Filming on the sea floor
The Tangaroa is travelling now close to Cape Adare and floating icebergs can be seen from the side of the ship. The DTIS (Deep Towed Imaging System) is lowered into the water to take still images from the sea floor. Sadie Mills explains the photographs that were taken and in the background is Steve George who gives the winch driver instructions. Sadie points out some of the species and items that can be seen like a dumbo octopus or whale vertebrae.
Points of interest for teachers:
Notice the ice on deck where the person can be seen at the beginning of the video.
Students should take note of the last item that Sadie points out at the end of the clip.
Transcript
SADIE MILLS We’re in the DTIS control room and we’ve just set up the computer ready for our next deployment of the bottom camera. We’re at site C26 which is just off Cape Adare in the Ross Sea. And we’ve set up ready to go. It usually takes eight minutes to get down to 790 metres where we are at the moment and so we shouldn’t be too far away. And when we get down there the first sort of thing we’re looking at is classifying the sediment type whether it’s muddy or rocky or sandy and then we start classifying what type of animals we’re seeing.
STEVE GEORGE Can we come down half a metre please.
SADIE MILLS Along with the moving video that we get off the DTIS we also have a still camera which we can get some really nice photos from. That shows us lots of things – animals – that are on the sea floor. We’ve got some asteroids and some corals and things here. And also some unusual things on the sea floor as well like a whale bone vertebrate which. Just here you can see a lovely little octopus which we affectionately call the ‘Dumbo’ octopus which our octopus expert is yet to identify. We have some lovely glass sponges here and sea lilies here. And in the lovely cool clean pristine Antarctic waters we even find beer bottles - yeah.
