Amazing Dive - Part 1: The Rice Cooker

June 3rd @ 12:45pm – The ROPOS dive that will wrap up shortly began last night at 11pm, and as the moon illuminated the calm surface waters, the dive control room was brimming with activity all through the night. After staying up until around 2:30am, and finally retiring to get some sleep, I was up and back in the control room just after 8:00am and for the next two hours I was glued to the screens. If you were lucky enough to be watching the dive live on the website’s live video feed, then you’ll know what’s coming, but if you missed it, I want to try and capture the moments in a series of blogs and a few choice pictures.

All of the events I'm about to describe happened close to the ODP 889 node on the NEPTUNE Network, at a depth of 1260m +/- 15m. This is a continental slope setting approaching the abyssal plain of the Juan de Fuca tectonic plate.

Two years ago, a discarded rice cooker was found on a routine survey of the area around ODP 889. The lid was closed, and just out of curiosity, the science team decided to get ROPOS to open it. Inside was an Octopus with her whole brood of baby octopuses! (As an aside, is it octopuses or octopi? This is, surprisingly still up for debate in the scientific community, and when one of my biology students this year asked me which was correct, I tried to find out, and learned that both camps: ‘octopuses’ and ‘octopi’ are firmly entrenched and refuse to give ground)

In any case, just as I walked in to the control room this morning, ROPOS has just found the rice cooker again. Out came the manipulator arm, the lid was swung open… no octopus this time. But what I find really amazing, is that here we are, in well over a kilometre of water in a vast ocean, and we can navigate to a pint the size of a rice cooker. Stay tuned for Part 2…

Blog post and photos by Scott Doehler 
Marine Educator