Day 17 - 11 July
The wind has been increasing all day and is now up to 17-20m/s. The waves are too high to be able to safely launch the ROV or to be able to undertake the core sampling we had planned.
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Position: 73ºN, 8ºE
Temperature: 6.5ºC
Wind speed: 8-10m/s up to 17-20m/s
Wave height: 2m and then higher
Visibility: good
Weather: partially cloudy
We have decided to move to the waters over a seamount about 40km north from the area we have been studying here. The top of this seamount lies only 600m under the sea surface, but the foot of the mountain is down over 3000m deep. It is the highest seamount in the Norwegian territorial waters – as high as Norway’s highest mountain, Galdhøpiggen, on land.
We hope to study the marine fauna here as well as the geological structure and make-up of the seamount. We would like to have a greater insight into how it was formed. We undertook a bottom dredge up one side of the seamount. The rock samples it collected consisted were serpentine in nature; the same family of rocks that includes asbestos. Does the presence of this material suggest that the mantle has come near the surface when it met this seamount? We plan to undertake further studies in the next few days.
