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.