Chikyu cruise day 1

Today I boarded on the Research vessel Chikyu for a drilling cruise to my hydrothermal vent site. It is quite rare for biologists to board on this drilling ship because its purpose is mainly… drilling! And this activity interests mainly geologists. But in this cruise, before the drilling we will make a biological survey and now I discovered this very fancy ship and I will try to share my experience in the next posts.
So let’s start by the beginning: what is the Chikyu? Simply it is a gigantic ship (over 200 m long) made for drilling deep into the seafloor.

Because the ship is so big, it could not enter in the port in Nago, so we had to use a small tugboat to reach it.

From far it does not look so big...

But getting closer then we realise it is a BIG ship...

To give an idea of the size, the arrow points at one person standing on the helipad

In the coming days, I will try to find a few minutes to show you the inside of this unique ship and our research progress...