Diving a new site and new Seeps!

Much of this years project is looking for new areas where methane is seeping from the seafloor. Our aim is to understand what is eating the methane and keeping it out of the atmosphere. Here we are focusing on areas like the one to the right which have active methane released from the seafloor leading to that white color. The white is bacteria that eat Sulphur that is a bi-product fo the microbes that eat methane. This is a new site that we just found this year!

Here are Alex and Steve collecting images of the site as we scope it out. Our New Zealand Colleagues found this and then guided us to it. There were many more sites that they also found that we hope to dive on over the next week.

This site has a lot more light so there is algae including the coralline algae that it looks like the urchins and sea stars are eating here.

This includes fleshy red algae such as above, but it lives in the shallows so can be impacted by ice.

Here is some anchor ice that is having a tug-of-war with the algae. The ice is trying to float away and the algae trying to stay. In the ice algae there is a bunch of amphipods that live there. They also live in dense assemblages under the ice

Our bubbles disturb them and sometimes they swarm. Nice to be wearing a drysuit at times like these.

Here is the view up - nothing but brinacles, algae, and amphipods (so an active ecosystem under the ice.)

Overall a wonderful dive. The rest of the dives were working, so we didn't bring cameras and instead used the information we gained on this dive to sample the various new ecosystems discovered.