Report from the field
October 28 2026
Two of our SEASAM Expedition leaders, Dan Wildrick and Tony D’Aoust, are out right now on a dredging expedition on R/V Atlantis off the coast of the Galapagos. They report in that they are pulling up a lot of interesting rocks!
Tony reports that they are dredging mostly on the sides of underwater seastacks (volcanoes) about 2,000 meters depth. “We tow the dredge uphill from deepest to the shallowest so that the rocks stay inside the dredge and so that it does not tumble down and roll all the rocks out, or get snagged up on itself that it no longer tows straight.”
These rocks are all basalt from relatively young submarine volcanoes in the Galapagos. Characteristics of individual rocks are mostly determined by how they cool. Many of the rocks we’ve been getting have had “fresh glass,”,which means they cooled very quickly and this is what a lot of the scientists on this expedition like to investigate.
Sometimes a manganese “crust” grows on the rocks. Scientists will argue over the growth rate of acretion but suffice it to say that it is a million or two million years per millimeter or so, so a crust of even several millimeters of manganese is an old rock!
Tune in for more reports from the field in the days ahead!
