Back in August, I accompanied Nancy Rabalais and LUMCON dive safety officer Ben Acker on a dive trip to station C6C. That location is an oil platform south of Terrebonne Bay with equipment for monitoring water conditions such as temperature, salinity, and dissolved oxygen. I’ve posted before about our work there exchanging equipment and taking samples. I’m involved with the LUMCON dive team through my continued collaboration with Nancy in researching seasonal hypoxia (a.k.a. the Dead Zone) in the region. For example, see our most recent paper on dead zone microbiology. The purpose of this particular trip was to show CBS News the heart of the Dead Zone. Nancy’s recent NOAA-sponsored hypoxia cruise (see Celeste’s trip report) revealed that this year’s zone of hypoxia was the largest ever, and it has attracted a lot of attention as a result. Below is the full-length GoPro footage of the dive, in three parts. A big chunk of the second and third parts are in blackness, at the bottom of the dive, where we searched, in vain, for a lost piece of equipment. But there is some beautiful footage of the rest of the water column if you scroll through the individual videos. A portion of this was included in the CBS News profile. UPDATE 10/4/17: Times-Picayune reporter Sara Sneath found this post and put together a cool summary and link for us at NOLA.com.
