Author: Robert Daniels

The weather finally gave us a break on Wednesday after two days of 35 knot winds, churning up the sea into a white mountainous mess.  Its amazing high the swell can get after a sustained substantial blow.  The Labrador Sea had taken on lake like qualities before the weather hit us, glassy and flat, perfectly reflecting the incredible sunsets and making for smooth sailing.  You could almost forget you’re in the middle of the North Atlantic, regaining the ability to walk straight lines instead of bouncing off walls to your destination.   Alas, a low pressure system moved in to remind us where we were and what the ocean was capable of.  All the forecast predicted that we’d be riding tandem with remnants of the hurricane for the rest of the trip. 

As the majority of the work is done for the trip, I spent a fair amount of time this week working through Matlab codes, making vector and contour plots with the ADCP data along the tracks of the seven CTD sections.  This is not really the realm of a marine science technician, but I’ve found that the ability to code is essential to so many facets of ship board data collection and processing, so any experience I can get with it will be applicable or helpful in other situations.

We had a fire drill on Thursday which went off an hour before I was ready to wake up.  I dragged my survival suit, PFD, and tired body to the lab for roll call.  I always appreciate the training, especially when it could help me survive in a disaster.

When the alarm went off again an hour later I ran down to grab my suit and realized it was the real thing.  Smoke and steam was filling the first deck.  The smell of burning rubber and steam hung in the air.  I got to the lab, surrounded by the same disheveled group of people as earlier, yet everyone’s eyes were keenly fixed on the SSSG giving instruction this time, knowing this was real.  Luckily for us (not for the engineers), it was only an overheated engine and a few burst pipes.  The situation was under control.  It was actually a little scary not knowing if this could be one of those rare occurrences when we’d need to leave the boat and drift off into the forbidding building swells beyond the guard rail of the ship. 

We had a great presentation on Thursday given by the chief scientist Bob Pickart on the present theories concerning the North Atlantic’s water circulation.  He gave us a good overview of the topic and then went specifically into the meridional overturning circulation which we’re here to study, the goals of this cruise, and what we’ve found so far.  Toward the end, he showed us figures of an amazing cyclone that we serendipitously collected data from with the CTD.  Researchers had known cyclones developed in the deep western boundary current, but were unaware that they were an intact phenomenon this far south of the Denmark Strait.  It was really incredible to see the high resolution CTD and ADCP profiles of the cyclone that Larik and I had collected the data from. 

We headed to the Cape Farewell on Thursday night to do two more CTD sections, thus developing a better picture of the whole cape current system.  These sections were unplanned but allowed more time for the hurricane leftovers in front of us to move north.  The swell was pretty big Thursday night and all of Friday, due to the 30+ knot winds, which made CTD work wet, hard, and fun.  The instrument would fly erratically out of the water on every recovery.  Even when we had it hooked and tightened on the tuggers, the unit would buck around wildly in the wind.  It was kind of intimidating at points, wondering how much pressure the weakest link of this operation could take. 

We were pretty beaten up on the trip back to Iceland.  The wind speeds were between 30 and 40 knots all weekend, which added energy to an already sizable swell.  Waves pounded the side of the haul, sounding like car collisions, and from the bridge I watched the bow get continually buried by the waves.  The ship pitched violently, sometimes reaching just beyond the limit of our shelf rails and table lips, sending the lab cascading to the floor.  The same happened in the galley launching all the juice against the opposing walling causing a Jackson Pollockesqueexplosion.   Half of the science team became drowsy Dramamine drugged crew members, limping in and out of their rooms, seized again by sickness.

The weather cleared and we came into Reykjavik on Tuesday morning.  It was amazing.  Cities tend to look so good when you are coming in to them from the water.  The smell of the shore was so raw and inviting.  Walking off a ship, after a month long sea voyage, back on to land is a very primal event.  My legs wobbled; as if they’re unsure how use the solid surface underneath them.  I was a freshly evolved animal, walking out from the water, making terra firma my home again.    

Every body of water has its own character.  Its unique inputs and diverse atmospheric interactions create a set of distinctive qualities.  The Labrador Sea, which is just a small section of the North Atlantic Ocean, exemplifies this idea having such a different feel from its oceanic sibling, the Irminger Sea.  The Labrador feels colder, which is probably due, in part, to the lack of warm Gulf Stream current and its heat flux.  Its bird population seems to be composed of larger species with a greater diversity.  Each afternoon I watch Shearwaters, Iceland Gulls, and a few yet identified birds soaring along the surface of the water, sketching the contours of the sea swells at what seems to me to be an all too dangerous proximity.  When the weather picked up on Wednesday night, countless puffins took refuge in the lee of the ship, diving below the sizable swells that rolled by.  It’s striking how different an ecosystem and environment can be on the opposite side of a small end of land.  Even down to the difference in smell which we get as we’re heading back toward the coast on the ends of our CTD sections.  The odor is more alive, even primordial soupish, hanging in the moist night air, engulfing the boat.

I’ve been working a lot with the LADCP, which stands for lowered ADCP.  The set up we’re using is two ADPCs mounted on the CTD rosette– one points up and the other down.  They are used to look at the velocity of the currents in the water column at every station and assembled into sections to give researchers a look at the greater and lesser current in the area.  It is necessary because the ship board ADCP is only good for the first 150 meters, but as the ship is 3000 meters of water, the LADCP is essential to get a look at the entire system. 

The LADCP is run using a Python program supported by Linux which I enjoy digging through when we have a deployment or recovery problem, though it’s a little stressful on the quick turn arounds.  I’m getting better at deducing the problems that arise and using the growing set of skills that I’ve picked up on the trip to sort them out.  It feels really good getting comfortable with a complex oceanographic instrument that I felt was very cryptic and intimidating when we left the dock in Reykjavik.  Dan, the physical oceanography research specialist from WHOI, and I tested all the cables Thursday afternoon and ran through the system during this evenings shift.  He’s a really nice and smart guy that has been teaching me a lot about ADCPs.  We ended up having to replace the faltering wiring harness that connected the ADCPs and the battery together and to the ship, making the whole system worked far better afterwards.  It stopped returning error codes in what I thought looked like Icelandic to my deployment and recovery commands, which was terribly unnerving at 3AM on a coastal cast, especially when the majority of those stations have 10 minutes between them, creating an increased urgency for the instrument to just work.

Our cruise has done a total of 150 CTD casts, 90 of which has been deployed and recovered by Larik and me on the night shift, leaving the other two shifts to split the difference.  I’m really glad be got the busy overnight schedule.  I’m getting the experience that I came here for, plus I’m being pushed to progress in an environment and with people that really facilitate learning.  We’ve gotten very good at our job, working well with each other and doing it with an absolute smoothness that makes getting a 1200 pound. CTD out of a big swell and on to the swaying boat controlled and easy.  I just wish my Russian was progressing as well.

All this work culminated with last night’s flawless shift; with no computer freeze ups, miss firing bottles, or any sort of minor breakdown.  There wasn’t one hectic situation where I learned how to fix a different problem that arises on a ship on the fly.  Nothing went awry.  It was a prefect ballet, rolling through a gentle story, punctuated with moments of excitement (i.e. the CTD recovery and deployment) and elation.

We had our first sight of Greenland at 14:30 on the 11^th.  The rising sea became more littered with icebergs and coastal debris on our track west, toward the coast.  As we approached land, the immense size of the rugged mountains and glaciers became more apparent and impressive.  Giant horns towered over a coast strewn with remnants of the ranges erosion.   I went up to the bridge to get a better look at the landscape and, as luck would have it, I got to see a couple of pilot whales and this pea soup thick fog bank rushing in to obliterate our sightseeing.  It was all really breathtaking– one of those moments that I stopped to actively appreciate how rare and amazing this experiences is.  

With mooring deployment consuming all the daylight hours, CDT casts have all been scheduled at night, which has made Larik and my shift very busy.  The nights of the 11^th and 13^th were especially hectic when we were doing a casts for a high resolution data collection of the Eastern Greenland coast, in an attempt to get a better understanding of the Eastern Greenland Current.  We had ten minutes between cast until 4:00, which meant starting the set up for a deployment as we finished the last cast.  We real got into a rhythm at about midnight on the first night making the rest of the night and subsequent days easier and more fun.  Larik is even teaching me some Russian as we work, including songs from famous Russian musicals, in trade for the conversational English lessons I’m giving him.

On the night of the 12^th, we spent the night “mowing the lawn”, which means steering the ship on a grid pattern course collecting bathymetry data.  We used the soundings with their latitudes and longitudes to create a contour map of the sea bottom around the area we’re putting the mooring tomorrow.  It really gave me a better sense of what we’re looking at on the echo sounder screen and how “right” my previous interpretations of the data was, also how to infer a more realistic picture of what the bottom looks like.  In the past I’ve only been on ships that have gone to established mooring sites, where we’ve recovered and re-deployed moorings.  This trip is much more involved, having to establish a site, installing the moorings in a reasonable and advantageous spot. 

I’ve been working with Nick, the technician, on the Seabeam software, attempting to sort out the bugs in the system.  The Seabeam has been down since the ship tapped the bottom leaving WHOI.  Just enough water got in to scramble the system but not destroy it.  Fixing this system would allow us to use the ships high resolution bathymetry system and have a far better understanding of what the sea looks like at the mooring sites.  We are getting really close.  The computers are finally talking to us and system seems to be awakening from its coma.

We had a minor accident Friday morning as Larik and I were bringing the CTD out of some pretty rough seas.  The Winch operator miscalculated the speed he needed to come out of the water and drove the CTD up into the winch block, it’s called two blocking.  Our tugger winch’s groaned under the strain of the sudden yank until we quickly let out line.  The cable eye was pulled beyond its breaking strength, thus needed to be replaced.  Looking on the bright side, no one was hurt and I got to observe how a replace the eye on a steel cable, but it did shut down work for a couple hours.

It’s Sunday and we’ve made it to the Labrador Sea after an epic crossing through the Prince Christian Sound.  We spent last night doing XBT cast on the west coast of Greenland.  XBT’s are a onetime use temperature probe that we send down as far as 1830 meters so researchers get a feel for the water column.  Historically XBT’s were “… prepared “by rubbing a bit of skunk oil on with a finger and then wiping off with the soft side of one’s hand,” followed by smoking the slide over the flame of a Bunsen burner.”, but lucky it’s all done by a simple instrument and some software at this point.  These XBT’s, CTD’s, and the Bathymetry work of the last few days are all in preparation for the mooring that we get started with on Monday morning at 6:00.

Life is good.

I’m on the night shift.  A schedule I tend to prefer when doing something out of my ordinary– though I’m working hard to make this technician life my every day.  Nights are so incredible on a boat.  I am up to see the arctic summer sun set and rise again in the span of a few hours, over the tumultuous North Atlantic Ocean.   At 2:00 this morning I got to see a remarkably colorful moon rise, with an unreal deep orange hue, peering through the shroud of blacken clouds.  On overcast days, work is done engulfed in an inky atmosphere, giving you the feeling of being at the edge of oblivion.

A research vessel never sleeps, which induces the fear of missing out.  There is a little trepidation of skipping a potentially interesting CTD cast or whale sighting when you decide to nap for a few hours, but that fear dissipates when your head hits the pillow.  The same action and excitement is going on night and day, with moorings being assembled, birds soaring, and problems quickly resolved.  It’s a dynamic chaos that works toward producing amazing discoveries.

I’ve been running the CTD watch from 20:00 to 4:00 every day with Larik, a student of the University of Moscow.  He is a really smart guy and great to work with.  He’s amazed by the safety standards of U.S. boats as compared with a cruise he took on a Russian research vessel.  It seems the Russian ship did not emphasize the use of helmets, gloves, or thorough training on what is expected to be accomplished.  He wears one of those striped Russian navy shirts to every shift, which cracks me up.  He’s really playing the part of a mariner.       

There is a lot of friendly and knowledgeable technician from Woods Hole and SAMS (The Scottish Association for Marine Science) to talk to and learn from on this cruise.  The ship is alive, sort of like a bee hive, with mooring assembly and preparation for deployment—chains, shackles, glass buoyancy balls…  Maybe it’s the giant yellow floats and copious strips of electrical on everything that has put the bee idea in my head.  The SAMS mooring have been going out first, so I’ve done the most observing, helping, and learning with them.  I’d never seen releases attached to the CTD to test their triggers at depth or their teardown and internal predeployment inspection.  Both of the SAMS technicians are very generous with their wealth of technical knowledge and excellent conversation. 

I’ve been helping Liz, formally a Woods Hole technician and now working for a research facility in Germany, with her current floats she’s preparing and deploying.  They look like giant (2 meter!) test tubes, which are weighted to have neutral buoyancy at 2500 meter.  After released, they will flow with the currents logging its position and velocity data, which will be transmit back to Woods Hole after a set interval.  It’s unbelievable that something so fragile on the boat is going to survive years at sea, traversing the open ocean.

Dan, from Woods Hole, has been showing me how to use a Linux system to create an ADCP data collection program.  We’re using this setup for the ADCP’s that are mounted on the CTD.  I’ve had pretty limited exposure to that operating system, so the tutorials have been really insightful.

It’s only a few days into the cruise, and I already feel like I’ve learned so much.

On board the R/V Knorr after a couple days in Reykjavik.  The boat is tied up at the Marine Science Institutes dock, situated behind the Harpa, the city’s Opera house.  The Harpa is really pretty during the few hours of darkness, as it has a constantly changing light show, dancing from window to window.  It looks great from the boat.

As I came in on the bus from the airport, I felt that the Reykjanes Peninsula was reminiscent of Alaska, with its rocky tundra covered in low shrubs and grass.  It is what I’ve come to think of as the classic subarctic plain, yet this seemed more alive.  The occasional Arctic Tern or Puffin would soar from behind a pile of volcanic rubble, do a few loops, and then disappear behind a cloud of belched geothermic steam.  The ground is alive.  There is a serenity to the landscape that doesn’t fully express its violent beginning and continuing cataclysmic tectonic metamorphoses’.   

It has been very interesting learning about early Icelandic/Viking history at the local museums.  Such incredible maritime developments were pioneered by the Norse people, which allowed them to make safe(ish) passage across the North Atlantic, and thus discover Iceland (though there is some debate as whether Irish Monks were here first, but no evidence of their existence on this Island has yet to be found) and, very likely, the New World.  It is in the wake of those innovators and artisans of blue water sailing that I get to experience for the next month of sea spray and science.       

I’ve been serendipitously put on the boat with a shipmate named Nick.  He just happens to be a past MATE intern, having just completed the six month internship, which consisted of two different passages in the Southern Pacific.  Nick’s now working on the Knorr as a Marine Science technician, very happy about the results of the program and his job.  It’s really inspiring to hear how well someone is doing with the opportunity I’m just embarking on.

We cast the lines off tomorrow morning at 8:00 and steam toward Greenland.  We’re half a day out from our first mooring deployments for a group from SAMS, a research institute from Scotland, whose technicians have been busily assembling their mooring on the dock for the last two days.  We all can’t wait to get going.

As the month of July is drawing to an end, my internship, which had seemed so far off in chaos of a hectic spring quarter is a just a week away.  My name is Robert Daniels, and I’m an undergraduate at the University of Washington majoring in Physical Oceanography.  I’m very fortunate to attend an excellent public research university with an active community of scientist, whom I’ve had such positive and inspiring interactions with.  With their encouragement and guiding hands, I have developed a high enthusiasm for field work and good science, which I’m carrying in tow to this M.A.T.E. internship.

I recently returned from a two week cruise on the vessel Norseman 2, working with researchers from the University of Washington, A.P.L., and M.I.T. in the Bering Strait.  We were recovering and deploying moorings and preforming several historic CTD lines in the Strait zone.  This cruise, which is the second I’ve taken to the area with the group, has vastly increased my knowledge of the ocean dynamic and furthered the development of my skills as a working researcher on a science cruise. 

I expect the same will be true with this next great cruise.  I’m very excited to meet with Bob Pickart and his group from WHOI on the R/V Knorr and work on the “Overturning of the Subpolar North Atlantic” program.  I spent weeks before the Bering Strait trip reading several papers on the accepted physical oceanographic processes of the Western Arctic, and now I’m steeping myself in the details of the complex currents, heat fluxes, and water properties on other end of the great northern ocean.  I can’t wait to get out there.