Well if you read my last blog entry http://www.marinetech.org/internship-blog/bid/1100 then you know that the MoorSPICE cruise started off without a hitch! However, as I am learning about life at sea, nothing goes exactly as planned and everyone needs to be prepared for anything.
Some of the troubles we encountered since the last post were minor like the less-than-salty scientists getting seasick and disappearing into their rooms for days. Another problem was that some scientists couldn’t get sleep because their beds are near the bow thruster which was pounding away all day and all night on this cruise, but these were minor personal problems.
We did encounter a few technical problems which spanned from leaky bottles to haunted water sample processing equipment. First, there were several Niskin bottles that boggled the techs. When we send down the CTD, we send it down on a strong metal cable that has a few metal wires in it that transfer data up to the ship and commands down to the instrument. The commands are to close the caps to the bottles which captures a water sample at a certain depth. Now in order for this to work properly it needs to be sealed water tight. In a growing number of cases on this trip, there were bottles that were coming up warm; water from the deep ocean should be very cold so this was indicative of a leak. Oh, and another clue was the fact that it was visually leaking. We discovered that the culprit was a crack in the bottles and we had to replace a few of them. Problem solved, but not all problems were this easy to solve.
A bigger problem occurred during a day that we set aside to download data from a mooring, remotely. One of the engineers from Scripps, Spencer, was tasked with using a sonar transducer to ‘talk’ with a mooring that was anchored to the seafloor right under the ship. He then used the transducer to command it to send us data via sound waves so our sonar receiver could download it. However the data never came. We tried using his personal sonar transducer and then the ship’s transducer, but neither of them worked. Luckily we were able to download data from a second mooring in the area. We called it a success and cruised to the next station.
The biggest problem for this cruise was the salinometer. Not only was it the biggest problem, but the challenge to solve the problem was put squarely on my shoulders. Now if you know anything about salinometers, which you don’t, you know that they’re incredibly touchy, they work only every other lunar eclipse, and they’re susceptible to all sorts of voodoo, but when you finally understand their ways, they give you the most accurate data you could ever need. Some people know them very well, but nobody on this cruise was one of them. So I got out the manual and hacked away at the beast until I figured out how to calibrate the thing to standardized sea water (sea water from off the coast of England that costs ~$120/liter) and how to properly clean the thing between each testing sample. The problem was that the data that it was producing was just wrong; it was way too high to be real. So I reread the manual over and over and for a couple of days I am completely stuck. Then I realized that there was a dial to manually adjust the voltage associated with the specific salinity in the standardized seawater, I guess because I’m a millennial I had assumed it was automatic. Then after helping the scientists with their calculations, we finally got some numbers that made sense! Not the quickest fix, but a fix nonetheless.
Another big problem at sea is monotony. The work is exciting and intensity is high, but the routine is, well, very routine. After doing moorings and CTD’s for a couple of months straight I kind of needed something to break up the routine a little bit.
The first thing I do is talk with the scientists and the other techs and bug them to tell me everything they know. I would go to Mar, the biologist from Spain, and try to get into the mind of a scientist. It is important to remember that the ship’s crew and the scientists come from very different backgrounds and are on the ship for very different reasons. The marine tech is responsible for keeping everybody on the same page and making sure everybody gets what they want out of the cruise, safely.
Another scientist I talked to was Marion from Scripps, who taught me everything there is to know about the Lower Acoustic Doppler Current Profiler and the software that she uses to read and process the data. It’s also important to know how the scientists use the data that we’re going to such great extents to collect. If they’re not happy with the data, they’re not happy with the cruise. Data is the driving force behind all science.
Helping me understand the data and much much more about the ship’s computers was Patrick A’Hearn, the lead marine tech on this cruise. He took me to the racks of computers in the computer lab and described to me in great detail over the course of weeks, what each machine does. I took it upon myself to draw it out in a formal network diagram, but the network is so complicated that it would leave the reader more confused. He and Tina taught me a lot about what types of data goes between what types of computers and it is a lot to process, but in this age of automation, so so important.
Aside from filling my head with information, I also like to fill my belly. On March 14th, the third mate, Marion, and another scientist, Sri, all stayed up through the night to bake all sorts of pies for Pi Day! I’m admittedly not that great of a cook, especially on little sleep, but we made enough pies to last for days. Luckily that night the cooks set up a barbeque on the bow. It was really neat to enjoy our creations with the beautiful Gizo Island almost a stone’s throw away. Since all of these islands are scarcely inhabited, it was incredibly unique that we saw two people rowing a canoe out in the shallow reefs around us. Then to top it off, we had a beautiful sunset. What a Pi Day.
More from the battlefront against monotony: The 2014 MoorSPICE Ping Pong Extravaganza! We had a lot of time to kill during a few 30 hour transits, so the chief scientist enlisted me to set up a tournament to keep everyone busy and our spirits high. With the help of an exceptional AB, Pam, we set up a ‘random selector’ machine to pick opponents for the first round of the tournament. This was a lesson in mechanical engineering as we built an actual lottery machine with floating ping pong balls with numbers on them. It was quite the thrill and I have gotten really good at ping pong over the past few months, so I kicked butt.
Another recreational activity we did to pass time was fishing, and as a group we caught one fish. It was about two feet long, and it was something called a blue runner. We saw a whole bunch of fish and even a shark way out in the ocean, but we only got one. I lie, we also had a flying fish fly on deck and dry out on us, although that wasn’t nearly as appetizing.
The biggest recreational project we had was the CTD videography. We wanted to show people at home what we do on a daily basis, and we also wanted to see what it looks like when the CTD descends down into the deep dark blue depths of the Ocean. So before we got the CTD in the water, we taped a GoPro to the end of a 20’ pole and held it in the water over the side of the ship. After we recorded the CTD deploying, we brought the GoPro inside and made a timelapse video of the usually four to six hours of watching numbers on a screen to make sure everything is working. This turned out great and I hope to post it somewhere and put the link here.
All and all, the MoorSPICE cruise was pretty awesome. I had a lot of fun and learned a lot of French from some of the foreign scientists. If you’d like to know more about the science, they made their own blog here http://moorspice2014.wordpress.com/ .
As for me, after a short stay in the New Caledonian port which included a long hot day of unloading all of their mooring stuff followed shortly by a well-deserved pool party, I was nearing the end of my hitch on the Thompson. I cannot even imagine being on another ship, but after a short transit to Auckland, New Zealand, I’m getting right on a plane and heading to Hawaii to get on the Kilo Moana!