TECFLUX II 2000

Gas Hydrate. It's one thing to read about this stuff and something else again to understand the physics that predict such things should exist - and then there's seeing it. Brought up from the depths of the Cascadia Margin off the coast of Oregon, frozen methane hydrate is something to witness. Unstable outside a narrow range of temperature and pressure it hisses and fumes in the heat of a summer night offshore.

Its white, colder than ice and it smells really bad. If you put a match to it, it will burn quite cheerfully - in the palm of your hand. This totally incongruous material is the focus of a lot of attention. In part, it's the reason we're out here.

Some scientists speculate that frozen methane hydrate lies under sediments off the coast in a layer that stretches from Alaska to Mexico. Deposits in the Gulf of Mexico may be as much as a mile thick. In all, there may be more than ten billion tons of carbon fuel - twice the known reserves of all other fossil fuels combined.

ROPOS is out here with GEOMAR, the Research Center for Marine Geosciences of Christian Albrecht University in Kiel, Germany, in support of TECFLUX II 2000. Scientists from Germany, Japan, the USA and Canada are here to characterize the geophysical and biochemical processes associated with the subduction zone on the Cascadia Margin.

The German ship R.V. Sonne proves once again to be an excellent platform as ROPOS assists in the deployment of a variety of seafloor experiments. Delivery and recovery of specialized gear like this time-lapse video package developed by Ko-Ichi Nakamura is a task for which ROPOS is ideally suited. This, and another identical unit were precisely positioned at pre-selected sites where methane gas bubbles rise from the seafloor. Evidence provided by these cameras supports speculation that the rate of these emissions vary with tidal cycles.

Over a period of almost six weeks, ROPOS dove every day with no down-time and minimal maintenance. As a bonus, toward the end of the expedition ROPOS was able to successfully recover a particularly valuable autoclave piston corer prototype lost on this site during an experiment in August 1999.

Telephone: 250 363-6332

May 31, 2005