Month: January 2014

So the days are already starting to blur together.  It’s so spooky how much time flies on the ship after settling into a routine.  However, my shipmates are very good at making sure the routine does not get monotonous.  The cooks have set up an inflatable pool on the bow and cooked us a fantastic barbeque of grilled vegetables, chicken, and lamb-ka-bobs.  We lounged around and had a great time listening to music and the endless stories of the experienced sailors and scientists.  

My favorite storyteller is Todd who is a very experienced at his job and with fishing. He is teaching me how to catch fresh fish for the next barbeque.  Sometimes, when there is no science going on and the ship is just cruising to the next station, we throw out as many as nine hand-lines which drag behind the ship.  Previous attempts on this cruise have been unsuccessful, until just the other day when we had a giant stroke of luck.  I saw Todd leaping with excitement and ran over to help him pull in his catch.  Eventually it took three people to pull in the seven foot Blue Marlin!  The lowest deck on the ship stands 11 feet off the water, so it would have been a real workout to pull it up.  However, after the entire population of the Thompson converged on deck to see it up close we had to let it go on the terms of it being a game fish.  It made for quite an exciting day!

Besides eating outside in the fresh salty air and deep sea fishing, we also have movie nights, play card games, gamble on the Super Bowl (I’m on a ship from Seattle), and my favorite thing to do is sit and watch the sunrise.  We have a beautiful pink, orange and blue sunrise every day that burns away all of the big puffy cumulus clouds that cover most of the sky in the morning. It really makes for a cool and majestic wake-up routine before the brutal mid-day sun starts burning the ship.

The ship and all of the science equipment onboard, also do a great job of keeping the monotony from settling in with their persistent challenges and utter complexity.  There is always something that is acting ‘wonky’, and needs attention from a marine tech.  One particular problem was that the gravimeter was giving bad data.  The gravimeter is a very sensitive and practically priceless science commodity simply because they don’t make them for ships anymore.  They measure minute changes in gravity and they are so precise that even the rocking of the ship skews their measurements.  So there is a double gimbal system in which it sits to keep it perfectly level.  That gimbal relies on a gyroscope that measures the roll of the ship and another one that measures the pitch.  The pitch gyroscope was not working, so we had to replace it.  I’ve never felt more like a surgeon than when I was taking this delicate instrument apart and switching out an old sensor for a new one.  It required lots of patience and care, but I was able to take it apart and put it back together successfully.  It’s really awesome the amount of amazing equipment is onboard and that they trust me to tinker with it!

Every day I’m becoming more confident in my abilities to solve scientist’s problems out at sea!  I am very grateful to have such a classy and intelligent group of people on my first cruise as an intern!  

So after cruising for a couple of days, we are now in the study area where we will be spending the next five weeks.  If you have read my previous blog then you know that I was seasick for the first day.  Well, thankfully the Pacific Ocean has been living up to its name, because the water has been perfectly peaceful.  Therefore, I am able to operate on all cylinders again! Unfortunately, there is a plethora of other types of illnesses traveling around the ship now.  Nonetheless, the show must go on!

We spent the first couple of days retrieving lots of moorings that were in the ocean taking measurements for a year and half. The moorings are extremely long cables that stay vertical in the water between an anchor and a buoy.  Along the line there is an instrument that crawls up and down taking measurements of the entire water column.  Due to all of the components of this system, it is a very complex operation to get these things onboard. It usually takes two or more hours from start to finish, which can feel like a long time out under the tropical sun.

After learning what these instruments can do I started to get curious about the area that we are studying.  So I sat down with someone from the science team and got a better understanding of why we’re collecting all of these data.  He told me that the region we’re in is called the Samoan Passage and it is a very important spot for the Pacific Ocean’s thermohaline circulation. 

Ocean circulation plays a critical role in the global climate.  For example, most of Europe would be much colder if it weren’t for the Gulf Stream bringing up warm ocean water from the tropics. So understanding how ocean circulation works is imperative. There are several ways that the ocean circulates, but this study addresses the thermohaline circulation in the Southern Pacific Ocean. All of the cold water near Antarctica sinks to the bottom and starts slowly traveling back to the equator.  At one point along its journey, the Samoan Passage is the only place deep enough for the very cold and dense Antarctic Bottom Water to travel northward. So it is squeezed through this passage that is only a couple of kilometers wide in some places.  The science party is quantifying the amount of mixing that is happening in this passage.  They call themselves the ‘wave chasers’, because the cold Antarctic Bottom Water is passing over these very deep ridges which form standing waves that are seen best in our temperature profiles.  These standing waves are similar to the ripples you see over shallow rocks in a river or stream, except the amount of flow over these ridges is several times greater than that of the Amazon River.  It is truly exciting stuff, and I am sure that I will learn much more about the Samoan Passage over these next couple of weeks.

The science party would be hard pressed to get the data they needed without the crew and, of course, the marine techs. This week I learned quite a few new things from both of them.  The crew taught me how to hand-line fish off the back of the ship after seeing tuna and marlin one morning.  Thus far, we have been unsuccessful in getting any fish onboard the ship.  As for my main job, I learned a very valuable skill for a marine tech: how to splice a wire and make it waterproof.  Normally, I just twist two exposed electrical wires together, maybe put some electrical tape on it and call it a day.  However, we had some problems with our CTD and had to splice a wire that we are sending 5000 meters under the sea.  This poses quite a challenge.  Even so, we were successful in our waterproof splicing.  We used a newer method that consisted of crimping, soldering, hot gluing, heat shrink tubing and then electrical tape.  I never thought I’d be using hot glue and a blow dryer (for the heat shrink tube) for electrical work. 

So now that I have spent about a week developing my marine tech skills and have good understanding of the science, I feel like I’m becoming a viable member of the ship!  I still have a very long way to go until I get to the level of competence that my supervisors Jason and Brandi have, but I am confident that I can get there! 

So it took me just under 30 hours to travel 10,715 miles to the Faleolo airport in Samoa, and I had good luck the entire trip!  Being a tall guy it is difficult to be comfortable on airplanes.  However, thanks to the recent winter storm a lot of people couldn’t make it to their flights so there were lots of open seats with leg room! My favorite part of the plane rides was definitely watching the sunrise over the tropical Pacific.  I also thoroughly enjoyed Air New Zealand’s “safety video” which was directed by Peter Jackson and featured characters from the Lord of the Rings. My day in the clouds couldn’t have been any better!

Once I landed the heat and humidity hit me like a train!  It was around noon and the sun had cooked the Samoan air to a balmy 90 degrees, and with the 95% humidity it felt like 100 degrees! The airport was only large enough to handle one plane at a time which made us passengers feel like royalty when we walked off the plane. There was a crowd of people waiting for us and soon two crew members and I were driving to the ship.

The first two things that struck me about Samoan culture is that they drive on the left side of the road and the men wear long dresses.  Once I got used to that, I looked around and noticed that most of the houses didn’t have any walls at all! Instead, they had lots of pillars and a large roof. It makes for very good ventilation, I guess.

Upon further investigation of the island I observed a large number of stray dogs. Apparently they run the place. Everyone puts their trash up on stilts so that the dogs can’t make a mess of it.

After an hour drive, we finally arrived at the ship, and it felt as though I had found an old friend. I walked onboard and recognized the famous cooks of the ship: Terrance, Sarah, and India.  Before I even got a room assigned to me Terrance, ‘Grey’ and I hopped on some bikes and rode to a beach with an amazing coral reef!  We saw a sea snake, sea turtle, crown of thorns, some bright blue starfish and even the fin of a little reef shark.  I was amazed at how much colorful biota lives under the surface!

The next few days in the Samoan port were extremely rainy and consisted of learning different computer systems that control and record the arsenal of sensors aboard the ship.  The co-chief scientist, John, asked me to help him put a custom mount for his sensors on the big steel cage that houses the CTD.  With the help of one of the Marine Techs, Jason, I was able to make it work exactly how John wanted it. After working on that, Jason and I went strolling through town and got lunch and a final haircut before leaving for a whopping total of $10!

Then we left port on Friday January 10^th around dinnertime.  I had been naïve enough to not take any sea sickness medication, and the first day of transiting involved some pretty rough seas.  I was incapacitated for almost the entire day.  However, once we got to our first station the seas calmed down significantly and now I’m better than ever! Wish me continued luck with the weather for this next week!

PS. I’ve had no luck uploading pictures, but I will keep trying!

So here I sit with my loved ones in my hometown of Reading, PA with only three days until I leave for Samoa!  I am anxious, excited and unfortunately sick. Nonetheless, I am doing everything that I can to prepare to be away from my friends and family for so long. I have never been away from them for this long, but I couldn’t imagine a better way to spend my time.  

It will be hard to leave my loved ones, but I am really really looking forward to this internship!  Samoa, here I come!