Dragging

A mooring is made of a heavy anchor and some scientific instruments. In between the anchor and the instruments is an acoustic release. We stick a wire in the water and the water sends out a sound. The acoustic release hears that sounds, responds with a sound of it’s own, and releases the mooring. Today, the acoustic releases responded but didn’t release.

So what did we do? We dragged for the mooring. That means that we put hooks on a wire and had the winch let the wire out into the ocean. Then we drove the ship in a big circle around the spot on the ocean floor where the mooring was. Then we started pulling the wire back in.

The wire is very heavy, so the plan is that it tightens like a noose around the mooring, snags it, and brings it to the surface. But lots of things can go wrong. We can snag a rock, or an old fishing net, or nothing at all. We can scratch and damage the instruments with the wire. Worst of all, once the wire does snag something, there is a lot of tension on the wire.

How much tension? At some points, there were 10,000 pounds of tension on the wire. If that wire had snapped, it would have been very dangerous. Ten thousand pounds of tension is the same as the weight of two and half SUVs.

Dragging for a mooring is a big risk. It takes a lot of time (time that would have been spent gathering more data) and could hurt someone, and might not even work. On the other hand, if we don’t drag, we’ll never get the instrument or the data it has been collecting for months.

So what would you do? Would you drag for the mooring or move on?

When I get home, I'll tell you whether or not we recovered the mooring. Right now, I still don't know.

Going to Sea

Scientists go to sea for all sorts of reasons. We write those reasons in proposals, and then someone gives us the money we need to do our research. But we also go to sea because we love the sea. This cruise is almost over, and I don’t know how long it will be before I get to go again. Even though I’m homesick for New York while I’m here, I sometimes get homesick for the sea when I’m in New York.

When I’m at home and thinking about the ocean, I sometimes like to read what other people have written about it. Here is one my favorite poems in the whole world, by e.e. cummings:

maggie and milly and molly and may
went down to the beach (to play one day)

and maggie discovered a shell that sang
so sweetly she couldn't remember her troubles,and

milly befriended a stranded star
whose rays five languid fingers were;

and molly was chased by a horrible thing
which raced sideways while blowing bubbles:and

may came home with a smooth round stone
as small as a world and as large as alone.

For whatever we lose (like a you or a me)
it's always ourselves we find in the sea

The Engine Room

The Chief Engineer gave us a tour of the ship’s engine room. It was interesting to learn how the ship works. The engine room is very loud, so we had to wear earplugs. Here are the highlights:



Thanks Chief! Also thanks to Zach & Kyla for taking pictures.

And in case you’re wondering, nearly everyone on the ship calls everyone else by their first names. The exceptions are the chief and the captain, who get called by their titles.

Thrills & Chills & Rainbows

Last semester, Ms. Caldwell invited me to participate in her advisory. I really liked it, so I thought I’d use what I learned there and tell you about my own thrills & chills for this cruise.

The biggest thrill of all is that the chief scientist wants to write a paper about the solitons with me and my friend Zach. He’s been really happy with my work on the LADCPs and on the solitons, and told me so. Being a graduate student can be very hard because everyone expects your best work all the time. Sometimes you do your best work and it that still isn’t good enough. But this time my work is being noticed and appreciated, so I’m very proud of myself.

The biggest chill is missing home. I have friends out here, but I miss my friends at home and my family. I email with my mother every day, but it’s not the same as talking to her.

When you’re at sea, you sometimes forget about the outside world completely and only the ship seems real. Keeping this blog has made this cruise different than other ones because I feel connected to all of you.

Here are a few more thrills
- The solitons! Solitons are awesome.
- Seeing sunsets! I love sunsets.
- Having time to read books. I read a lot at sea.
- Getting to fix things. I’m good at fixing things, and even though I get frustrated when they break, fixing them makes me feel satisfied.

And some more chills, too
- Never having a day off. We work 12 hours a day, seven days a week. I’d like at least an evening off, but that doesn’t happen here
- Not being able to decide what to eat. The food has been great out here, but I’m not always in the mood for what the cooks are making.

Here’s a photo of one more thrill:

And now a science question: what makes rainbows?

What is a soliton?

To help me explain, I want you to think about these situations:

Situation #1: Imagine jumping in to the water. Waves would spread out in all directions around you, making bigger and bigger circles.

Situation #2: Now imagine that the when you jump in the water, waves only spread in one direction. There’s no circle getting bigger, just a line of waves traveling in one direction at a constant speed.

I’ve jumped in water lots of times, and the waves have always acted like situation #1. Situation #1 is also how waves have acted when I’ve thrown things in the water or seen fish jump out of the water. It’s just how waves act.

Solitons are a special kind of wave that acts like situation #2. Really. This is one of those times when science gets weird. It doesn’t happen often, but if the tides are just right, the time of year is just right, and the location is just right, solitons will form.

One of the really wonderful things about being a scientist is that I’m allowed to forget everything else for a while to study just one thing. Imagine the most interesting thing you’ve done in school all year and getting to do that for as long as you like. That’s what I’ve been doing for the last few days with solitons. I’ve been looking at figures, equations, and maps, trying to understand everything that has happened.

An important thing to know about solitons is that they’re internal waves. That means that they’re not on the surface of the water, but they’re inside the water where colder and warmer water meet (7th & 8th grade science club: remember the tank experiment?). Most of our measurements have to be below the water. However, there is a sign on the surface of the water that a soliton is going by: a band of breaking waves in an otherwise calm sea. It looks so unusual that sailors back in 1922 wrote about it but had no idea why it happened. Here’s what it looks like:

The whitecaps (those breaking waves) might not look big, but they were stretched out in a huge line across the horizon. It didn’t look like anything I’d ever seen before.

Don’t worry if you don’t really understand what a soliton is, or why they're important. Most college students don’t even know what an internal wave is, and certainly don’t know what solitons are. So you’re already ahead of the game.

Mooring Recovery

Here's a video of the mooring recovery we did today. Drew, our
Restech, is going to tell you what's going on. First, here are some
definitions that will help you understand him:

- a mooring is a scientific instrument that gets attached to an anchor
and left in the ocean to collect data
- a buoy is something that floats in the water - in this case, it's
part of the mooring
- lifelines are cables that act as railings around the ship

Let me know if there's anything else that's unclear. Also, I'd like to thank Drew for doing the voiceover and Suzanne and Pach for doing the video recording.

CTD Deployment

You’ve seen the data that comes from doing a CTD cast. But how do we actually collect the data? We have to put the CTD in the water very carefully, to avoid damaging our instruments or our ship. To do that, we use a winch, which includes a pulley (remember those, 6th graders?). Here’s a video of the process:



A few highlights:
- The guy making the funny hand signals is Drew. He’s our Resident Marine Technician, or restech. The hand signals tell the winch operator what to do.
- That’s me in the lower right corner! I’m running a tag line, one of the ropes that keeps the CTD from swinging too wildly. There’s not much risk when the seas are calm like they are in this video, but you can imagine what happens in rough seas. The other tag line is run by Gerald, who is a member of the Philippine Coast Guard.
- Look at the CTD going down in the water. Can any of the 7th graders tell me what is happening to the light underwater to make it look like that?
- I left the soundtrack as it was so that you could hear what we hear. Ships are loud places.

Finally, thanks to Alette for filming!

Cruising

The cruise is underway! Here is the view we had when we left Manila:


In order to leave Manila Bay, we needed a pilot to guide us out. Normally the word “pilot” refers to the person flying an airplane, but it’s sometimes used for boats, too. Because Manila Bay is such a busy place, the government requires pilots who know the bay very well to help the captains steer the ships. Here is the pilot boat on our starboard side:


Our what? At sea, you don’t use right and left to describe locations within the ship. It would be too easy to get confused – if you’re facing the back of the ship, then left becomes right! So we have four directions: forward, aft, starboard, and port. If you’re facing forward (the front of the ship), port is on your left, starboard in on your right, and aft (or after) is behind you. The front of the ship is called the bow, and the back is called the stern:


If your classroom were a ship, where would the bow be? The stern? What direction (forward, aft, port, or starboard) would you have to go to reach the door?

Ready to Sail

It’s been a busy few days! Since I arrived in Manila on Tuesday, I’ve been working hard to set up my equipment for the cruise. I work with a system called ADCP, which stands for Acoustic Doppler Current Profiler. What does that mean?

Acoustic means having to do with sound.
Doppler has to do with the way sounds change pitch. I’ll explain more later, but the Doppler effect is also how speed guns work. The eight graders used those to measure the speeds of cars near DLMS, so the rest of you can ask them about that.
Currents are the movements of water in the ocean – remember the East Australian Current from the turtles in Finding Nemo.
Profiler means that it produces a profile of the whole water column, not just at a single depth.

By now you’ve probably noticed that there are lots of special names for things at sea. If I use a term that you don’t know, please ask me to define it.

At sea, I work with ADCPs that are mounted on the bottom of the ship, called SADCPs (for Shipboard ADCP) and ones that are lowered into the water with other instruments, called LADCPs (for Lowered ADCP). The SADCP system is easy to use; you turn it on at the beginning of the cruise and then just check it to make sure that it’s working. The LADCPs are a lot more work! They have to be turned off and on every time we put them in the water and they have very complicated wiring. That means when they don’t work, it can be very hard to figure out what’s wrong with them.

My friend Zach works with the LADCPs too. I work from noon to midnight and he works from midnight to noon. But when we’re still in port and at the beginning of the cruise, everyone is awake most of the time. We spent a long time together making the system work today and yesterday. Here is the completed setup:


Later, I’ll go through everything in this picture. For now, just notice the two yellow cylindrical machines – those are the LADCPs – and Zach.

Here’s the ship in port:


We should have left by now, but we don’t have permission to yet. This happens a lot, so we’re all trying to patient. I'll post again after we sail!