RRS James Cook JC257
Cruise summary report
| Cruise Info. | |||||||||
| Ship name (ship code) | RRS James Cook (740H) | ||||||||
| Cruise identifier | JC257 | ||||||||
| Cruise period | 2024-02-07 — 2024-03-21 | ||||||||
| Status | Completed | ||||||||
| Port of departure | Caldera, Costa Rica | ||||||||
| Port of return | Caldera, Costa Rica | ||||||||
| Purpose | Research | ||||||||
| Objectives | Cruise JC257 of the RRS James Cook was a 44-day oceanographic cruise out of Caldera, Costa Rica working in the international waters of the Clarion-Clipperton Zone and the second cruise of the NERC Highlight Topic project 'Seabed Mining and Resilience to Experimental Impact' (SMARTEX), a 4-year project that started in 2021 to study fundamental scientific questions to inform the debate on seabed mining for polymetallic nodules. The main objectives of the cruise were measurements of physical oceanography (mesoscale eddies and their impacts at the seafloor), geophysical survey (mapping the seabed at various resolutions), biology (the spatial scaling of biodiversity and natural geochemical drivers of biodiversity across a 100km transect), as well as studies of recolonisation rates, ecosystem function and ecotoxicology baselines. JC257 made use of a wide variety of equipment including the Remotely Operated Vehicle (ROV) Isis, the Autonomous Underwater Vehicle (AUV) Autosub, a megacorer, USNEL-type box corer, CTD, gravity core, glider, fish trap and in-situ pulse-chase experimental cubes. The main work area was the 'UK-1' region of the Clarion Clipperton Zone at 13°30 N, 116°20 W and a typical depth of 4100m.
The cruise departed Costa Rica on 7 February 2024 and returned on 21 March 2024. The ship’s company consisted of 17 scientists, 15 technical support personnel and 21 ship’s crew. The captain was John Leask, the chief scientist Adrian Glover, the co-chief scientist Daniel Jones and the head of the NMF technical team Dave Turner. A total of 122 over-the-side equipment deployments were made as well as continuous underway operation of the ship acoustic instruments (multibeam and ADCP systems). The largest proportion of the ship-time was dedicated to ROV operations, followed by box cores, then AUV, then megacorer followed by the remaining gears. A large volume of samples and data were obtained and all primary objectives of the cruise met, as well as opportunistic recovery of settlement experiments deployed on two previous cruises. All the moorings deployed on JC241 were recovered leaving nothing on the seafloor and good data were obtained from all the mooring instruments. 16 deployments of the ROV Isis were made on the cruise, all were successful. The ROV was deployed in various configurations including the ability to take in-situ close up imagery of seabed fauna using the highest resolution camera mounted low and at the front of the tool sled; this was very successful. Other configurations included deployment and recovery of the cube experiments and recovery of settlement panels deployed on previous cruises in 2013 and 2020. 16 deployments of the AUV Autosub5 were also made, some of these dives were tests and 9 dives returned useable data. 39 deployments were made of the box core, of which 34 returned samples and 32 were high-quality fully quantitative samples. The megacore was deployed 16 times, all of which returned good samples with typically 5-7 of the core tubes returning good quality samples for a variety of studies. 19 CTD casts were made on the cruise; several issues were encountered with the cable in the earlier part of the cruise requiring retermination and troubleshooting. These problems were eventually solved. The CTD included water sampling and a variety of sensors which are detailed in section 2, as well as ADCP data. The Gravity Core was deployed on 1 successful deployment at the end of the cruise. The NMF Deep Glider was deployed during the transit from Caldera to the UK-1 site but did not surface as planned and was eventually lost. The Fish Trap supplied by SAMS was deployed 4 times but was lost on the final deployment. | ||||||||
| Chief scientist | Adrian Glover (Natural History Museum, London), Daniel O B Jones (National Oceanography Centre, Southampton) | ||||||||
| Project | Seabed Mining And Resilience To EXperimental impact (SMARTEX) | ||||||||
| Coordinating body | Natural Environment Research Council (NERC) | ||||||||
| Cruise report |  (60.03 MB) | ||||||||
| Ocean/sea areas | |||||||||
| General | North East Pacific Ocean (limit 180W) | ||||||||
| Specific | Clarion-Clipperton Zone | ||||||||
| Track charts | (0.30 MB) | ||||||||
| Data held at BODC | Get data | ||||||||
| Series/Profiles | |||||||||
| 1 Multi-beam echosounder | Reference numbers Horizontal spatial co-ordinates Bathymetry and Elevation
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