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.

The Bridge, and What I Learned There

In the last two days, I’ve spent more time on the bridge than I have on all my other cruises put together. The bridge of a ship is like the cockpit of a plane: it has the best view, and it’s where all of the controls are. I was there to watch for solitons on the ship’s radar. I’ll post about solitons soon, but while I was waiting for them I learned so much that I had to share it with you.

Really cool thing #1 that I learned on the bridge: ships use flags to communicate.
We fly the United States flag, and when we’re in port we also fly the flag of the country we’re visiting, as a sign of respect. If we need a pilot we have a flag to request it, and if there’s already a pilot on board we have a flag to indicate that. If two ships pass each other at sea, they each lower and then raise their flags as a way of saying hello. We also fly the flag of the Scripps Institute of Oceanography, which operates the R/V Melville. Here’s Ian, the second mate, holding the Scripps flag:
And here are some more flags, rolled up neatly:


Really cool thing #2 that I learned on the bridge: ships have secret codes for weather.
All over the world, ships record the weather that they see. In many places, those are the only records of weather, so they’re pretty important. But it would be confusing if everyone wrote about the weather in their own words, and it would take too long to read! So there’s a secret code for writing down the weather:

And here is a log sheet with the some of the codes written in:

Do you think you’d be able to keep track of all of those numbers? Ian says he’s been doing this so long that he knows most of them by heart.

Really cool thing #3 that I learned on the bridge: it’s fun to be on the bridge.
The bridge is located at the top of the ship. From there, you can see everyone out on deck and anything else happening in the water. The captain and the chief scientist were both came up too, and we watched for the solitons together and talked about our work. Here’s a view of the first way that I saw them: a line of dots on the radar:

The dot in the middle is the ship and the blue circle marks a distance of about 1 nautical mile (1.2 miles) away from us. That line of yellowish dots represents the first soliton that we saw. So what is a soliton? I’ll tell you all about it tomorrow.

Wildlife

There was a request for wildlife photos. Here’s what I’ve seen so far:

- Birds in flight. They tend to be too far away to photograph clearly.

- Fish under water. Have you ever tried photographing fish under water? It works quite well if you, the camera, and the fish are all under water. When only one of you is, it tends to fail.

- An insect on deck. I’ve seen one, when we were near land. It flew away.

- As I mentioned earlier, I did see some whales but wasn’t fast enough to get any pictures.

But I finally have a wildlife photo for you! Here it is:

Yes, that’s a squid. Very soon, it will be bait, but right now it’s still a squid. I touched it and it was slightly slimy.

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:

Q & A with class 8Awesome

Hi everyone! It’s great to hear from all of you. You asked some excellent questions, and I’m going to try to answer all of them.

-What happened to your friend Jake's bracelet? Did it shrink? Did it break? Did it remain unchanged?
Jake’s bracelet came up looking exactly the same as it did when it went down. But now he can tell all of his friends that his bracelet has been down to the bottom of the ocean.

-How do the drawings look? Have they changed size too? Can you still read our names?
The drawings are very clear and very tiny! Yes, I can still read your names

-Can we get more data from the big yellow thing (Shaliyah)... AKA the CTD?
I’ll do some more posts with CTD data. I’m also going to try and find someone to explain to you how all of the instruments on the CTD work.

-Will you be going underwater at all too? Can you send cameras underwater?
We’re all staying on the boat. People do send cameras underwater, but we won’t be. Sorry about that. Most of the things we study can’t be seen even with a camera – they have to be understood from the data.

-Try to get pictures of wildlife too!
I’m trying! I saw whales yesterday but by the time I ran inside and got my camera, they were gone.

-What's the next experiment you're going to do?
Check out the post about the mooring! That’s a big experiment. The next one will be our study of solitons. Solitons are a very special kind of wave. I’ll do a post on them once I collect data.

And now for the sunsets:
Abby – we don’t have daylight savings time in the Philippines. But I agree that it could have effected the sunsets if I thought I was taking my photos at the same time every day and forgot to account for the changing of the clocks!

Bryan – they may have been at slightly different times of day, you’re right. I think that the bottom photo was taken earlier in the evening than the middle photo was.

Ms. Brooks – I agree. There’s lots of pollution in Philippine cities, and when the wind blows it towards us we can even smell it. Lots of pollution can mean a prettier sunset.

Alvin – yes, they were taken at different locations. But the locations were similar, and not too far apart.

Shaliyah – excellent observation. The size of water droplets can change the type of cloud we see. Also, as with Ms. Brooks’ answer, whatever is in the atmosphere, whether it’s pollution or water vapor, can change the way we see the colors of sunset.

Class 8A, you are living up to your name! I can’t wait to see you all when I get back.

And class 71 – it is cool that you were checking the blog while I was posting! It must have been around 1 or 2 in the afternoon your time. I work from noon to midnight Philippine time, but last night I was working late and decided to post before I went to sleep.

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.