How do we get samples from the deep sea?

27 March 2011

Share

Question

How is it going: to get living samples from the ocean bottom and to keep it up in natural conditions (t, light and P)?

Answer

We put this question to Paul Tyler, Southampton University...

Paul - The traditional methods have been to collect with trawls and things called box corers, but if you're working on something like hydrothermal vents, we go down in a submersible which dives for anything between 8 to 20 hours on the seabed. More recently over the last 10 years, there's been a massive development of what we called remote operated vehicles and these are vehicles, some the size of a large car, with a battery of cameras, connected to the mother ship via a fibre optic cable, so you get images in real time from the seabed, and you can collect samples with the manipulator arms and then everything's brought back to the surface.

Comments

Add a comment