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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.