RRS Discovery D163
Cruise summary report
| Cruise Info. | |
| Ship name (ship code) | RRS Discovery (74E3) |
| Cruise identifier | D163 |
| Cruise period | 1986-10-26 — 1986-11-19 |
| Status | Completed |
| Port of departure | Falmouth, United Kingdom |
| Port of return | Gibraltar, Gibraltar |
| Purpose | Research |
| Objectives | This cruise was the last in our DoE commissioned research programme on oceanic radioactive waste disposal. The new IOS deep-towed sidescan and profiler, TOBI, had been lost on previous cruise to GME when its glass buoyancy spheres imploded. Since January TOBI had been redesigned and rebuilt, and cruise 163 was to be its first test at sea.
The most important objectives were therefore to bring TOBI to a fully operational state; to use it to obtain data on outcrop patterns, sediment stability, and faulting in GME: and to continue the PUPPI programme, in particular trying to confirm and extend the observations of high pressure gradients near the 10 km box. Coring, seismic profiling and camera work was to be used to fill in between the TOBI and PUPPI operations, broadly continuing earlier lines of work. Finally, we were to recover a sediment trap and Bathysnap seabed camera for the IOS biology group. |
| Chief scientist | Roger C Searle (Institute of Oceanographic Sciences Wormley Laboratory) |
| Cruise report |  (0.84 MB) |
| Ocean/sea areas | |
| General | North East Atlantic Ocean (limit 40W) |
| Specific | Great Meteor East/ Eastern N. Atlantic |
| Track charts |  |
| Measurements | |
| Biology and fisheries | |
| Sediment traps | Quantity: number of deployments = 1 Description: 4 traps |
| Geology and geophysics | |
| Core - soft bottom | Quantity: number of cores = 2 Description: box cores |
| Bottom photography | Quantity: number of deployments = 2 Description: Wide Area Survey Photography,(WASP)camera system,also 1 Bathysmap seabed camera |
| Multi-beam echosounding | Quantity: track kilometres = 7200 |
| Long/short range side scan sonar | Quantity: activity duration in hours = 89 Description: Towed Ocean Bottom Instrument(TOBI),5 deployed,89 hours of towing |
| Single channel seismic reflection | Quantity: track kilometres = 3600 Description: SRP & 3.5 kHz |
| Magnetic measurements | Quantity: track kilometres = 1852 |
| Other geological/geophysical measurements | Quantity: number of deployments = 4 Description: Pop-Up-Pore-Pressure Instrument(PUPPI) |
