Category: Columbia University, Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory Page 3 of 10

Week Four 6/30-7/6

The team began the week traveling to station 03 at Orphan Knoll, 320 nautical miles off northern Newfoundland. Upon arrival on Tuesday, they successfully obtained 6 usable cores from the first cast. However, the sediment from the second cast was unsuitable for their project due to its coarse-grained. The team then moved to a new site, station 4, just east of Orphan Knoll. This location had deeper waters, resulting in longer days. On Wednesday and Thursday, they performed four casts per day. By Friday, they had collected enough mud after the third cast and deployed an Argo float. 

This week the weather took a noticeable change. The days were longer, colder and with frequent fog. We’re planning to head further north along the eastern coast of Greenland. I also spent a good chunk of time on our transit, relabeling all shuttles for the multicorer. I did this because many of the shuttles had different numbers from old attempts at labeling. And the inner plastic tube had no label. This made it difficult to track which shuttles were actually collecting usable cores. Additionally, I made a data sheet to record the sampling data that allowed us to see if the location on the multiorder had any impact on sample success. I was a bit nervous about showing the data sheet to the science crew because no one had actually asked me to do any of this but I had asked one of the senior techs if I could do this in my off time but I am happy to say that my efforts seem to be a appreciated! 

6/23-6/29

The days are really blending together now. I feel like I was just in New York a week ago but I also feel like I’ve been working on the boat for a year.  Overall, I’m still having a blast, and everyday I’m excited to be on shift. Deployments have been going well, but we are having difficulties with the samples. At one point we were all really really excited that 5 out of 8 samples were usable. The ocean conditions were not the best but we were also dealing with issues with the shuttles. There’s a lot of discussion on how we can improve them. We’ve been adding wooden blocks to the bottom to help the shuttles not penetrate the bottom too deeply. 

One of the days, the main block (the pulley that the winch wire is run through) on the A-frame was making an awful sound. Turns out the bolts used were too small and some had snapped. It was a really great example of how amazing the engineers on the ship are because they erected scaffolding and had it fixed within the hour. I wish I knew his last name but Sam, the Chief Engineer, has literally fixed every problem that comes up in record time. I am beyond amazed by him and his team. 

I also got to see an ARGO float! Which is something I’ve learned about in college and have used their data for projects. The deployment was pretty straight forward but it was amazing to have that hands-on experience with something i’ve only read about. 

We’ve passed our 4 week mark on our cruise aboard the R/V Marcus G. Langseth. We’ve been steadily making our way north and its becoming apparent. The days have become much longer as well as colder. We’ve had a steady stream of fog that comes in most days for several hours at a time. We are almost done with our current station and have been working at a steady pace for the last several days.

Recently I’ve been learning how to operate the winch during deployment and recovery of the mutli-core instrumentation. This is certainly been one of the more challenging technical skills I’ve had to learn while aboard. Both deploying and recovering instrumentation takes quite a bit of coordinated effort between several different people. While I am in the winch booth operating via a remote joystick, there are two people running tag lines, someone operating the A-frame and a deck leader managing everyones actions. It is quite an intricate dance and one where safety is paramount. It can be an anxiety inducing build up but is done within a moment and comes with elation when everything works well.

Tomorrow we will begin setting our sights even further North, riding along the Eastern coast of Greenland. I will be keeping my eyes out for any auroa borealis though seeing the occasional pod of whales has been a good consolation prize if not.

Week Four: 6/30-7/6

With our first three (00, 01, and 02) stations in the rearview, we started week four in transit to station 03 at Orphan Knoll, a feature of the ocean floor about 320nm off the coast of northern Newfoundland.

On Tuesday, we arrived to the site. The first core cast came up with 6 usable cores! Yay! However, by the time the second cast hit the deck, the science team has determined the structure of this sediment was not suitable for their project. It was too coarse-grained, which means it is advective sediment that water flows through rather than getting trapped in. Also, trying to centrifuge the water out of it doesn’t work as well.

We started steaming again and started fresh on Wednesday morning, now calling this site 4, just a little east of station 3/Orphan Knoll. The water is deeper here, which means more wire time and longer days, but hopefully better mud.

Wednesday and Thursday we cranked out four casts per day, pulling 5 or 6 cores off each of them. This sediment contained rocks! Which is exciting, if you like rocks. The rocks are all a sooty black color, until you crack one open to reveal granite or dolomite. This dark outer coating is manganese oxide. Dolomite is a very common bedrock where I live, so I got a nerdy little thrill out of holding pieces of it that we had pulled up through 4000 meters of seawater.

On Friday, we had collected enough mud after cast three of the day, yay! This site was our second of three designated places to deploy an Argo, so we sent that off the stern as we headed out. At first, the Argo laid flat in the water, but within a few seconds, it “came alive”, righted itself, and immediately began a “dive” to 2000m.

In the evening, we spent some time tracing wires and troubleshooting because our echosounder isn’t receiving data properly from the GPS. Then, we played some MarioKart. The following days in transit went similarly; projects and troubleshooting anything acting up, then MarioKart. On Monday we expect to be on station and coring.

Week three of our cruise has passed and the time has seemingly flown by and trickled at a glacial rate. We began the week in the midst of being on our third station and it has become the problem child. During the 5 days we were at station we continually faced equipment, weather and sediment difficulties though luckily to no detriment to morale. For several of the days the weather kept us from deploying off deck part of the time. That coupled with difficult ocean conditions limiting the amount of usable cores meant we had our work cut out for us. It was certainly rewarding for all when we recovered the last core onto deck and made our heading for our next station. The next several days of transit were a welcomed change of pace with several projects to take on, both small and large. We arrived on station Tuesday morning refreshed and ready to get that mud. Unfortunately this sediment was far too dry for the science party’s liking and thinking quickly they decided to move overnight attempting to find more favorable conditions. Hopefully our new location holds mud worthy of our efforts.

Week Three: 6/23-6/29

Week three was spent collecting sediment from our station in the Newfoundland Basin. We arrived on station Sunday evening, and spent our first full day coring on Monday. We were also met with some challenges: a few cases of COVID, low success rates on core casts, a blip of foul weather, and a repair on a crucial turning block.

COVID cases springing up was a bit out of left-field, given we had been at sea for two weeks. Testing, isolation, and masking were parts of the (very calm and collected) response initiated by the captain, and by the end of the week things were mostly back to normal.

We kept up a steady pace of 3-4 casts per day, but each cast only produced one or two usable cores. Progress was slow. This was an interesting chance to experiment with the multicore, and adding wooden blocks on the bottom of the “spider” helped to produce better cores by keeping the multicore a little shallower in the sediment when it touched down.

One stroke of good luck was the weather we had been tracking mellowed out by the time it reached us, and we only missed a half day of work rather than the 2 days we initially expected. On either side of the poor weather, we enjoyed some warm, sunny days.

On Friday, Ayse noticed the main turning block (mounted on the A-frame, which the winch wire runs through), was starting to make an odd squawking sound, a lot like the sound of a mallard duck. After we finished that cast, the deck crew assembled some scaffolding to take a look at it. They quickly determined that source of the squawk was the inner sheave, which was starting to separate due to improper hardware. With the proper bolts in place, the duck was silenced, the block was fixed, and coring was resumed.

On Saturday morning, the morning shift completed the final cast at station 2 to send the CTD and Niskin carousel! Once the CTD was secure, they turned their attention to one of three wooden crates on deck. In each of these crates, there is an Argo float. These are robotic instruments that meander around the ocean, measuring CTD profiles as they descend and ascend, and send these data back to scientists. This is an international project that started in 2000. Today, there are 3908 active Argo floats taking these measurements. The Argo float was deployed off the stern, and we were on our way to station 3!

Week Two on the Langseth has come and gone!

We finished up our first transit, and then spent a few days on station coring. We experienced a little kerfuffle with the new winch, and lost a few hours of work until we were able to devise a solution.

It took us 8 casts with the multicore to collect sufficient “mud”. It’s not actually the mud that the science team is after though; it is the water trapped between the fine grains of the sediment. This water is called pore water. To extract the water from the sediment, the science team does lots of careful scooping, centrifuging, filtering, and bottling.

 The multicore has eight tubes that are lowered into the sediment and then pulled back up (hopefully) full of a beautiful core of deep-sea sediment. So far, it is very rare to have a cast in which all eight cores are usable. A good cast for us has resulted in 5 or 6 “keepers” and subpar casts bring up 1 to 3 keeper cores.

The number of casts needed depends on many factors, including how “watery” the sample is (i.e. what the sediment is like) and the conditions of the ocean. It is easier to get a nice core in calm water.

After we wrapped up station 01 (not to be confused with station 00, which was our first stop), we transited about 800 nautical miles northeast. Transit allowed time for extra resting and project catch-up.

Now we’re at work getting samples here at station 02, where conditions have been more difficult; we have about 2 knots worth of current and we are retrieving only a couple usable cores from each cast. At this site’s depth of about 4830 meters, it takes about 2 hours to send the multicore down and 2 hours to retrieve it..it is a long way to go at a pace of about 45 meters per minute.

One night we enjoyed the sunset over very calm waters with the company of dozens and dozens of dolphins. Several pods over the course of a few hours swam towards the ship, under the bow, and along the wake. Very special!

06/18/2024:

• New rules for winch booth: one person at a time, max 1-hour stay.
• Minor issues adjusting winch during deployment rotation.

06/19/2024:

• Deployed corer at 6 am after prep with Joe at 5 am.
• Assisted with taglines and bottle replacement, each deployment takes 4 hours.
• Noticed winch operator error during shift change.
• Experienced sudden vision changes; eyesight issues noted.

06/20/2024:

• general deployment day.

06/21/2024:

• transit to next station

06/22/2024:

• Day spent seasick, rested in theater room and cabin.
• Tested negative for COVID after some of the crews positive results.

06/23/2024:

• Reapplied patch, feeling better.
• Five onboard tested positive for COVID.
• Anticipated arrival at station tomorrow morning.

06/24/2024:

• Winch line on first cast was angled significantly, had to call all stop and work with the captain to get the boat to drift with the current
• last cast yielded only one usable sample.

06/25/2024:

• First cast nearing completion by 9:30 am.
• Helped Arron on the fly bridge with setting up some stuff for an O2 sensor.
• Switched from hour long shift rotations to half hour.

06/26/2024:

• Took off weight from the corer and crew added wood blocks on the bottom so that the tubes wouldn’t sink so low into the mud.

IN CONCLUSION:

A bit more downtime this week, but I am beginning to feel settled down with living and working on a boat. Im honestly shocked that it’s only been a little over two weeks.  The most notable event this week is that we were able to get 5 (out of 8) good samples on one of the casts. Which is way better then usual! We also changed our shift rotations to 30mins instead of an hour. That was no one has to hold the winch joystick for a whole hour.

My second week aboard the Langseth has officially ended and the time has seemingly flown by. At the beginning of this week we were just starting our transit to the next station. From the Bermuda area we headed North East up the Atlantic for several days. These transit periods are a good time to rest as well as perform some of the necessary tasks that we wouldn’t have time to while we’re at a station, busy collecting core and water samples. During this transit we did some house cleaning of the marine tech shop, prepared equipment for future projects and remounted the remote controls for the winch. All our work was well rewarded though when we were accompanied by a huge pod of dolphins at sunset on our last day of transit.

Fearing foul weather oncoming, we began coring with haste on Monday succeeding in deploying three times in the day and three times again today. It seems we are getting a rhythm to the task and even with depths reaching near 5000m we are having no issues keeping that pace. The difficulty I’ve come to understand with coring is until you have the samples back aboard, you never truly know what quality you’re going to get. The coring specialists do everything in their ability to optimize each deployment but in the end we are at the whim of currents, sediment and benthic characteristics. Unfortunately the science party has only been able to utilize a few individual cores from each deployment on this station though we are trying several fixes to bump those numbers up. As they say, necessity is the mother of invention. Hopefully this week comes with better mud and even more adventure. 

Our first week of the trip has already come and gone in a flash. I boarded the Langseth in Brooklyn Harbor late on the 9th. That was followed by a full day of preparations and getting the lay of the ship. Its quite a maze of hallwyays and decks that I easily became lost in the first several days. I would say I know it well now though I think I find a new room everyday. The ship left port in the early hours of the 11th in order to refuel and then were on our way out.

The ship’s engineers were faced with a potential delay, waiting for a part, and not wanting to waste any precious time the crew and science party decided on a new first deployment station whilst we wait. The instrumentation we are primarily using on this cruise are multi-cores, taking cylinders of mud from the sea floor, thousands of meters below the surface. The first station was a bit of a crash course for me in the operation of multi-cores as we deployed them several times over the next couple days. Some good news came at the end of this station when the engineers were able to fix the ship without going back to port.

After finishing up at our initial station it was time to make haste towards the next and official first station. Transit took several days and was a good time for all to rest and reset before the real work began. We only arrived on station yesterday and have already had our share of success and tribulations. During an inital CTD deployment the Langseth’s new winch malfunctioned leaving the CTD stuck close to the bottom for several hours. With the valiant efforts of the ship’s engineers and electricians the winch was repaired and CTD recovered in one piece. Today we’ve deployed two more cores and seem to be smoothing out all the little problems as they come. We hope for fair winds and following seas as our journey begins.