“It’s such a cool ballet of assets and ship.” This is the Slack message we received from our shore-based team member, Senior Research Specialist Sebastian Sudek, earlier this week. He spent the week piloting two long-range autonomous underwater vehicles (LRAUVs) while we coordinated complementary observations at sea aboard the David Packard. 

Aligning our ship operations, mooring deployments, CTD casts, ROV dives, and LRAUV missions required extensive forward planning, an incredibly skilled team of seagoing crew, scientists, and engineers, and also some good luck. 

We ran into problems along the way—unexpected challenges with mooring deployments, slow satellite communication with the vehicles, battery depletion on the LRAUVs—but the team adapted to each new challenge, using their collective experience to solve each problem as it arose. The success of this complicated “ballet” among all our assets speaks to the culture of open communication and collective investment in our research at MBARI.

I cannot wait to analyze all the amazing data we collected from this cruise! Our observations are grounded by the two moorings deployed across the coastal upwelling zone, allowing us to monitor how particles sinking nearshore are transported farther and deeper offshore over several seasons. 

Our coastal waters of California are extremely productive, drawing down carbon dioxide from the atmosphere while feeding deep-sea food webs. When this production gets transported offshore, it can sink to very deep depths, where carbon can be sequestered for long periods of time. This is a major way that the ocean regulates our climate. This process is very difficult to track because it occurs in a highly dynamic environment with fast-moving currents and unpredictable animal populations.

The ballet we performed with our seagoing assets this week will help us to identify some of those dynamic processes that drive the transport of sinking particles into the deep sea and offshore. 

We collected samples of sinking particles from our drifting sediment traps, which we will now use for chemical and genetic measurements. I am especially excited about the SnoCam+ time-lapse cameras that were attached to our drifting sediment trap. These cameras capture images of sinking particles as they land inside the sediment trap, complementing the more resource-intensive measurements we collected from physical samples. These innovative instruments represent an exciting way to scale up observations of carbon export in space and time.

While sailing back into the Moss Landing harbor, I was contemplating the almost surreal experience of the past week. It is such a privilege to dream up an expedition—with wild plans to send as many robots into the ocean as possible, to use every tool in the toolbox—and then be able to work with such a talented team to turn that dream into a reality.