After deploying our sediment trap in Steffen fjord, we immediately left the Chilean fjords and drove landwards towards Monte San Lorenzo. During this three hour twilight drive, Patagonian wildlife woke up. Plenty of suicide bunnies started to test their luck by crossing the gravel road just in front of our pick-up truck. Luckily, by midnight…
5.30 a.m., a screaming alarm awakes two early birds in the Brisas del Sur hospedaje (B&B) for their first day of fieldwork. To avoid the strong afternoon winds, Seb and Matthias leave the hospedaje before dawn. The zodiac of Lucho, our assistant captain, brings us to the COPAS research vessel ‘Sur-Austral’ where our captain Rodrigo…
After travelling more than 13,000 kilometers over the Atlantic and across the Andes, our team from Ghent University has yet again arrived in Coyhaique for another year of chasing Patagonian mud. Coyhaique constitutes the capital of the Aysén region in Chile. This region is home to the largest temperate icefields of the Southern Hemisphere, being…
Ladies and Gentlemen, this is your Captain speaking. On behalf of the crew, I welcome you aboard Belgica flight A962 to Zeebrugge. We have hit our cruising altitude of 10 feet. We are expecting a relatively smooth cruise and anticipate an on-time arrival in Zeebrugge on Tue June 18th at 0830 local time. You will…
Today is already day 10 of this expedition, and (unfortunately) also the final full day for scientific work on board of RV Belgica. After having sheltered a few days in Bantry Bay, trying to keep ourselves busy (or catch up on overdue work), we set off this morning to the study area again with two…
It is all so quiet, shh shh. It is all so still, shh shh. And so peacefull until … we will depart again. That kinda sums up the last few days since we are still stuck in Bantry Bay, a place that starts to feel like home. Despite the splendid green Irish country views, the…
Hi all, I am Thomas Mestdagh, a PhD student from the Department of Geology of Ghent University. For the second year in a row I am aboard of RV Belgica to join the team that sails out to the Porcupine Seabight. However, we are unfortunately not in the Porcupine Seabight at this moment, since we…
This is Robin Houthoofdt, and I am not going to bore you with my lifestory again. You can read my post from last year if you want to know more. The only change is that it’s one year of experience later. The start of this campaign did not go as easy as it should for…
Hi there, welcome to today’s update on life aboard the RV Belgica. My name is Aisling Robinson and I just finished my final year as an undergraduate in NUI Galway studying Marine Science. Taking part in this survey has been a very exciting experience for me as it is unlike any I have had before.…
Hi followers, today it’s my task to write a daily report on this survey. My name is Wim Versteeg and I am working for the Flanders Marine Institute (VLIZ). Last year I was also one of the participants of the Porcupine survey. My experience from my previous job at RCMG as seismic geophysicist was needed…
Hi dear followers! We are the biologists of the mission: Benoît Geelhand de Merxem, a master student in ‘Biology of organisms and Ecology’ and collaborator of the Royal Belgian Institute of Natural Sciences (RBINS) for this mission, and Yves Laurent, a research technician working for the OD Nature of the RBINS, in the Conservation Biology…
Hi there, and welcome to today’s blogpost coming to you from RV Belgica! My name is Lotte Verweirder, and for now, I am still a geology student at Ghent University. I just finished writing my master’s thesis less than two weeks ago, so I’m nearly at the end of my studies (still have to do…
My name is Eoghan Daly and welcome to my blog post from the RV Belgica, now located in a Special Area of Conservation of the same name (The Belgica SAC). We are sitting along the Irish continental margin where the deep ocean rises to meet European shelf seas, in what proves to be a very…
Eleven km of CTD casts, 11 m of mud and a few milligrams of suspended sediment. That’s what the five of us (Seb, Ben, Loic, Lucho and captain Rodrigo) aboard the R/V Sur-Austral have achieved during the last nine days of our field expedition. Getting to Eyre Fjord took us three days of navigation. To…
On 30 November 2018, at 17:29 UTC, a magnitude 7.0 earthquake hit South Central Alaska (see USGS Earthquake Catalog). The earthquake’s hypocenter was located at about 16 km north of Anchorage, and at a depth of 47 km. Did this earthquake produce an event deposit (i.e. turbidite) in nearby Eklutna Lake, or not ? And…
