Month: June 2013 Page 1 of 2

This past week has been exceedingly hectic to the point that I didn’t realize it was friday until I just now when I updated this blog. Ship time is a different thing sometimes. 

I just spent the past hour in the Jason Deep Submersible ROV van. It is a tiny 40 square foot box with more tv’s and xbox controllers and odd specialized controllers than anywhere else I have ever seen. Quite simply I watched them attach a shackle to a trawl resistant mooring so it could be brought to the surface. Now connecting a shackle is simple on the surface. But when you are 300 meters below the surface in 15 foot viz water and your only depth perception is being able to zoom in and out on camera this simple task becomes an ballet of skin. The manipulator arms are nearly four foot long with little graspy hands at the ends of fully rotatable wrists. The pilot maneuvered these hands with the precision of a heart surgeon. This is another one of those times where the written word fails to describe the amazing feat of ingenuity and dexterity of the actual action accomplished. But if you would like to see this happening live we are broadcasting live streaming video from the ship.

 

It can be viewed at explorationnow.org/atlantis

 

 

 

R/V Hugh R. Sharp

Leg one of scallop population survey

June 22 2013

 

 

Days at sea: 9

Time: 1859

Weather: Sunny and 69.89^oF with 76% humidity

Wind Speed 5.1kn

Sea State: 1-2ft swells

Position: 39 34.35N x 073 26.78W

 

The Basics

 

Just as if I had blinked my eyes and held them closed for a second too long, the entire first week at sea has seemed to pass over the time span of just a few watches. The rest of the crew is itching for our return to land and completion of the first two week leg where some of us will have only a day to put our feet on solid ground, and where others from both the ship’s crew and the science crew have completed their time on the Sharp until the next cruise calls. Luckily I feel like I have just gotten started with my summer here on the Sharp. In a way, this is true as we will be aiming to go further north towards Georges Bank and will be sailing all of July.

            So much has happened thus far so I will start with the descriptive basics. I stand watch with technician Ted C. during the day watch. While some science cruises choose to adopt a six hours on watch six hours off watch schedule, we all opted for the 12 on 12 off, with day watch beginning at 0530-1730. The reason for the long watch is sea slime. While I expected to come off the cruise smelling of scallops, I really could not have expected how fully covered I could get, head to toe, in sea-slime from the various organisms that make it to the surface in our dredges. The scallops themselves are not too slippery, but the sea-stars ooze immensely, the sand-dollars foam a spring-green liquid, and the fish flop in their own secretions. Shower time at the end of watch (instead of every six hours) comes only second favorite to dinner time.

 

For the Good of Science

 

            There are two main science motivated goals of the cruise. The first being to physically dredge the bottom of the ocean floor for scallops at mostly random locations along traditional scallop fishing territories. The second, still with scallops in mind, is to tow a specialized real-time camera a few meters above the ocean floor to continually photograph the scallops in their natural habitat.

            This camera is called the HabCam. One ability which makes the R/V Sharp unique is that it has a deployable fiber-optic cable that attaches to the HabCam and is capable of communicating real-time data back to the ship. This allows the science crew to treat the HabCam as a remote operated vehicle in a sense as they can change its position by letting more or less of the cable release from the ship’s winch while viewing data in the ship’s lab.

            I may have painted an incorrect image of the trailing HabCam, it is much larger than just a camera tossed overboard. The camera is mounted on a rectangular steal frame, somewhat cage shaped with the addition of a ‘second-story.’ Overall the HabCam configuration weighs ~3500 lbs leading to an awkward deployment and retrieval which takes place on a ramp secured to the port side of the stern.

            Besides the camera itself and the four strobes which bring light to the camera, the frame of the HabCam is also equipped with multiple CTDs (the classic oceanographic instrument which measures conductivity, temperature, and depth from which one can calculate salinity) one of which is taking dissolved oxygen readings. There is also a side-scan sonar which produces a relatively detailed image of the ocean floor and an instrument set to specifically measure the wavelengths indicating chlorophyll and CDOM which correlate with the photosynthetic primary producers in the ecosystem. A full spectrum spectrometer records the remaining wavelengths, and the altimeter and GPS report back on the HabCam’s position. There is also a sensor photographing plankton in the water column, primarily zooplankton.

 

HabCam N’ Scallop’n

 

            Life on the ship takes on a different pace during a scallop dredge than when the HabCam is in the water. We began this leg with a multiple day HabCam track, then went to several days of dredging, and currently the HabCam is back in the water and has been for the past two watches.

            When the camera is in the water I focus mainly on helping Ted maintain the winch readouts (which we have had some significant trouble shooting issues around…it was discovered that a circuit board was damaged by a voltage leak and we will be replacing it when we come into port on Monday) or with any other small projects necessary. Thus far I have worked on mapping out quite exactly the set up of the wet lab, and the back deck where we dredge. Having a map is a good reminder for both the crew and science and hopefully it will be helpful in future cruise planning and setup. I am also responsible for testing the CTD daily and recording air temperatures, humidity, and data from the ship’s GPS and ADCP (Acoustic Doppler Current profiler, used to measure ocean currents). Everyday I also check the filter and flush fresh water through the ships flow through system. This system takes constant data from the surface waters as we are underway, such as seawater temperature, salinity, and fluorometer readings. 

            It is currently 1800 and we just finished dinner-I want to go into descriptive detail about scallop dredging as it has been the most active, and a quite favored part of the trip so far, but I think It will have to wait for the next post.

            To give some insight about dredging I have included a selection from my daily journal, written three days ago:

 

Journal Entry:

June 20 (and writing for the 19^th)

0107

 

Nearly each trawl brings up a new mix of organisms. Today things were a little less “back-to-back” with about an hour between every transect. I would imagine as large as the ocean is that this amount of time would not lead to such variable a catch. Even yesterday when our transects were closer together, almost no dredge brought up the same. While Science has to remain unbiased, a dredge full of scallops is undeniably what gets the crew most excited. When Evan is on watch the fisherman in him is always there looking down on us with his binoculars that moment the dredge gets inverted on the table. The mounds of scallops at their largest have taken up about one quarter of a table maybe a foot and a half high. To me, especially when I’m on the table shoveling them, this seems like a lot of scallops but the boys tell me this is just a warm up compared to the third leg on Georges bank. I am working on my arm muscles now!

            The dredge after dredge which has been dumped onboard carrying mounds of sea-stars or mounds of sand-dollars and mud show me how the commercial scallop fishing must take skill and knowledge. The scallops apparently are very particular in their environment and favor a specific temperature, substrate composition, and often importantly depth.

 

Thanks for reading!

 

Love to the family my Mom, Dad, Alan, Omi and Gram. I’m excited to come land-side soon to give you all a call…Happy Summer. I still sleep very well on ships, missing R.C.S. 

 

So here I am in Astoria Oregon, famous for the movie The Goonies being filmed here. It is a small port town with plenty of bars for libations. I went exploring, walking up and down the main streets for several hours just trying to get a feel for the town. It was disturbingly empty. It seems from what I have been told it is a tourist town that relies heavily on the cruise ship industry. The stores are definitely geared toward a tourist market most definitely. In order to get warmer clothes I had to wait for someone to rent a car and ride in with them across a bridge to a place called Fred Meyers or something similar, which is basically a Walmart with a different name. It seems in my attempt to pack a well rounded selection of clothing for this six month world tour that I neglected to pack enough warm things. Seeing as it was summer I was not assuming 50 degrees and rainy would be that common. Boy was I wrong. So after procuring some more hoodies the couple crew members and I ended up going to a state park nearby. This was awesome. I saw mountains right next to the beach. This has been a wholly unimaginable sight for someone who has spent the vast majority of her life on the east coast in southern states.

So there we were on a beach, yeah we spend all our time on the water and go to it as soon as we get off a boat, if you are drawn to this work it makes sense, but is still slightly comical. There were mountains all around us on, and an old shipwreck sitting on the beach that had all but rusted completely away. Ship wrecks are one of the few things that truly make me shudder when I see them. So I didn’t want to spend much time there. The second most remarkable thing was the sand was a mixture of dark and light sands so the beach took on this Tim Burtonesque type of feel, with the washed up trees from the local logging industry adding a spice of strange contours to the striped sands. People had actually built several small pseudo dwellings that could have been fairy forts or some such magical thing had this actually been a Tim Burton movie.

Then we drove around a bit and found another part of this park that was more wilderness. We started out climbing on old World War II bunkers that were built to help defend the west coast. Then we came to a trail that we decided to walk down. The beauty of this lush green landscape is not something I had seen in months, so it kind of seemed weird and out of place with what my present world is like. There was moss and ferns growing everywhere. The evergreen trees were giants among the leaf bearing trees. They had moss hanging down in large whimsical spirals and sheets that seemed to almost give the trees a monastic look as if these were ancient monks from some elder tribe of people. Then we started getting bit by the largest mosquitoes I have ever gotten bit by. Having been on a boat for several months I didn’t really think about this, plus being a spur of the moment adventure no one brought bug spray. So there we were traipsing through the forest of elder monks donating our blood to their mosquito protectors. I was bitten more than a hundred times easily in the course of our jaunt. The only respite from the plague of buzzing hypodermic terrors I could find was by lighting a cigarette. I had been told years ago by an uncle that smoking helped keep the bugs away, and it did indeed seem to help at least keep them away from my face and hands. The rest of my body did not fare so well.

So if you ever find yourself headed to Astoria might I suggest more warm things than you think you might need and plenty of bug spray if you are planning on enjoying any of the amazing wilderness trails that abound in this area of the world.

R/V Marcus G. Langseth,

19-June-13, The Study Site

 

R/V Marcus G. Langseth: A Daily Routine on the Boat

 

            Hello everyone!  I thought I would use this blog post to talk about what my daily routine on the boat is like.  Since I last posted there hasn’t been a lot going on besides the regular data collection, we did have to weather our way through a storm but other than that life has been proceeding as normal and hence why I am now writing about what life is like on the boat.

So, my work shift is from midnight to noon every day.  As such, my day begins about an hour before work.  I get up and get ready and then head down to the galley to get some food before my shift.  The first meal that is served by the crew isn’t until 7:20 am so I grab something small to eat and then go to the main lab.  Once there I talk to everyone to see what is going on and if everything looks like it is going well.  Oft times there is not much happening besides the routine monitoring, but sometimes there are problems that need to be attended to.  When there aren’t problems, I head over to an open seat and begin monitoring the data. 

            Monitoring the data isn’t all that exciting but it is a necessity.  If there is an open chair at the guns monitoring station then my job is to watch the gun data to ensure that if a problem with a gun occurs it is recorded and if for some reason a whole shot is missing that it is recorded as well.  If I am at the navigation station, my job is to make sure that our streamers are in the correct position.  If they aren’t then I have to steer the ship into the correct position using a plus and minus button to move the ship closer or farther away from the line.  This station involves the most work as the currents can more our streamers into very different positions from the ship and requires nearly constant monitoring.  The final monitoring position is the data position where I monitor the bathymetry data being collected and keep a log of data about our positions, speed, ocean conditions, and the weather, every 30 minutes.  Personally, I like the navigation position because it keeps my attention and I get to steer the ship.

            While monitoring equipment, I also help Carlos, one of the gun mechanics, every two hours.  Because there is such strain on the cables that hold the doors close to the boat, they need to be moved a little bit so that the same portion isn’t being strained.  As such, I go up to the vein deck and help Carlos move the cables in and out.  I also sometimes lend him a hand preparing the guns and also cleaning and repairing the trolleys that hold the guns up on deck.

            Other than my meals of which usually occur at 3:00 am, 7:20 am and 12:00 am not much else really occurs during my shift, unless of course there are problems.  My meal at 3:00 am is a dinner from the night before that the cooks have saved me while the 7:20 am meal is breakfast and the meal at 12:00 is lunch.  After lunch, I usually go back to my cabin to relax a bit, do laundry if needed, and then go to bed and get ready to start the next day.

            Well, that is pretty much my daily routine on the boat.  For my next post, if no major events occur, I plan on talking about what life is like on the boat.  I will also talk about the crew, grad students, and principal investigators that I work with during my shift and how all of us work together to make the data collection a reality.  Take care everyone.

 

 – This is Tyler Poppenwimer, signing off –

Well, here it is quickly approaching my first internship in this new profession as a ROV technician. I have finally finished all of the tasking and now the excitement is beginning to build. There were a lot of loose ends to take care of and I am finally on my way. I have been reviewing different sub-sea sampling instruments and basic sea-man ship skills for this internship. I am beginning to pack my last remaining items and will soon be on my way up north to Duluth, Minn. I do have some concerns; like how well will I sleep in a strange environment-minor eh!
 

R/V Marcus G. Langseth,

08-June-13, The Study Site

 

R/V Marcus G. Langseth: Working out the Kinks

           

When I last left off, the Marcus G. Langseth had begun to collect data.  While we may have started to collect data, all was not completely perfect.  During the past few days there have been some unexpected kinks and faults that have had to be worked through and fixed.  Nevertheless, after the hard work of all those on the boat, we have managed to successfully work through the problems and find solutions.  The Marcus G. Langseth is now successfully collecting data again!!!!! Give me some data!

The first of the problems that arose stemmed from a fault in some of the data collection software.  During our shift, myself and the two grad students on my shift, Brian and Luke, noticed that our recording system wasn’t acting correctly.  We looked at what was going on and we noticed that our data wasn’t being collected.  We mentioned this to Bern, who is the observer supervisor, and immediately everyone began to run around trying to get it fixed.  Eventually though, after many hours of work we managed to get it fixed. 

With that problem solved, we thought the next day would be an easy day, however we were terribly mistaken.  Part way through my shift, our streamer monitoring system let out an alarm.  Everybody frantically went over to check the monitor.  On the monitor streamer 4 had lost contact with all of its acoustic recording devices and consequently, we were not gathering data on streamer 4.  We didn’t want to pull in the streamer since, the boat can’t slow down because all the streamers are out.  This makes us reel in a streamer at about 2 meters a minute since there is a huge amount of strain put on the streamers.  And with a 6km long cable brining it in this slowly would take hours.  Not only this, but we would have to bring in 2 of the gun streamers, and the door holding streamer 4.  We tried to work through the problem from the main lab for a few hours, but soon we realized that the only way to solve the problem was to bring in the streamer.

Once the order was given to pull out streamer 4, I rushed up to the gun deck to assist with the reeling up of two of the gun strings.  I was given a harness, a hardhat, put my gloves and coveralls on, and hooked up to the fall safe line and edged towards the edge of the boat to bring the gun strings up.  As the guns were brought up, Carlos (one of the gun mechanics) and I unhooked chain hooks from trolleys on the ceiling to hook onto the guns.  In this way, we can haul the heavy guns up on deck without straining the thin air hose.  After about an hour we had managed to bring up the guns.  However, while this job was done, I was not done as there was more work to be done.

I headed up from the gun deck to the streamer deck to see what I could do there.  I saw that we were bringing up streamer 3 so that they could unchain it from streamer 4 and thus enable us to bring in streamer 4.  I helped with what I could and after we had successfully unchained streamer 4, I headed up yet one more deck to the vein deck and began to help bring in the door.

I mentioned in one of my previous posts, that the doors just folded down off the side of the boats.  I was mistaken in this.  In fact the doors, known as veins to the techs, are not connected to the sides of the boat, by pins, but are chained to the sides of the boat and are held up by large winches mounted on the vein deck.  The veins are disconnected from the boat and are lowered into the water where a float holds them aloft. They are designed in such a way so that they pull away from the boat, yet because they are attached by a strong steel cable are held to the ship.  Streamer 4 and streamer 1 are then attached to the veins and streamer 2 is attached to streamer 1 and streamer 3 is attached to streamer 4.  In this way streamer 1 and 2 are held away from the boat by one vein and 3 and 4 are held out by the other.  Thus it was necessary to detach streamer 3 from 4 before we could bring in streamer 4.

Now that that correction is out of the way, we can go back to the story.  Well, once we had brought in the door, we began to pull in the streamer, but after long hours of work our shift ended and the next shift took over.  I was exhausted and dirty.  I didn’t even bother to take a shower once I got back to my room.  I brushed my teeth, washed my face and fell into bed exhausted. 

I woke up feeling refreshed and was hopeful that the problem had been solved in the night while I slept.  I was happy to see once I had arrived in the main lab the problem had been solved.  But, my happiness was too eager, there was yet another problem that had begun almost immediately after the problem with streamer 4 had been fixed.  This problem was with the main computer that coordinates the navigation, gun strings, and the streamers.  This was a problem that I could barely help with so I watched and learned and tried to be as helpful as I could.  I brought the tools they needed grabbed the spare parts for the computers they needed, and brought them extra wires to help plug in the spare parts.  Eventually, after hours of work, we had finally fixed the main computer and everything was up and running.  A few hours more and another eventful shift was completed and I went to bed.

The same routine happened the next day, as I arrived at work, all looked well.  Of course sometimes, looks are deceiving.  About a quarter of the way through my shift the navigation system, SPECTRA shutdown.  As it shut down our guns stopped firing and we stopped collecting data.  This in itself is bad, but if it is dark and the guns stop firing for more than eight minutes, in order to protect any unforeseen mammals that might have swam near the guns, we have to stop firing until morning.  Luckily, while I was on gun monitoring I noticed that the guns had stopped firing and started them up again whilst everyone else was trying to get SPECTRA operational again.  Eventually, after an hour or so SPECTRA was brought back up and since I had restarted the guns we were able to begin collecting data as soon as SPECTRA was restored.  After this ordeal I was finished with my shift and was able to go to bed.

The next day, proved easier than all of the last.  As in fact, there was not a single problem, during my shift.  And since then there haven’t been any problems.  I am thus hopeful that there won’t be any more problems and we can collect data easily and that all will work out.

Well, that is all for this post, I will post again soon.  Until then, take care everyone.

 

– This is Tyler Poppenwimer, signing off –

 

Then we sat there. For several minutes we sat, or so I thought. It wasn’t until the top of the lock became visible did I realize we were being lifted by the force of seemingly infinite water being let into the lock. Once I started seeing grass, I nearly panicked. Generally I am one of the most observant people. I was looking at the walls checking for signs of water inlets, anything that might allow for the passage of water from one lock to another that I failed to think that it would make most sense to put the inlet/outlet at the lowest point. I felt slightly foolish for this glaring oversight on my part, but in my defense I have never been through a lock system and have never even seen one that functions. Granted I am from a city which still has many antiquated and useless locks, I have spent days climbing on and in those old locks, but never did I stop and think the GIANT hole at the bottom was where the water transferred from lock to lock. So yeah, once I realized I had missed where the water might be coming in from I glanced down and saw the eddies and frothless water flowing into the lock, raising both our vessels. Again this was a silent happening. The only noise was that of the ships quietly humming from the massive diesel generators that supply their power. Even that was somehow muffled slightly, or so it seemed to me.

As our ship rose, there was a quiet excitement filling the air. Granted I had never seen this, so in my typically nerdy fashion I was more than over joyed at the massive feat of engineering that was going on all around me. To think this 48 mile canal began its life in 1881 by the French and was completed by the United States in 1914. So here I am standing on a ship built in the 1990’s going through a lock system that was nearly 100 years old. The technologic changes that the canal has had to deal with since its construction are nearly unfathomable. By todays shipping standards the locks are too small, so they are constructing a third larger lane for the massive super tankers that share our seas today. Just imagine what the canal will look like in another 100 years, probably nearly the same, with the mystique tempered by the ages and the endurance and grace forged in the massive number of ships that travel through it every year. More than 10,000 ships pass through those locks each year. But this is all information you can get from google. You aren’t reading this for that. It is a fundamentally amazing feat of human will power against insurmountable odds that brought it into existence.

So there we were on our journey to ride through a jungle on a research vessel that has just been floated up 80 something feet through three locks, when out of nowhere my allergies started killing me. I guess late May in the jungle isn’t a place for a woman with horrible allergies. Part of the reason I like being out in the middle of the ocean is that they don’t bother me as much. So with sinuses straining my brain for room I went and took Benadryl to avoid the migraines that so often accompany my allergy attacks. Luckily for me I take enough Benadryl on a regular basis that the sedative side effects rarely ever kick in. So able to breath and with the sun setting in a jungle, I was struck by the surrealism of the journey I was on. This canal was cut through the middle of some of the most inhospitable wilderness that the Americas has. Malaria ran rampant through the camps of the people who worked on the amazing feat. So with that in mind I sat back and watched what wonders were to play out before me.

Lake Gatun was marked by buoy markers to mark the ship lanes. Then as we progressed through the dark wilderness we came to these odd markers. So I had to know what these yellow and green markers set high on the slopes were for. They are a set of four total markers set one atop the other. One set is yellow and to the left of the green pair. I asked the chief mate what they were for. He then explained to me how when we are going into a turn the pilot has to line them up, generally lining up the green ones to ensure that we are in the portion of the channel that is deep enough for ship traffic. These markers are set so that at a distance and the correct course heading they line up one on top of the other.

Then we came to what can only be described as the single most beautiful bridge I have even seen. This bridge called the Centennial Bridge rose up out of the jungle in a glistening light show. At first only one of its two massive supporting towers was visible. With the super bright lights shining delicately off the glistening metal cables and steel beams it was like a shining pinnacle of brilliance in the middle of the jungle. The cables which held up the large roadway shone with a grey brilliance that even the most erudite of painters could not conceive of a color to put to canvas this brilliant. The second tower came into view and the symmetry of this concrete and steel expanse left me awe struck in a way that the rest of the canal had. As we passed under the bridge I was hurriedly taking pictures with my phone. The tiny 8 megapixel machine caught the bridge of the Atlantis and this bridge behind it in near perfect succession, our bridge bisecting that bridge; two modern things of beauty sharing the same space and time on the elder canal in perfect unison.  Then we began passing giant bucket dredge barges that were feverishly digging at the canal in what can only be assumed to be expansion efforts for the next phase of this marvel.  

The hours drove on; we were moving slowly, maybe a maximum of 3 knots, so it was going to take every bit of the twelve hours I was promised it would take. We came up to the next set of locks, this one began our decent to the Pacific Ocean. An ocean I had never previously been to. New adventures were before me. A whole new life of things I have never before seen, as if I haven’t experienced enough wonder and awe to fill a life. We passed a large container ship that was moored to two giant stable mooring platforms. The Atlantic Klipper was slowing its approach as we went into the narrow neck of the lock. Again we were boarded by a group of line handlers; again they worked their coordinated effort in our safe passage. This time the water flowed out of the locks, and slowly the walls began to rise up past our ship. It was midnight or later, so I decided to retire, most of the other non-deck crew had long since gone to their bunks. I decided I should soon sleep for tomorrow was a new day, a new ocean, and a world of possibilities and unimaginable adventures before me. 

Time: 2357

Nothing like a little ‘red-eye’ flight to commence my journey as one of this summer’s Marine Advanced Technology Education interns. Time is one of the first things given a different face at sea. We are expected to reject the classic comforts of a daytime routine based on ‘morning tasks’ being different than ‘night tasks.’ It may very well be possible that I may be brushing my teeth at 0300 or dead asleep at two in the afternoon. The ship makes its own time bubble, where we will operate separately from land, twelve hour shifts and no days off- Here we come! I am wearing my new lilac waterproof watch, it seems to be lacking military time so I am hoping I will get good at adding twelve hours to all my times.

With a small hiccup in my travel plans from west coast California to east coast Delaware I maybe taking ‘plane, train, and automobile…’ and ship of course! In fear of misplacing my luggage during the itinerary change, the airline suggested I carry my bags with me. So here I sit with my one 48 liter backpacking pack, a small bag, a water bottle, my rain boots, and my laptop; all I am bringing with me for six weeks. It still sinking in that I am on my way, not only to greet the Sharp as my summer home, but on my way to the Atlantic Ocean. While I have been to the East US before, I have never been to Delaware.

Oh! My airplane to Houston is boarding now- What a grand landmass lies between me and my final destination. Looking forward to this opportunity and blogging again soon. I’ve included a quick “eye spy” photo that I took during packing.
 
~Maia

P.S. Thanks Jesi for your help getting me out of town!

R/V Marcus G. Langseth,

08-June-13, The Study Site

 

R/V Marcus G. Langseth: Collecting the Data

 

            Hello everybody!! I am sorry that it has been a bit longer than the 3-4 days I promised but with the amount of work time my schedule involves, it is hard to blog as often, I am going to have to revise this to about every 5-6 days.  I work 12 hour shifts now, starting at midnight and ending at noon, but of course that is just a rough estimate.  Usually I stay a bit later and get there a bit earlier to help with the shift changes.  As such, I work a bit longer than the 12 hours and plus I also have to have lunch after my shift ends and do regular things like laundry and other necessities.  After this I am usually off to bed to get ready for the next day of work and so my blog writing time is getting rather small.

Anyways, since I last posted, the Langseth finished deploying all of the equipment and has begun recording data.  It was a pretty exciting moment when all of the equipment was deployed in the water and the first shots from the gun fired!  It was at this moment that our hopes were realized and everything was working properly.  Then, when the first data from the gun shots appeared on one of the monitors in the main lab everyone cheered and was really excited.  The moment of research had begun!

Now that we had begun to collect data, my work schedule, while not being reduced in the amount of time, was reduced in the physical aspect of work.  With the streamers and guns out, we are hopeful that we will have little to do with these.  We will have to bring the guns in every once in a while to check them but this is minor compared to the work needed for the streamers.  Instead my role now consists of monitoring the various equipment using the monitors and recording data into our numerous logs.

The main lab is set up so that from any one position surrounding the main terminal you can see any of the 36 monitors that display information about the ship, the streamers, the guns, our course, and our intended lines that we need to follow to gather data.  From this information, the students and I must log information every 30 minutes, when we start and end a line, and when we start and end a turn.  Some of the information we log are our latitude and longitude, depth, salinity, magnetics, temperature of the ocean, speed, boat heading, wind speed, wind heading, and the current shot number (the shots are from the guns). Some of the data that we have to monitor include information regarding the depth of the streamers, the timing between gun shots, our navigation and speed, and the data to make sure nothing looks erroneous. 

To help explain what I have just written, the lines are the longitudinal lines that the ship and the streamers trailing behind it are to follow so that we can make sure we cover the entire study area.  They set up like the lines of the paper and once we have completed all of the lines, the streamers will have gathered data across the total area of the paper.  However, as our streamers are 6km long, we can’t make a tight turn and so rather than doing the line underneath, we have to skip about 7-10 lines.  This results in really long turns, of which we log the start and end, which can last about 3 hours! During these lines, which can take about 9 hours to cover, we shoot approximately 1900-2000 shots.  Each shot then gives us data about the bottom of the ocean. 

Other than that, life has become pretty mellow around here, if we don’t have any problems then my time should be filled with monitoring equipment and getting to talk to some of the grad students and principal investigators.  Let’s hope no problems arise!!  Well, that is what is going on during my time on the Langseth.  Take care everyone.

 

– This is Tyler Poppenwimer, signing off –