This map shows the priority areas that this 2011 Nancy Foster Expedition will cover. The large grey land mass on the top left is St Thomas, Virgin Islands and to the right is St John. South of St Thomas is the Caribbean Sea, where we will be for the duration of the cruise collecting data. One of the major priorities is to map the ocean seafloor. If you look to the right you can see the colors and dots and lines all over the map. The reds indicate shallow water and as you get to the blues is deeper waters. The black lines on the map are the transcects that were covered with the ROV (Remotely Operated Vehicle) and then the dots are the drop camera locations. All of this mapping was done on a cruise a year earlier. On this cruise we are going to map out the region in the red box south of St Thomas. So we will be hanging out not too far south of St Thomas mapping the sea floor with Muti-Beam sonar.
That's great VM...really interesting. How many miles off the coast of St. Thomas are you?
ReplyDeleteIs the area in green the shelf?
Hmmm...well technically I could actually calculate that and if I had a little more sleep in me I would. So maybe tomorrow I actually will, however by then we will be south of St John! I have no direct sense of how far, but we are pretty close. The entire time we had a view of St Thomas in the far distance.
ReplyDeleteYeah, so in that southern section of the map the shelf edge can be seen at the 1000 meter isobath.