Up and down, round and round

Today was fun. After another long period of surveying we decided to take a look at the tops of some of the submerged sea-mounts (formed long ago by volcanic activity on the sea floor) that line up along this part of offshore Brazil. Our hope was that there might be some nicely preserved sequences of marine sediments on these high, isolated mounds -- mud that might give us a good, continuous paleoclimate record.

Well, we found a sea-mount that was not on our maps and decided to take a closer look. The SeaBeam image of the topography had us all intrigued.

Doesn't it look like we're having fun?!

We ended up mapping the entire mount. To do this we made multiple tight turns so that we could pass over it completely. You can see the track of our mapping on this SeaBeam bathymetric map.

I tried to get Captain Seamans to make some "bat turns" for us. Although he couldn't exactly do that -- safety IS his number one priority -- he and First Mate Dee did their best to give us very tight turns which did manage to get the boat rocking and rolling quite nicely. Fun, fun!



The sea-mount did, indeed, turn out to have sediments on the top. And we now have the cores to prove it.

Besides the turning and coring fun, we had fun looking at the details of the topography of the sea mount. We had a naming contest and people came up with quite a few possibilities. We have yet to name an "official winner" but here are some of the names in the running: pot sticker mount, oyster rise, ostracode mound, Hugh's eye, and the current favorite Popenoe Peak (I'll a save the story of this last name for another post). Does anyone have any other ideas?

Maybe the "raised relief" view of the mount will get your imagination stirring.