By Chris German, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution
April 27, 2012
Safe home. Sentry lands back on deck at the end of its final dive for this cruise. The magnetometer is strung to collect new geophysical data all the way to Valparaiso and we are off heading full speed for port. Image courtesy of Chris German, INSPIRE: Chile Margin 2012 Expedition, NOAA-OER. Download larger version (jpg, 862 KB).
It is 4 am, just three hours after the last blog ended and the Sentry vehicle is safely back on deck. We confirm, by 2 am, that we have 14,000 photographs on board and a quick quality control scan shows they are good. We also have completed a cursory glance through the sensor data and there are multiple occasions where we have seen that Koichi’s Eh sensor have picked up evidence of chemically reducing fluid close above the seafloor.
By tomorrow, we will have downloaded all the data and can start looking at the photographs, as a first prioriy, from the locations where the chemical clues from Sentry are the strongest. That is where the chemical-loving animals we came here in search of are likely to be living but, let's face it – pretty much every single photograph Sentry has just taken is from a place that no human on Earth has ever seen before.
But 14,000 photographs takes a lot of concentration to look through, so right now, we are starting the ship’s transit for port and all of us – even Dana! – are headed off to bed. We should get one more blog out of this website before we hit port on Monday, so that update should get posted after the weekend. Check back then for a final wrap up – we may have looked at every single photo by then.
