treaming web events from the seafloor that will include narration from the science team. The scientists' work will also be chronicled in video, still images and regular blog updates on the expedition website: http://www.whoi.edu/hades.
The Kermadec Trench, off the northeastern tip of New Zealand's North Island, is the fifth deepest trench in the world with a maximum of depth of 10,047 meters (32,963 feet or 6.24 miles). It is also one of the coldest trenches due to the inflow of deep-water originating from Antarctica.
What marine animals live in the trench and how do they survive the crushing pressures found at that depth —about 15,000 pounds per square inch? These are some of the questions the science team will be trying to answer.
"The energy requirements of hadal animals have never been measured before," said Drazen, who will lead the efforts to study distribution of food supply and the energetic demands of the trench organisms. Drazen, along with a graduate student and postdoctoral fellow from the UHM School of Ocean and Earth Science and Technology (SOEST), eagerly prepares to deploy the world’s deepest oxygen sensors into the depths of the Kermadec Trench.
The multi-disciplinary international science team includes co-principal investigators Malcolm Clark and Ashley Rowden of the National Institute of Water and Atmospheric Research (NIWA) in New Zealand, Henry Ruhl of the National Oceanography Centre at the University of Southampton, Alan Jamieson and Daniel Mayor of the University of Aberdeen (UA), and Paul Yancey of Whitman College (WC), as well as collaborators from Japan Agency for Marine-Earth Science and Technology (JAMSTEC), Scripps Institution of Oceanography and the University of Oregon.
The scientists are hoping to conduct research at 15 stations as part of the expedition, including sites in shallow water for testing purposes, sites along the trench axis, and sites in the abyssal plain. At each site, the team will deploy free-falling, full-ocean depth, baited imaging landers (Hadal-lander) and elevators outfitted with experimental equipment, including respirometers to see how animal metabolisms function at such great depth and niskin water sampling bottles to investigate microbial activity at full-ocean water depths.
The team will use the deep-submergence vehicle, Nereus, which can remain deployed for up to 12 hours, to collect both biological and sediment samples. Nereus will stream imagery from its video camera to the ship via a fiber-optic filament about the width of human hair. This state-of-the-art vehicle, developed by a team of engineers at WHOI, is the result of a combination of some of the greatest advances in technology and science, and has already dove successfully to the deepest part of the ocean—Challenger Deep in the Mariana Trench—on its first mission in May 2009.
This expedition will build on earlier studies of the Kermadec Trench by Alan Jamieson at UA’s Oceanlab and colleagues at NIWA and the University of Tokyo. Using the Hadal-lander, which was developed at Oceanlab, the team has documented new species of animals in the Kermadec and other trenches around the Pacific.
"To date, this method has been successful in observing the deepest fish ever seen alive," Jamieson said. "By combining WHOI's HROV Nereus with Oceanlab's Hadal-Lander technology, the team have the best available technology at their disposal."
Once thought to be devoid of life, trenches may actually be home to many unique species. For one reason, there is growing evidence that food is plentiful there. While it is still unclear why, organic material in the ocean may be transported by currents and deposited into the trenches.
In addition to looking at how food supply varies at different depths, the research team will be investigating the role that energy demand and metabolic rates of trench organisms play in community structure and how these biological systems differ from their shallow water relatives.
Exactly how animals in the trench evolved to withstand the pressures is not completely known, but Shank's objective will be to