This quilt is part of my JOIDES Resolution Expedition 390 (South Atlantic Transect I) collection. by clicking on the tag 390 quilt, you can see all the quilts I made before and after my two months on the South Atlantic Ocean.

All geoscience research projects need a location map – and an IODP expedition is no exception. This quilt shows the location of the South Atlantic Transect, where Expeditions 390 and 393 visited a combined six sites to collect continuous cores of sediment and basement material. The transect is positioned west of the Mid-Atlantic Ridge and eastern Rio Grande Rise in the Atlantic Ocean, at approximately 31^o South latitude. This area was first cored in 1968 by the ship Glomar Challenger for Deep Sea Drilling Project Leg 3 and provided critical data necessary to prove the theory of seafloor spreading – the knowledge that bottom layers of sediment are older as you move away from the ridge at a divergent plate boundary.

Fifty-plus years later, an international group of scientists onboard JOIDES Resolution revisited the region with new technologies for collecting deep-sea material and new primary research questions: quantifying the timing, duration, and extent of hot fluid moving through the aging ocean crust; and investigating the microbes living in the sediment and basement and how they have varied in abundance and diversity over time and location.

And it all begins in this location, where JOIDES Resolution spent four months across two expeditions collecting the deep-sea material necessary to make new and significant contributions to our understanding of Planet Earth.

The quilt is an original design. The globe panel is from Spoonflower. The wooden frame for the globe is from Jo-Ann Fabrics. The background is 3 Cats Shweshwe, a Da Gama Textile manufactured in South Africa. This quilt measures 33 inches tall by 30 inches wide and was completed May 10, 2023.