Design and Field Testing of a Scalable Deep-Sea Sediment Sampler System for Hadal Depths

This paper presents the design and testing of a purely mechanical sediment core sampler developed for hadal depths, including the Mariana Trench at 11,000 meters. Sediment cores provide critical insights into seabed composition, environmental health, and marine ecosystems. Collaborating with Inkfish, a submersible technology company, we developed a sampler designed to operate under extreme pressures (110.32 MPa) aboard Inkfish's submersible landers [1]. Building on a spring pulley proof-of-concept, we improved the design, fabricated a prototype for 2–3 km depths, and created a deployment system compatible with Inkfish's procedures. After testing we concluded that our completely mechanical system is a viable solution to collecting deep-sea sediment at a low cost. With its improved design, our second iteration prototype is able to collect sediment samples more reliably and can be assembled and reset more easily compared to the previous prototype. The device's simplicity and compact size means the device can be easily adapted to other vehicles and depths, increasing the accessibility of sediment samples. Additionally, while our device was designed with Inkfish's submersible landers in mind, our device could be easily scaled up in order to collect samples of a much larger diameter and length. Furthermore, the deployment system's simple attachment method allows our device to be adapted to almost any benthic lander with relative ease. As such, we believe that our passive sediment collection device has the potential to impact numerous marine research areas such as marine biology, geology, and geophysics.