups (like deep-sea fishes or squids) when we measure target strength from many individuals.

Roughly half of the weight that we bring on a ship is devoted to Jason's Launch and Recovery System or LARS. Our particular one-of-a-kind LARS consists primarily of an umbilical cable, an electric winch, and a hydraulic crane. Now I'll tell you a bit more about this Jason LARS, since its what I know best.

This last ADEON cruise is beginning to wrap up, with our last CTD and net tow of the trip completed yesterday through last night in almost 3000 m of water. We moved to this deeper area further off of the continental shelf so the Jason crew could accomplish some engineering dives, sending the ROV Jason out to test equipment and techniques in a dive that lasted most of a day! It’s been really cool to hear about the Jason and watch the crew at work – getting the chance to look around at the sea floor through Jason’s cameras has definitely been a highlight of this trip!

Hello AR49 ADEON cruise blog readers! It’s the new guy, back again to tell you more about the fantastic experiences I’ve had at sea. The other bloggers have done a great job describing all of the research happenings on board ship, including lander recoveries, Jason dives, and net tows on the night crew. Besides all this rigorous and exciting work, there have been a number of other interesting things happening during our cruise.

We retrieved the last lander of the ADEON project! It’s a great feeling to have ended our ADEON adventure with every single lander accounted for, despite some recoveries being unconventional. Aside from our primary retrieval method (using acoustic releases), we have had ROV Jason recovery, fishing vessel recovery, and even one that surfaced 10 days after sending the release codes (which was rescued by a very generous nearby vessel – M/V Alucia).

I’ve been sailing on research cruises since 2008 as an operator of National Deep Submergence Facility vehicles such as Alvin, Sentry, and most recently the ROV Jason.  The job is challenging and satisfying, but there are some drawbacks.  For this job we give up a lot of time away from home, friends, and family to support science operations.  We live on a ship for up to two months at sea, sometimes over holidays.

Hello AR49 ADEON cruise blog readers. My name is Grant, and I’m a second-year PhD student under Dr. Jennifer Miksis-Olds who graciously invited me along on the final cruise of the ADEON project. As a new guy on the ship (the only new guy actually), I’ve spent the start of this voyage adapting to life on the ship. Luckily, I managed to dodge the horrors of seasickness, which the crew and other scientists were sure to warn me about, especially given our flirtation with the nasty nor’Easter cruising up the coast.

Dec 06 – Sailing Southward

So we’re traveling south to our first lander site off the coast of North Carolina and have a fairly long steam ahead of us.  Thankfully, we’ve managed to let the big nor’Easter pass through us, but we’ve still got some lumpy seas (much like mashed potatoes, lumps in the seas are not ideal) ahead.