Home Again

I made it home! I’m very, very jetlagged but I want to post one more time. In my very first post, I listed three goals. How did I do on each of them?

1. Post to the blog at least five days per week. I did it! Yay!

2. Finish at least 80% of the changes that I need to make to the paper that I’m writing. This one is a little harder to measure, but I think I did it. I’ve made most of the big changes and gave my adviser a revised copy. When I get it back from him, I’ll have a better sense of how I did.

3. Work well with all of you at DLMS! This one is up to you to tell me. Did you learn from the blog? Did you enjoy it? Did you see how awesome it is to be a scientist?

And here I am, controlling the winch! I’ll see you all back in school. But before I finish this post, I need to say thank you to the people who made this blog possible:

Thanks to the captain and crew of the R/V Melville for running a great ship and letting me photograph everything.

Thanks to the chief scientist for an awesome cruise and for being so supportive of this blog.

Thanks to everyone on both watches for helping out.

Thanks to Drew, the chief, Kyla, Zach, Suzanne, Alette, Pach, and everyone else who specifically helped with the blog.

Thanks to my mother for reading the blog every day and sending me comments.

Thanks to your teachers, Ms. Blomberg, Ms. Brooks, and Ms. Caldwell for working with me on this project and to your principal for supporting them.

Thanks to Rob Quatrone and Sara Scovronick at CERC for making this happen.

Thanks to Bob Newton and Nancy Degnan for running the LEEFS program that brought me to DLMS.

And last but not least, thanks so much to all of you, who made this a really fun and special cruise for me. You guys rock and I can’t wait to see everyone in school again!

Mapping the Journey

We’re almost back in port! We finished our last CTD station, number 126, and now we’re packing up. Here is a really, really cool map of where we’ve been:

Wow! What’s going on here? A few different things
- The arrows represent the movement of water on the surface. Longer arrows mean the water was moving faster
- The color of the arrow shows the surface water temperature. Red is warmer, blue is cooler.
- The locations of the arrows follow the cruise track, so you can see where we’ve been

This is called a vector plot (the arrows are called vectors) and they’re a great way to show a lot of data in a small space.

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.