Scientific team to study Pacific seabed

Press, 20 August 1983, Page 7

Scientific team to study Pacific seabed

NZPA staff correspondent Washington A survey ship exploring the Pacific seabed will visit New Zealand in December and take New Zealand scientists aboard for exploration off the New Zealand coast.

The ship is the Samuel P. Lee, which left Redwood City, near San Francisco, earlier this month to chart the Pacific seabed and explore for minerals and hydrocarbons.

The SUSI2 million (?NZ18.5 million) voyage, funded by the United States Geological Survey, will take the ship “as close as possible” to both the North Pole and the South Pole, a marine geologist, Dr Gary Greene, told NZPA from the U.S.G.S. office in Menlo Park, California.

The ship will explore for seabed minerals such as

cobalt and manganese in the South Pacific and also search for hydrocarbon deposits as well as analysing the geological structure of the seabed.

The Samuel P. Lee will arrive in Wellington in midDecember and take New Zealand scientists on board to analyse the seabed between Wellington and. Christchurch. Christchurch would also be used as a base for a twomonth voyage to the Antarctic after Christmas, Dr Greene said. Work there would be a general study of the geological structure.

The ship carries 18 scientists and technicians, but scientists from a number of other nations will participate on various legs of the trip, raising the total in-

volved to 150. The 63-metre ship’s project has been dubbed “Operation Deep Sweep.” Her itinerary is flexible, but she is not expected to return to the United States for at least a year, and to have covered some 64,000 km in that time. The Samuel P. Lee trails a 3m long “seismic streamer,” studded with

thousands of microphones, 12m below the surface. The microphones record echoes from the seabed. The crew will also fire more than 1000 “sonobuoys” that parachute into the water, extend an aerial, fire sound at the seabed and transmit the reflected sound back to the ship.

These'echoes are fed into a computer which produces a profile of the seabed and the rock strata and sediment below it — “like looking at a slice of cake,” said Dr Greene.

The ship will also collect seabed samples.