The ocean floor holds secrets stretching back millions of years. Beneath that surface, the top 10 meters of sediment contain a detailed record of how land, sea, and atmosphere have interacted over the past 1 million years. Scientists have been studying this record using piston cores since the mid-20th century—but as our questions grow more complex, so does the technology we need to answer them.
That’s where our expedition comes in.
We’ve been invited to join a team of researchers working on the next generation of ocean exploration tools. We’re onboard the R/V NEIL ARMSTRONG* for a two-week cruise focused on testing new equipment that can measure sediment properties without taking cores. This voyage is part scientific mission, part “shakedown cruise”—a chance to see how well the new gear performs in real-world conditions.
Meet the Team
Our expedition will be led by Chief Scientist Dan Orange from UC Santa Cruz, with support from Tim Sonnemann (Portland State University), Laura Brownstead (Penn State) and James Gibson (University of Texas Institute for Geophysics). Charles Holland (Portland State) is Co-Principal Investigator and will be following our progress from shore.
The Rutgers team—four of us—will be working 12-hour shifts 7 days a week, both in the science lab monitoring data as it comes in, and on deck helping deploy and retrieve over-the-side equipment.
The Technology We’re Testing
One highlight of this cruise is the SBP29 echosounder, a newly installed hull-mounted system that sends sound waves into the seafloor and records their echoes. It can detect features up to 100 meters below the seafloor with better than 10 cm vertical resolution—even while the ship is moving at 10 knots in moderate seas.
We’ll retrace older survey lines to compare legacy data with the new profiles we collect. One of the goals is to develop ways to measure sound velocity and attenuation in marine sediments using the SBP29. These acoustic properties could help scientists better understand sediment environments with fewer core samples—just enough for calibration and dating.
What to Expect
This is the first research cruise for all of us from Rutgers, and we’ll be sharing updates and stories from life at sea as time permits. From long shifts and deck work to exciting new data and unexpected challenges, we’re looking forward to documenting the experience and the science behind it... and it looks like we may get chased off location by the effects of a hurricane farther south in the Atlantic.
Stay tuned for more posts as we set sail and begin exploring the ocean floor in new ways!
*fun fact: NASA named the Space Shuttles Columbia, Challenger, Discovery, Atlantis, and Endeavour after famous exploration and research vessels, with Atlantis directly named after the primary oceanographic research ship used by the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI). Keeping with this tradition, Scripps Institution of Oceanography named their latest ship after the astronaut SALLY RIDE, and WHOI named theirs after the first person to walk on the moon.
