Project: Hydrothermal Exploration of the Chile Triple Junction

The first INSPIRE (INternational Southeast Pacific Investigation of Reducing Environments) expedition took place from February 24 to March 17, 2010. During 22 days aboard the research vessel (R/V) Melville, members of the INSPIRE: Chile 2010 expedition set out to explore four largely unknown regions of our planet, in search of missing links in our understanding of biology, geology, and chemistry within the deep ocean. Through hours of conductivity, temperature, depth (CTD) work - comprising 33 separate deployments, 26 bouts of multicoring, and 10 trawls - we sampled at depths between 350 and 6100 meters (up to 18,000 feet).

The 2012 INSPIRE expedition took place from April 20-30, 2012. During the 10-day cruise on the R/V Melville, we probed for strange new biological life forms, communities, and ecosystems dependent on as-yet-unknown conditions. Members of the INSPIRE team used an autonomous underwater vehicle (outfitted with cameras and chemical sensors) called Sentry - in combination with instrumentation to measure conductivity, temperature, depth (CTD), a multicorer, and a towed camera system - to locate and characterize heretofore unknown and some barely known ecosystems.

Read more about both expeditions:
https://oceanexplorer.noaa.gov/explorations/10chile/
https://oceanexplorer.noaa.gov/explorations/12chile/welcome.html