Happy Saturday!
We just arrived in Woods Hole, MA. We are unloading equipment and loading some new equipment on the ship. Part of the science party is leaving today, but we are getting four new members of the science party tomorrow. The mooring we were supposed to deploy on leg one was having issues so we now have a tech on board who will hopfully fix the issue and we can deploy it on leg two. I wasnt on my phone as much this week and didnt take as many notes for each day unfortunatly. I forgot to mention earlier that the science party is made up of scientists and students from, Rutgers University, MIT, WHOI, VIMS, Skidaway and NRL.
While doing the 2000m CTDs I talked to Jeff, Co-chief scientist (NRL), and he told me about the SOFAR Channel(SOund Fixing And Ranging) that starts about 1000m down. Whales and humans use this channel to emmit low frequency sound waves thst can travel thousands of miles. In certian areas of the North Sargasso Sea, which is where we were, there is also 18 degree mode water that allows for a simillar but smaller channel like the SOFAR to form closer to the surface. In the photo below you can see the sound velocity of the 2000m CTD cast where we see this happening.
During the week I switched my 8am-8pm shift for two days to 12pm-12am in order to see some night time operations. During those shifts I worked with the science party deploying the Underway CTD off the aft deck of the ship. Jack and Bre, two students with the science party, showed me how to upload the UCTD data once we got the device back on board. We did these UCTDs twice a hour for almost 24 hours for a few days.
On our steam to WHOI we ended up with some pretty nice, calm weather which was nice. At sunset on June 1st we saw our first whale! It was a sperm whale. Then on June 2nd we were on the bow taking a group picture when we saw a pod of pilot whales and then two humpback whales. We continued whale watching after the picture and ended up seeing some seals and a few more whales.
