Just as my first cruise on the Atlantic Explorer came to an end, week two of my internship began. The approaching hurricanes were, from this point on, a constant logistical concern. The first hurricane, Franklin, hit a couple days ago. It wasn’t particularly intense, but it was still windy enough that there was not much for us or our visiting scientists to do but stay on the ship. The second hurricane, Idalia, is sitting on top of Bermuda as I type this. Other than getting in the way of weekend plans, the storm has not been particularly unpleasant. The power is out on the BIOS campus, but I’m lucky enough to be on the ship’s generator power.

 

Idalia’s position right now

 

This week was quite busy. I started on a personal project, which has, unfortunately, been very uncooperative with me. I’ll write about it once I make some actual progress. For now, let’s focus on the enjoyable parts of this internship.

 

We’ve been doing several odd jobs around the ship now that it’s in port. We moved a temperature sensor onto the main mast, cleaned parts of the ship’s water intake system, and replaced the batteries in a pinger that we may soon attach to the CTD. BIOS has a new liquid nitrogen generator, and I got the chance to fill a dewar, pictured below, with liquid nitrogen, which we will use on a future cruise. 

 

Me filling a dewar

 

Additionally, I was given a tour of The Mid-Atlantic Glider Initiative and Collaboration (MAGIC) vehicle, and the process by which its buoyancy is adjusted so that it can fly through the ocean effectively. It is lowered into a tank of seawater and weighed by two scales, which allow scientists to compare the weight at the front and back of the vehicle and fine tune it by adding or removing weighted material from the inside of the glider.

 

One of MAGIC’s gliders

 

Lastly, today I had the chance to do something totally unrelated to work. My mentor and I used some of the liquid nitrogen from the generator to make ice cream. We mixed up a basic recipe, mostly made of half-and-half we took (with permission) from the galley. It came out pretty close to Dippin’ Dots, and we mixed up the following flavors:

Vanilla

Peanut butter chocolate

Coffee

Kiwi strawberry

Maple nut

Grape

Give it 5 or 10 years, and grape ice cream will be all the rage. It’ll be a Bermudan specialty. We hope to give this ice-cream making process another go, and I’ll write about all the fun flavors we make in a future blog post!