The Cups, Part II & The Big Yellow Thing

Just one more batch of cups left! I just pulled some very nice shrunken cups off of the CTD. Here are the cups tied on to the CTD before deployment:

See those long grey things? They’re bottles for collecting seawater. Here’s Jake, our winch operator, getting ready to start the cast:

His job is to make sure that the CTD goes in and out of the water without any problems. He also needs to make sure that the CTD doesn’t hit the sea floor! If it did, the instruments could be damaged. Jake is watching Drew’s hand signals so he knows when to raise and lower the CTD:

Now we’re going to fast-forward about three hours to when the cast is coming out of the water. People are waiting with poles to attach hooks to the CTD. The hooks are tied to the tag lines, which let us control the CTD as it comes on deck:

And here it is with your cups still tied on:


After the casts, scientists take bottles of seawater collected at different depths back to their labs on the ship and on land: