Category: R/V Atlantis Page 4 of 10

I am currently going on a little over 2 weeks at sea with the Alvin Ops group. It is my first time at sea for this long, and I will say I had some anxiety beforehand. I am currently enrolled in an online masters program, so I was worried about having enough time for both the internship and my courses. Now in retrospect I can say that all of that anxiety is out the window. Even with the long hours of work for the internship I still have plenty of time to get my course work done, and also relax. When you’re on a ship there’s nowhere else to go, so the distractions are minimal. The work days are long with the Alvin group, but I am used to it and because I enjoy the work it doesn’t feel long. Up to this point I have worked closely alongside the mechanics during focused repairs, inspections, and maintenance. I am learning something new everyday, and it is all thanks to this amazing opportunity afforded to me by the MATE program. If it were up to me I would never leave the Alvin Ops group, they are a great team to be a part of and the work is extremely interesting as well as unique.

We were falling into our groove this week on the ALVIN team and by our increasing comfort with the basics of launching and recovering the sub, responsibilities incrementally expanded. For me, this included the new and coveted task of throwing the tow line during the recovery process. In recovery, a small boat (a Zodiac) is deployed with a team of swimmers from the RV Atlantis, with the objective of preparing the sub for recovery once it surfaces. It is an intricate choreography with many steps beyond the scope of practice of an intern. Part of the on-deck duties related to sub recovery is throwing the tow line, which attaches the sub to the back of the ship and brings it into position. This allows for attachment of all of the accouterment which allows for the sub to be lifted back onto the ship. I have never been called the Walter Johnson of my generation, so I found the prospect of throwing the tow line off the back of the ship to be intimidating. It turns out, I was in a “League of My Own,” by which I mean I did an acceptable job and threw it sufficiently far to allow the recovery process to continue. Truly a win for interns everywhere. I cannot wait for the parade in my honor. I would like to thank the Academy and the MATE Program for making this day possible.

Last night was a very busy night. Today was the first science dive. After the first couple dives called engineering dives where the Alvin pilots make sure everything is operating smoothly, the scientists can add their equipment to the submersible for sampling. The Alvin ops team were working with the scientists to determine what would be used for sampling on the first dive, and it took a lot of last minute building and machining. Things don’t always go as planned and scientists enjoy making the technicians do more and more. It doesn’t bother me because I am enjoying the work and I am always learning from my superiors. There is a wealth of knowledge among the team members and I am always willing to lend a hand. We are quickly falling into a manageable routine, and I can’t wait to see what happens next.

All is well aboard the R/V Atlantis. Fair seas and favorable launching conditions greeted us this morning, so the first launch of ALVIN took place. It is crazy to be involved with the launch of ALVIN and to help vent scientists with their objectives. What an incredible privilege to do a day of work with an incredible team of engineers and then go eat some lunch with brilliant biologists, geologists, physicists, and chemists in the middle of the ocean! C’est la vie for a MATE intern.

My fellow intern Noah Bourassa and I arrived at Golfito and joined up with the RV Atlantis and the ALVIN team. The first thing we did was help load up the steel weights – which is how stuff headed to the bottom of the ocean manages to get there and (importantly) come back up. Once those were piled up and secured, we had some time to learn the ropes and relax. This included a tour of the ALVIN personnel sphere and an overview of the electrical team’s responsibilities. We had a day off to explore Golfito, and settle in before we push off!

Week one complete. Boarded my flight out of Boston at 5 am on Monday the 12th, then boarded a connecting flight in Dallas, and found myself in San Jose, Costa Rica. I met with another MATE intern after customs, Emilia TopJohnson, who is on the same cruise. We grabbed food near the hotel and then turned in for the night, awaiting news of wether or not the other team members arriving the next day would be delayed by weather or not. Luckily they arrived on time with no issues, and we all made it onto the chartered flight out of San Jose to Golfito, where the ship is in port. Once in Golfito Emilia and I met many more members of the Alvin and Sentry teams, and we were well aquainted with our mentors by the end of the night. The next morning was a weight party which involves moving and stacking steel plates which are used on the Alvin submersible as ditchable weights. I enjoyed this laborous introduction to work on the ship. After that party we were free to explore the area. My roommate, my mentor, and I found a local dive shop and joined an expedition to two wreck sites. As someone with only cold water diving experience I will say that it will be difficult to go back. Today we had a packed day of working on pre launch tasks. I first assisted in securing spaces with line, and then I helped in the mechanic shop. For the majority of the day I helped the team install new parts onto water samplers which are used to take water samples from hydrothermal vents. I thoroughly enjoyed it, and the time flew by. The team is very knowledgable, and more importantly helpful and positive with teaching me. Tonight is our last night in port, and we are scheduled to depart at 0930, but that could change. Until next time.

Hello! My name is Emilia Topp-Johnson. I am a UNOLS MATE intern on the electrical team of the ALVIN HOV through Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, and will be boarding the R/V Atlantis at the port in Golfito Costa Rica in a few days! This past spring, I graduated from Washington University in St. Louis with a degree in Astrophysics, and am entering Columbia University in the fall to undertake a degree in Electrical Engineering. I have previously worked as a Geophysical Research Assistant aboard the Atlantis’s sister vessel, the RV Thomas Thomson exploring the Gofar transform fault, and am excited to continue to explore the bottom of the ocean, especially with such a unique and incredible device! Much of my past year was spent overwintering on the Greenlandic Ice Sheet, so I am super excited to spend time doing science in the sun!

Last week’s schedule was really hectic, but I had a nice chance to relax as the storm began to hit. This storm was not as severe as the first, but there was definitely lots of wind and some pretty big waves. I spent the first weather day reading and watched Get Out with the crew when I finished my book. The following day, I slept in and caught up on some much-needed rest before meeting the team outside for a deck test. The lead mechanic had used his free time to put a Wario face on Sentry with electrical tape, so that was quite a shock to see as I was waking up. He did a really good job and it made the final deployments all the more exciting. 

On our final weather day, I was getting a bit restless, so I cleaned and organized our mechanical van. We performed yet another deck test, but I asked to watch from inside this time so I could get a better understanding of the reasoning behind the order of operations of the test. 

We decided to move the 24-hour dives from noon and midnight to 9am and 9pm, so we got up early the next day to prepare for a morning dive and did the deck test and pre-dive as the sun rose. Even though we changed the dive schedule, we kept the same watch schedule, so instead of being on watch for the last four hours of each dive, my shift was now the first 3 hours and then the ascent the next day. I asked to watch launch from inside for this dive and learned a lot from that experience. I actually had to leave my watch early this day to register for my fall classes, so I offered to cover some of someone else’s shift instead and started at 6am instead of 8am the next morning. 

I had been watching the software engineer execute the post-dive commands, but I was able to run them myself after my watch that day. We recovered at 9am and planned to launch our last dive of the cruise at 9pm the same day. I was outside for launch and then went back in for another watch shift. The sky was clear for the first time in a very long time, so when I was off at midnight, I went out on the bow to look at the stars before heading to bed. 

Because Sentry was in the water, I got to sleep in again. There was a merch sale in the main lab and I bought an Atlantis sweatshirt (to support the great cause of course) and was given a Sentry T-shirt and some stickers for my first Sentry Team cruise! I relaxed until my night watch and executed the inside post-dive once again. I found myself getting a bit sentimental sending the final commands, but we played some music to celebrate as I recovered the data. 

Today was a very exciting day on the Atlantis, not only because we began our transit back to Astoria, but because a WHOI engineer that many people had worked with on the ship was off to the International Space Station! There was a streaming party for the launch, but I couldn’t participate because we had a lot to do to reconfigure the vehicle for its next cruise. We started the process of removing all of the instruments specific to this cruise, replacing them with what will be needed for the next, and preparing it for shipping. I took off the wings, propellers, and SUPR saddle before cleaning the oil off of the wings and the deck. I also organized the hardware for the saddle once I had disassembled it.  Finally, I removed the strobes, beacons, and iridiums, took out the batteries I had put in them the very first day, disassembled the poles I had also put together, and secured the spares van for our transit. It was funny doing things like this in reverse because it made me realize how much I have learned while I’ve been here. These were the very first tasks I was given and I remember feeling so intimidated, but now I know my way around all of the different components of the vehicle. 

We ended the day by taking a group picture on the bow to commemorate all of the great work that has been done this cruise.

Aside from my Work Plan goals, I committed to the Sentry Team that I would be able to do a push-up when the cruise was over. After moving countless weight stacks and pulling myself up the steep stairs when my legs were too tired, my skills were finally put to the test. Not only can I now perform vehicle maintenance and data recovery and stand watch during dives, but I can also officially do a push-up. One could say I have achieved maximum personal growth on this trip.

We will arrive back in Astoria tomorrow and spend the day packing up the lab and storage vans before heading out for drinks to celebrate all of our hard work. I am very nervous I’ll have bad dock rock after four long weeks at sea. We’re actually going to spend one last night on the boat so that we can oversee the crane picks on Sunday before driving down to Portland. I’ll stay at the airport hotel again and fly back to Santa Barbara on Monday!

I have learned so much about the different career paths I can take in this field and where my interests lie, and I am very thankful to have had this experience before I begin to apply to jobs and grad schools in the coming months. Living on a research vessel can feel a little exhausting and isolating at times, but I am beyond grateful to have been able to take part in this cruise and am very excited for my future in ocean engineering. See you all so soon and thank you so much for reading my blog posts, it meant the world to me! 

As predicted, we did not end up being able to launch last Saturday. The weather was too severe to work with the vehicle out on deck, so I took the time to update my Matlab script for my weather predictions. Since I first wrote it, I have been inputting new data as I receive it each day and therefore making my predictions more accurate as time goes on. As the day progressed, the weather began to subside, enough so that we could do some light work on deck drilling holes into a bracket that would hold the bottles for the SUPR water sampler. The SUPR (Suspended Particle Rosette) sampler consists of a flowmeter, a pump, a valve, and 14 bottles to take individual water samples throughout Sentry’s dive. The pump draws water to be fed into the valve, which has 14 positions for each of the 14 bottles. Because the bottles go into the water full of DI water for neutral buoyancy, the flowmeter is necessary to have record of the amount of water that was collected.

The following day, we were finally ready to prepare for the first dive since the storm had hit. We removed the Nortek to make space for all of SUPR’s components and took off the lead that had been used to account for its weight. I also watched as the lead mechanic replaced a centering spring in one of the wings, which have to be replaced about every 6 dives and are critical to Sentry’s performance. I made two sets of weights, and each weight comprises of 72lbs of steel. There are three of these in each set: two used to descend, and another dropped to ascend. We concluded this busy day with a deck test. It was so exciting to have things back up and running after the storm as downtime seems to pass pretty slowly here.

On the day of the dive, we secured the tubing and flowmeter for SUPR. After some ballasting calculations, we put 8lbs of lead back on before conducting the pre-dive. Because we were launching at midnight, I had some downtime in the afternoon and used it to write a Python script to search through data from the ship so that I could include real-time wind speeds in my Matlab script. The next day, while Sentry was in the water, I started a new book and read until my 8pm watch shift. Because things were going very smoothly, the expedition leader gave me some tasks to keep me busy like estimating where in the tracklines we’d be when it was time to come off bottom and how much battery we would have left when we began that ascent. My shift always takes place during recovery, so I’ll be inside for the post-dive and outside for the pre-dive and launch. I really enjoy being able to see all aspects of the deployment because I do really like the software side of things and get to see how everything connects.

We had a quick turnaround as we recovered at midnight and were launching again at noon the next day. The scientists had collected their samples from the SUPR bottles, so we resecured them to the vehicle before preforming the deck test and pre-dive tasks. Once Sentry was back in the water, I decided to use the time to make my Matlab script more efficient. I had been inputting the new data I collected each day as independent matrices, but as time went on, my script was getting really long and I was having to copy and paste the same loops each morning just to change their variable names to the correct date. I decided to go through the script and stack the data from each day into just a few 3D matrices and use a nested loop to iterate through each day, eliminating many lines of code and greatly reducing the time it takes me to update it each morning. At the end of the night, I finished my book from the previous day and started the first few pages of a new one.  

Because we launched during the day, I had an 8am watch. When I showed up, the mission had just gotten to a point where the previous person on watch had started to command the vehicle to leave its tracklines. Because this is more involved and a mistake could be critical, they decided to stay on until we came off bottom. During this time, I met with the expedition leader to go over my weather project, and he gave me some helpful advice about how to word my outputs to be more clear and concise for a user, and suggested that I begin to include my observations of the actual wave height during the day. I had been making calculations on the offsets between different forecasts for both wind speed and wave height, but the ship only had real-time data for wind speed. Now that I’ll be observing the height of the waves, I will be able to tie it all back to actual conditions and best predict when we can launch. When it was time to ascend, I took watch and stayed inside for the post-dive once again. While I was inside, we found out that a Canadian research vessel is also in the area and we’d have to change our dive schedule because they’ll have an ROV at our dive site. Instead of beginning a 24-hour dive at midnight, we’d launch at 8pm and come off bottom at 6am. We prepared for this quick turnaround by performing the pre-dive right after the post-dive and had a short break before putting the SUPR bottles back on, conducting the deck test, and launching. This was the first time I played a critical role in the launch and it was very nerve wracking, but went well. I had watch from 1:30-4:00am and then met back up with the team a little before 6:00am to prepare for recovery. It was hard to wake up for watch, but after a cup of coffee there was no way I was going to nap before I had to be ready on deck. When we began to ascend, I took over watch again, got breakfast after the post-dive, and finally fell asleep. There is another storm coming in, so we won’t dive again until Tuesday and I’ll have this weekend to catch up on some rest.