Hello World,
Justin Miyano reporting from the Arctic again. It has been almsot 3 weeks at sea, and I seem to be the only remaining person excited about it. This morning, we woke up to some snow on the outside decks. The temperature has been fluctuating between 28 and 32 degrees, and it is quite cold, but I suppose it is way better than cold rain. Ugh, just the thought of it is giving me chicken skin.
Yesterday, we completed the deployment of our 5th acoustic mooring. Between the last blog I wrote and this blog post, I have communicated with some of the scientists to better understand this project better, and I have learned that, after the acoustic source mooring is deployed, 3 transponders are deployed so that at any given time the acoustic source produces sound, the transponders can triangulate the exact position of the source, which anables the scientists to calculate the distance and speed of the sound traveled between the moorings. Once the 3 transponders are deployed, we use an echosounder to locate the precise positions of the three.
On the tech side of things, everything has been working well and our days have been mellow, until 2 days ago, when we attempted the troubleshoot what could be the problem with our faulty GPS system and antenna (the POS-MV system). We power cycled the system (a fancy tech word for turn off and on) so that we could attempt various combinations of the 2 antennas, cables, and extensions to find the broken component, but then the whole system stopped functioning. For hours, we tried powercycling and looking at all the connections, reading the computer outputs to see what could have gone wrong but there were no obvious signs. After a long battle with the POS-MV and sending out an email to the manufacturer’s representative who had helped us in the beginning of the cruise, we called it a night. Then, we woke up to a see the POS-MV working again. The computer said that it had started logging information a couple hours prior to us noticing this morning. What a magical white September morning.
On another note, we recently learned that we have a protp-type buoy onboard from a project called UpTempO (Upper Layer Temperature of the Polar Oceans: http://psc.apl.washington.edu/UpTempO/). They study the seasurface temperatures in the polar oceans to help monitor global warming, using these simple buoy systems. The buoys have temperature and pressure sensors from 2.5 to 60 meters deep! The deployment of this buoy is STARC’s (Oregon State University and Scripps Institute of Oceanography) responsibility, so the two techs, Brandon and Keith are pretty excited that we will be working on the deck for a change!
Other than that, we have corn hole and ping pong tournaments to celebrate Labor Day! Woo for some fun. Happy Labor Day weekend everyone.
P.S. It took me 3 attempts to write this blog because the site kept freezing up when I would try to upload a photo so I am not going to upload a photo this time, sorry.