Submitted by djbramer on Thu, 12/10/2020 - 15:41

Dec 10, 2020 A Very Happy Day by Jennifer Miksis-Olds, ADEON PI, UNH

Today was a very happy day aboard the RV Armstrong, preceded by a very sad and disappointing one the day before.  Yesterday, our first task of the day was to recover the bottom lander that was deployed about a year ago at the WIL site off the coast of NC.  This lander sat on the bottom of the ocean collecting acoustic and oceanographic data for over a year.  The lander is equipped with 2 releases for redundancy to ensure that if one malfunctions and does not release the weights, the second release code can be sent for the backup release to disengage and allow the lander to rise to the surface. Alas, none of the release codes brought the lander to the surface yesterday after both confirming that they had in fact been released.

We were a very unhappy science party because 1) we didn’t get the lander back (all those sensors cost a lot of money), 2) we didn’t get the years’ worth of data back (which is not replaceable), and 3) we had no idea why the releases were not functioning correctly. Lucky for us, ROV Jason is on board this cruise to help us recover a second lost lander that did not surface under the same suspicious circumstances last year.  The Jason crew was able to mobilize earlier than expected, and we did a ROV Jason recovery dive this morning (Figure 1).

jason deployment
Figure 1.  ROV Jason being deployed from the RV Armstrong to recover an ADEON lander stuck on the seafloor. Photo credit: Carmen Lawrence (JASCO).
buried lander
Figure 2.  ADEON WIL lander buried in sediment on the ocean floor.  Picture taken from the ROV Jason cameras.  Photo credit: Jennifer Miksis-Olds (UNH).

Thanks to the expert skills of ROV Jason pilot Jimmy, and the quick response time of ROV Jason Expedition Leader Ben Tradd and the entire Jason team, the wayward WIL lander was found on the seafloor exactly where we anticipated it to be.  The problem was that it was piled with ocean sediment in a sand bank. The lander was 1/3 to 1/2 covered with sediment, which made it too heavy to surface (Figure 2). Once ROV Jason was able to dislodge the lander from the sediment, it surfaced on its own.  The RV Armstrong launched its small boat to recover the lander when it surfaced (Figure 3), and it is now back on board safe and sound with a year of data to analyze and discover.

small boat
Figure 3.  RV Armstrong Mates Chris and Mariah in the small boat retrieving the ADEON lander upon surfacing while the RV Armstrong brought ROV Jason back onboard.  Photo credit: Jennifer Miksis-Olds (UNH).

THANK YOU, ROV JASON TEAM!!!!

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Jennifer L. Miksis-Olds, PhD.

Director, Center for Acoustics Research and Education | Research Professor | School of Marine Science and Ocean Engineering | Center for Coastal and Ocean Mapping

University of New Hampshire 24 Colovos Rd. Durham, NH 03824 603-862-5147, j.miksisolds@unh.edu | https://eos.unh.edu/center-acoustics-research-education

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