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Daily Updates: March 2000
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Daily Updates: April 2000
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Daily Updates: May 2000
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View Today's Slideshow!

rainy weather

TODAY'S WEATHER
Overcast and rain
77°F (25°C)
Latitude: 2 deg 10’N
Longitude: 97 deg 45’W
Wind Direction: NW
Wind Speed: 10 Knots
Sea State: 2
Swell(s) Height: 3-5 Foot
Sea Temperature: 84.2°F (29.4°C)
Barometric Pressure: 1013 MB
Visibility: 5-10 Nautical Miles

what's to eat today?
Breakfast
Linguica and onion frittata
Banana nut bread
Omelets
Bacon and sausage
Eggs to order
Assorted tropical fruits
Dry Cereal

Lunch
Darby’s roast beef
Curly fries
Chicken noodle soup
Pork and beans
Salad bar
Homemade apricot granola bars

Dinner
Fried Catfish
Wild rice
Black bean casserole
Vegetables
Fresh dinner rolls
Salad Bar
Pete’s Birthday Cake

Bob “Yogi” Elder carefully slides the electronic chassis out of its pressure housing. These units are the “brains” of Argo II. Craig Elder is helping.

Heading to port!
May 6, 2000
By Dr. Dan Fornari

At 1115 hours local time, we hauled up the last dredge from the eastern volcano in the Galapagos Rift valley. Our deadline to finish sampling was 1200 hours. Thanks to the great ship handling by the Bridge watches, and the expert support by the winch controllers we did all the sampling we had planned. In the last dredge we recovered two types of lava from inside the crater and at the top of the volcano. One type was glassy and younger, and the other older and blocky The blocky lava appears to be slightly magnetic. Mike Perfit thinks this rock may be have high concentrations of iron and titanium. It is called a “FeTi basalt” after the chemical symbols for those two elements. It is a rock type that forms when magmas have cooled for a long time in a magma chamber before they are erupted. The geochemical analyses of these samples that he will do back on shore will tell Mike if he is right.

As we picked the rocks out of the dredge bag, RV Melville did a slow turn and began the four day transit to Manzanillo, Mexico. As the science team finishes up the last bit of data compilation and copying, and we pack up the vehicles and all our equipment, I thought you might be interested in a summary of all the different types of data we have collected during this expedition. As you can see from the list that follows, this expedition has been exceptionally successful and productive thanks to all the hard work by every person on board RV Melville, and the shore based support staffs at Scripps Institution of Oceanography and the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution who helped make this expedition possible. I thank them all for their dedication, effort and good spirit during this field program.

Cruise Statistics:

Distance traveled by RV Melville on this expedition 9,445 km
Days spent collecting DSL-120 sonar data: 8.9 days
Kilometers of ridge axis surveyed by DSL-120 sonar: 562 km
Total seafloor area surveyed by DSL-120 sonar: 474 km2
Days spent collecting Argo II data: 7.4 days
Kilometers of seafloor surveyed by Argo II: 238 km
Number of Dredges: 45
Number of Rock Cores: 45
Number of CTD casts: 1
Gigabytes of raw sonar data: 150 gigabytes
Gigabytes of processed sonar data: 5 gigabytes
Number of Hi-8 video tapes recorded: 188
Number of digital video tapes recorded: 94
Number of digital still images recorded by Argo II: 50,362
Number of 35mm photographs recorded by Argo II: 2,161
Number of frame grabs recorded by Argo II: 5,350
Size of shipboard data web site: 5.5 gigabytes (>350,000 files)
Size of Dive and Discover Expedition 3 web site: 330 megabytes
New hydrothermal sites discovered: Several on the East Pacific Rise between 1° 40’N and 1° 45’N