JC112: A brief review

This morning we awoke to the sight of land on the horizon for the first time in six weeks. The cruise JC112 is over and we’ve arrived in Caldera, Costa Rica. It’s been an excellent experience for us all, and not one we’ll soon forget! We’ve travelled thousands of nautical miles in our efforts to collect a cornucopia of data, which will be used to learn more about the oceanography of the Panama basin. A nautical mile is 1.852 km, about 1.15 miles, the approximate distance of one minute of arc measured along a meridian.

Sunrise over the first land we've seen since leaving Balboa at the beginning of December.

Since leaving Panama at the start of December we’ve done 63 CTD and VMP casts, collecting 15120 litres of seawater in the niskin bottles from which we’ve analysed 1512 samples for salinity and 1644 for oxygen content, and stored 406 samples to be analysed for helium back on land. We’ve deployed 12 magnetotelluric landers and 3 moorings, performed 85 penetrations of the seabed with a heat probe and processed 1696 swath bathymetry data files.

The onboard map showing where the ship has travelled.

Our wildlife spotting has gone fairly well too, with reported sightings of dolphins, sharks, turtles, pilot whales, flying fish, sea snakes, pyrosomes, squid and many different seabird species. This morning saw rays added to that list, as well as dolphins riding the ship’s bow waves and flocks of pelicans flying alongside us.

A dolphin accompanying us on the way into Caldera.

And this was only the first cruise. Next week the RRS James Cook will once again be sailing out into the Panama basin. With an (almost) entirely different crew and a new set of scientific instruments, this second cruise will be focusing on geophysics, measuring seismic activity within the Earth under the basin. At the beginning of February a third cruise will depart from Panama aboard the German RV Sonne. The two ships will be out in the basin simultaneously and will be working on joint operations for a portion of that time.

So while JC112 is now over, there’s still plenty of exciting science to come from the OSCAR project. Watch this space!

The science team of JC112 on the aft deck of RRS James Cook.