Welcome to the LARISSA cruise!

Right now, everyone is busy working in port. There is cargo to load, labs to set up, and endless problems to solve. But it will all be worth it once we set sail on January 2^nd.

Here's the Research Vessel Nathaniel B. Palmer, otherwise known as the NBP.

And here's cargo being moved to one of the ships. I'm not sure if it's for us or for the ship docked next to us. You can see the US Antarctic Program logo on the container.

I don't have any science to report on yet, but I've been learning a lot. Docks are really exciting places because there are so many different projects going on at once. A big part of working on a ship is helping other people, so I spent most of yesterday helping the people who take samples of mud from the seafloor. You'll learn more about why they do that later on, but they didn't need me to understand – they just needed help. Once they get the mud, which they call sediment, on the ship, there has to be a way to store it. It turns out that the best way to do this is to take PVC plastic rain gutters and cut them so that the sediment can go inside them. It's the cutting that takes so long, because it has to be done very neatly and carefully. Here's what we used to do it:

That's called a bandsaw, and it has a very sharp blade. That white stuff you see is little pieces of PVC. I was covered in it by the end of the day! But we got the work done, which is the important part.

Destination: Antarctica! (updated)

If you've made it to this blog, I'm hoping that you're interested in my upcoming trip to Antarctica. I'm a graduate student in oceanography at Columbia University, and I work with middle school students once a week. While I'm at sea, I work with my students via this blog.

Please feel free to look over the posts from my last research cruise in the Philippines. The upcoming cruise is a little different, but I'll be posting about similar topics. I'll also be doing my own science fair project for my students to follow as they work on their projects.

I'm hoping to expand this blog to include more schools this time. If you're a teacher and would like to use this blog in your classroom at any grade level, please email me and let me know what types of posts would be helpful for you. Any registered Google/Open ID user can comment now!

More information about the cruise, which is part of the LARISSA project, can be found here. Please feel free to email me with any questions.

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.