I’m kind of obsessed with Okeanos Explorer. Why? Because being able to watch a live feed of an ROV exploring the deep ocean on the TV in my living room is pretty amazing. THE FUTURE IS NOW PEOPLE.

Okeanos Explorer is a NOAA boat whose sole business is ocean exploration. It uses two ROVs equipped with mega giant cameras and a network of satellite intertubes to bring you live feed of seafloor exploration. It beams back all sorts of amazing images of weird deep sea sea beasties and geology. Quite often they find specimens they have never even seen before! Just last mission they even explored a wrecked WWII plane! Current mission: The Wake Islands in the Pacific Remote Islands National Marine Monument.

The next dive will happen this Sunday. You can catch all the feeds on your compy at their streaming link http://oceanexplorer.noaa.gov/okeanos/media/exstream/exstream.html

If you have a smart TV, ROKU, Apple TV or really any other streaming device you can WATCH IT ON YOUR TV. Just pull up the YouTube app and search for Okeanos Explorer. Camera 1 is where the action is, but Camera 2 (ROV #2) and Camera 3 (Control room) are pretty neat too.

You can also follow along on Twitter at #Okeanos, lots of biologists online to identify all the things! Or post-dive check out Christopher Mah over at Echinoblog with some sea-beastie round ups.

The post Have you been watching Okeanos explorer? If not, this week is your chance! first appeared on Deep Sea News.

One thing I’ve learned from the Okeanos Explorer’s ROV trip to the Marianas Trench, is that deep sea jellyfish just like to let it all hang out. How else you going to feed effectively if you don’t wave your tentacles around like you just don’t care? But get too close to this unidentified jelly, and you risk triggering its Inspector Gadget quality evasive maneuvers. RETRACT! SWIM AWAY! Live to extend another day. You go jelly, you go.

More awesome videos and photos from this incredible series of dives can be found here.

The post GO GO GADGET JELLYFISH! first appeared on Deep Sea News.

If you follow me on Twitter (@para_sight), you would have seen this week a steady stream of screen caps I grabbed from their live video feed (active at the time of publishing this), which I had running  constantly on a second screen in my office.  I’m not part of the OE team, but it’s pretty addictive viewing for the temporarily office-bound!  For non-Twitter folks, here’s a gallery of shots of some of the things they saw.  I am no expert on the taxonomy of deep sea critters; any bad ID’s are mine.  I’ll take any missing ID’s too, just add them to the comments.

If you want to go deeper into the science of deep sea critters, check out Dr Craig’s excellent piece today on what happens to wood at the bottom of the ocean.

The post TGIF – Pretty pictures from Okeanos Explorer first appeared on Deep Sea News.

See more here

The post Okeanos Explorer in the Gulf of Mexico first appeared on Deep Sea News.

“For a thousand miles of the open ocean we sampled it all,” said Miriam Goldstein, an oceanography graduate student from the Scripps Institute in San Diego. “And while most of the garbage patch is made of microscopic plastic particles, invisible from the air, we did pick up pop bottles, a bucket lid and even a floating junked suitcase.”

via Okeanos Explorer returns to S.F. with data trove.

The post WE R TAKIN OVAR UR CITY AN PRES first appeared on Deep Sea News.

The join Indonesia – U.S. exploration of the deep ocean north of Sulawesi, Indonesia mapped the large undersea volcano Kawio Barat.  From base to summet Kawio Barat measures 10,000 feet but its summit still remains 8,000 feet below the surface. The expedition also utilizing telepresence to connect researchers on land to the NOAA ship Okeanos Explorer.  Researchers at the Exploration Command Centers in Jakarta and Seattle can interact with shipboard personnel to guide the expedition via live satellite and high-speed internet. You can catch the expedition at oceanexplorer.noaa.gov in both English and Bahasa Indonesia. The site includes logs from scientists at sea and ashore, images from the expedition, and expedition education lesson plans.

The post Update on NOAA Expedition in the Indian Ocean first appeared on Deep Sea News.

A recent oceanographic survey on the NOAA ship Okeanos Explorer led by James V. Gardner, a marine geologist at the University of New Hampshire, discovered a 1400 meter tall plume (4.3 Eiffel Towers) rising from the seafloor off California.  The plume may have originated with a recent massive landslide that created the 3.6km “amphitheater-shaped” scar.

Water samples above the plume did not have high mineral contents, suggesting the feature is not a hydrothermal vent.  Gardner reports his teams findings in Eos, a weekly newspaper from the American Geophysical Union for members (can someone send this to me?).  The team thinks the plume is a methane gas bubbles coated in a veneer of methane hydrate ice, that quickly dissolve in warmer lower pressure water.

[googlemap lat=”39.7240885773337″ lng=”-125.35400390625″ width=”500px” height=”500px” zoom=”6″ type=”G_SATELLITE_MAP”]39.724089,-125.354004[/googlemap]

The post The Creation of a New Deep-Sea Feature first appeared on Deep Sea News.

All good things must come to and end, so they may have a new beginning.
So begins the next chapter in the history of deep ocean exploration…

The NOAA Ship Okeanos Explorer was commissioned this week in Seattle, WA. The vessel will be equipped with two deep-sea ROVs capable of broadcasting high-definition video from the deep-sea in real-time using Dr. Robert Ballard’s “telepresence” technology. Word on the street is the Chief Scientist’s quarters come equipped with an inflatable hot tub, sushi bar, and wine rack Dr. Ballard keeps in a briefcase chained to his wrist at all times. ;)

NOAA’s Ocean Explorer website hosts a cool time lapse video of the conversion.
Check it out.

The post TGIF: Deep-sea exploration's new flagship first appeared on Deep Sea News.