ALIA Expedition
Daily Report Archive

Day 24 Image Gallery and Daily Report
Tisa's son is cleaning off a grapefruit with a cut-off can (hopefully not, but probably Starkist).

Day 23 Image Gallery and Daily Report
How to pile the pile of rocks? A puzzle that requires at least six brains ...

Day 22 Image Gallery and Daily Report
Today was an eventful day, for life on a ship.  Today was the first day that any shipboard videoconferencing happened...

Day 21 Image Gallery and Daily Report
Dredging off the Wallis Island, we watched as dredge 127 picked up rock after rock...

Day 20 Image Gallery and Daily Report
Today we continued our transit back east for most of the day, and found ourselves dredging near the French Island of Wallis...

Day 19 Image Gallery and Daily Report
The sun is out and I am a new man.  With the foul weather gone we're clear to wander outside for exercise, pleasure, or work...

Day 18 Image Gallery and Daily Report
This morning, while changing shifts, the ship’s general alarm sounded.  Trying to remember if continuous sounding meant ‘fire’ or ‘abandon ship’, I met Jeffrey Lee (one of the ship’s engineers) in the hallway...

Day 17 Image Gallery and Daily Report
Today our work was truncated short because of a storm which came in. Due to the waves and wind, we battened down the hatches in the galley, and the captain declared that “heavy weather procedures” were in effect...

Day 16 Image Gallery and Daily Report
We are in a place of tremendous elegance, both on and off the land. On the land it's one paradise after another...

Day 15 Image Gallery and Daily Report
The Kilo Moana was built in 2001, and was subsequently equipped with some of the latest technology available.  A large part of this went towards shipboard interconnectivity...

Day 14 Image Gallery and Daily Report
Today our dredge yielded a disappointingly small amount of rocks; only three in fact. However, we are becoming more proficient at operating the dredge with minimal instrumentation...

Day 13 Image Gallery and Daily Report
Living on a research vessel is a unique experience.  Everybody knows that everybody else has a function, and that if that ball gets dropped, the order falls apart...

Day 12 Image Gallery and Daily Report
Dredge 16 was about 500 meters below the ship, and once more headed down the bottom. Suddenly, we received a call over the radio, “All Stop! All Stop!” Instead of the requested two knots forward, the ship was backing up over the dredge...

Day 11 Image Gallery and Daily Report
Several people on the boat have been helping us out as we try to model the behavior of the dredge as it is dragged behind the ship so we can predict its depth and position...

Day 10 Image Gallery and Daily Report
Today we left port and started steaming towards our next dredge location.  We are cowboy dredging now, without any pingers...

Day 09 Image Gallery and Daily Report
We continued to map the seafloor on our way to the port of Pago Pago, surrounding to survey it for possible dredge sites.  Dredging is much more of a hit and miss affair now that we don't have a pinger to use...

Day 08 Image Gallery and Daily Report
There has been much debate lately as to the time of day, and actually which day is when. The ship uses several different times, and it can, at times, be very confusing...

Day 07 Image Gallery and Daily Report
Today we caught up on some more rock cataloguing and identification.  It seems like there will be some difficulty in keeping up with the pace of dredging in the future...

Day 06 Image Gallery and Daily Report
At about 11:00 PM yesterday the dredge snagged on a rock on the sea floor, we stopped the ship and tried to work it free...

Day 05 Image Gallery and Daily Report
Today we completed our first dredge of the new summit in Vailulu’u, Nafanua. This resulted in about 300lbs of rocks being collected from the ocean’s floor...

Day 04 Image Gallery and Daily Report
Dredging is the simplest way of collecting bottom samples.  Basically, dredging involves dragging a metal bucket along the bottom of the ocean, in an attempt to get rocks into it...

Day 03 Image Gallery and Daily Report
Stationed at the Vailulu’u seamount, we continued to take CTD readings directly over the crater.  At about 1:30AM we retrieved the CTD at which time the winch broke...

Day 02 Image Gallery and Daily Report
Today started off with an excellent beginning, and as most days do; with breakfast, this one was different however, in that we had fresh tuna steaks...

Day 01 Image Gallery and Daily Report
Departure from Pago Pago in American Samoa with the Vailulu'u seamount as the first survey target. Vailulu'u is now a high priority target because a recent survey by the KOK revealed that a smaller cone inside the main crater is growing at a rate of 8 inches per day...

Day 00  Image Gallery and Daily Report
Day 00 represents all days preceding Day 1. This includes our meeting at the University of Hawaii, the flight to Pago Pago, and events that happened while the R/V Kilo Moana was in port... 

View All Galleries | Participants | Alia Expedition Home Page