Saturday August 1st

  Floating over the  Lions Bay sea mount, oceanographic biologist Lena Clayton and MLSS director Glen Dennison prepare to drop a temperature probe 415 feet down to the base of the Lions Bay sea-mount.

The probe is rigged with an auto-release unit (AR unit) programmed to return the instrument package to the surface a week later on the following Saturday morning.  The monitor is set to sample ocean water temperature every 10 minutes starting 30 minutes after it’s drop.  Placement location is over a large submarine ledge, 415 feet down, at the base of the sea mount. This spot has been selected in order to measure any associated temperature fluctuations in the up welling and down welling currents of the water column.  The location is devoid of sponge and much deeper than the bioherm on the top of the sea-mount.

bathymetric map of the sea mount showing the drop location

Saturday August 8th

  Glen and Lena wait patiently on location for the instruments to return.  Over 400 feet below them at 10:0am sharp the AR unit releases the instrument cluster and the accent begins at 100 feet/minute.

blue and silver housing of the temperature logger

 Lena on the helm, spots the instruments at approximately 10:05am having just surfaced from the depths. The surfacing location was within 100 feet of the drop location.  Recovery was successful and water temperature data was accumulated in time increments of 10 minutes for a total of 980 reading over a one week time span. These are the deepest temperature measurements in this series to date.

graph of the temperatures from the deployment

…more to come on this project