E-mail reports from the Chief Scientist, Liz Sikes, on board the RV Roger Revelle:
2005: Feb 26 | Feb 27 | Feb 27 | Feb 28 | Mar 1 | Mar 2 | Mar 4 | Mar 7 | Mar 8 | Mar 11 | Mar 13 | Mar 15
| Mar 16 | Mar
17 | Mar 19 | Mar 21 | Mar 22
| Mar 25 | The End
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E-mail reports from the Chief
Scientist, Liz Sikes, on board the Roger Revelle:
We leave
This took a
long time because we have so much stuff – and there are 24 people who are
working with me… and that means a lot of stuff to check. Then we had to
stow everything away so that it wouldn’t roll around or fall over and
break once we leave the dock and the ship starts to roll around from the
waves. So we had to put everything in the cupboards in the lab and then
tie everything down. But now that is all taken care of and we are just
waiting for the ship to finish fueling so we can leave.
After
double checking that everything was tied down and wouldn’t fall off the
tables when the ship starts rolling we had to do a fire drill – and an abandon ship drill—that’s
really something you don’t have to do at school! It’s just to
make sure that we know what to do if there is an emergency. Then after
that I had to make sure that all the forms were up to date (like getting all
the scientists’ passports to the captain). Then we left port and
went out of the harbor, and I felt seasick – so I went and lay down in my
bed. Being seasick is a little like having a tummy bug… I
didn’t throw up… but sometimes people do. And when I lie down
and close my eyes, I feel better. So, I went to bed at
Right now,
we are steaming to our first station. Which means that the captain
and his crew are driving the boat which has huge diesel engines out to
the place in the ocean we want to take the first core. While we are
steaming (they also call it sailing) we have our echo-sounders on to see how
deep the ocean is and to see what the bottom looks like – the
echo-sounders make a picture of the bottom of the ocean using sound –
it’s kind of like looking at a cartoon of the bottom of the ocean.
We use these to find the place we will sample the mud. It will take us another
whole day to get to the place we want to start… boats are a lot slower
than cars or planes.
Here we are
on the high seas. We steamed south and east from
So, what we
are doing now is still steaming to station -- not in a straight line
mind you, but with a little zig zag to get some surveying in... We have
to use the echo sounder to look at and into the bottom to see where the best
mud (we call it sediment) is. Right now we are coming down the south slope
of the Chatham Rise, aiming to start coring when the water depth is 4000
m.
Our science
plan is to get a core at different depths (every 500m of water depth). So
once we start out here at the deepest point, we will then work our way up
the south flank of this rise, coring every 500m water depth....
What coring means is that we have a very long and very strong pipe (called a
coring barrel) with 5000 lbs (~2500 kilograms) of weight on
it. We will lower that down on a long wire, then just before it
reaches bottom we have a trigger that will let it drop the last few meters, and
it will jam itself into the mud. Just imagine trying to jam a piece of
pipe into the mud -- that's why we need so much weight. We then have to
pull it out and reel the wire back into the ship. That's our
plan ... now we get to see if the seas and the mud will
cooperate.
As for me,
I've been working hard to try and decide the best place to put our first core,
and our coring team is making sure that everything is ready to go and
SAFE. Even though I am feeling better, when the waves get bigger I feel a
little queasy now and then. I hope to feel better enough that I can go to the
gym on the ship today and use the rowing machine so that I can stay in shape--
it's a really hard thing to do on a ship because even though this is a big
ship, it's still a small place -- and we are cooped up inside all the time. The
food is pretty good, and they have ice-cream at every meal! So I have to be
careful that I don't get fat!
Last night
we finally got to our first coring location. Yesterday we did a lot of
echo-sounding looking for a good place to core. We found several places where
the mud is deep enough at the bottom, at the different waters depths we want,
so that is good. We started with the deepest spot. Once we got there
we had to rig the piston core to get it over the side so we could get the mud.
That’s not such an easy thing on a ship that is rolling around. To
get the samples we want we have a 40ft (12 meter) long core barrel made out of
metal, which is so long we can’t lay it on the ship deck so it has to lie along the side of the boat.
They put almost 5000 pounds (lbs) of weight on the top. That weight makes the
pipe jam into the bottom and get a core full of mud (like pushing a straw into
a slushy and pulling it out). Because the bottom is so deep you
can’t just drop it from the ship, so it has to be lowered over the side
on a wire, and a trigger attached to a small core releases it to fall the last
distance. The way it works is the trigger core dangles below the big
core, and when it hits bottom, it lets the big one go and it jams in.
Some of the pictures show the coring team loading the short trigger core
into its cradle, after that it’s lowered on its line down below the
ship. Then the barrel of the big one is released, and then the weight
stack is swung out of the cradle (you can see the cradle in the picture of the
trigger core—it is the big blue tub). The whole thing is lowered into the water using the
ship’s crane.
The water
is so deep here it took almost 2 hours for the core to get to the bottom on the
wire, and take the core. Once the core is in the mud the winch driver has
to pull it back out by reeling in the wire. But you can only pull so hard
or the wire will snap. On this core the technicians did such a good job
of getting the core into the mud that it got stuck – we pulled as hard as
we could and it wouldn’t come out so we had to wait and let the rocking
of the ship ease it out. We waited about 20 minutes as the ship rocked
and gently jiggled the core, but finally it let go and they could reel it back
in. Getting that heavy pipe (now full of mud) onto the ship is just as
hard as putting it over the side. You do everything in reverse…
and you have to go slow and carefully so no one gets hurt.
The core
came on board last night very late. Inside that metal pipe is a plastic pipe
called the core linear that holds the mud. It had to be eased out very
carefully. The core inside was 12 meters long so we had to cut it up
into1.5 meter sections (that’s about 4 ft). I don’t have any
pictures of that because it was my job to cut up the core. Maybe I can send
some pictures next time!
We also
want on this cruise to take some multi-cores. These are much more gentle
cores which sample just the top 3ft (1meter). So that rig has to be very
different from the piston core. So after we took the piston core, they
tried to get a multi core. But
the winds have come up -- a good southerly blowing up across the
All
yesterday it was too rough to do any more coring. In fact when the coring team had time to
look at the multi-core they brought back on board yesterday it was badly beaten
up. Some of the metal struts were
hanging loose, and when they got the net off of it they could see that many of
the bolts and welds had been badly damaged. That damage is not because the multicore
slammed against the side of the ship – it’s because it got rattled
up and down with each wave for 4 hours as it went down and back up. The swell (which are the big rolling
waves) the last 2 days have been 12 ft (3meters) high, which means the ship and
the multicore were actually bouncing up and down twice that. So the multicore
got pretty shaken up. We had a
pinger attached to the wire above the multicore (the pinger sends out a
"ping" that you can hear and we can see that on our echo-sounding
trace so we can see where in the water the gear is). The batteries in the pinger go so
rattled around that it stove in the tops of them! It's pretty rough. The crew spent hours fixing the multi
core. See the picture of the chief engineer praying to
the coring gods that we could get it fixed! The praying must have worked because
they fixed it! So we are waiting still to see if the sea calms down enough so
we can try for another core.
Even though
we haven't gotten any more cores, that doesn't mean we don't have anything to
do. We have to take the core we
got, and prepare it so we can study it.
When it came on board we cut the 12 meter core (that's 40 feet long!)
into 1.5 meter (about 5 ft long) pieces so we can carry it around and work with
it. After we run the sections
through a sensor device, we then have to split those sections length wise so we
can see the mud. To do that you
have to cut the plastic core liner barrels with a skill saw (there is a picture of our student Matt doing
that). Splitting the core
barrel is messy business so that gets done out on the deck in the hanger. Now,
we only use the saw to cut the barrel NOT the mud because that would stir it
all up. So, after running the saw
down both sides, you then have to slice the mud gently with a wire that you
pull down through the mud along the slits that the saw has made. The wire we
are using on this cruise is actually a cheese slicer! Then gently, very gently,
so the mud won't slip out, you have to pry the 2 halves of the core apart.
We now have
2 halves of the core that we can work
with. One we will work with, the
other we will save so in case we need it later it's there - so we call one the
working half, the other is the archive half. After the core is split, we have
to clean up the surface of it so we can see what is there. This is because even though the wire
cuts the mud gently, it still drags things along the surface of the core - and
that stirs things up a little bit, so we even more gently clean the core by
scraping the surface across the core. At last we can see what was in the core
and if we got what we wanted. Next
we take a picture and very carefully measure the lengths. At this stage it's
very important to measure everything very carefully and carefully write
everything down, so that when we go back to sample later we know what
everything is. And we always have
to go back again later. Some times as long as 10 years later! After that is all written down
carefully, only then we can begin to sample the core.
Right now,
we are waiting to see if the sea state is calm enough to try for another core -
it's the Captain’s decision if it is safe enough - so we are waiting to see
what he thinks.
Last night
the weather calmed down enough that we managed to get a second piston core.
This time when it came up on board it was still daylight so we took some
pictures of people taking the core liner out of the core barrel (that's called extruding the core) and cutting it up. So once the heavy core weight is safely
back in its cradle it has to be gotten back up from vertical to horizontal so
we can get the mud out. The coring
techs lasso a wire taped to the outside of the barrel and winch it up and lay
it back down on the "sticker-outers" (those metal struts that hung so
they stick out the side of the ship). Then the coring techs push on one end and
the scientists pull on the other and slip the core liner out. The barrel is metal and pretty thick so
that it can jam into the mud and the liner is plastic and actually holds the
mud, and is thin enough to cut so we can work with it. So we pull about 20 feet out and cut it
off, and cap it immediately so that the mud, which is sometimes pretty wet,
can't slide out.
Then we put
it on some specially designed poles to hold it,
then pull out about 20 feet more and do
it again. Then we go back and slice it into the shorter 1.5 meter
sections that easier to work with.
Those weight about 75 pounds (about 32 kilos) so you don't want to be
lugging anything bigger around.
When we get to the top, it’s always wet so we have to be very
careful to hold it upright before we cap it so nothing falls out. I'm sending some pictures today of
extruding the core and capping it.
After we do
all that we have to wait a few hours to let the core warm up before we can
begin processing it - the water and mud at the ocean bottom is only a few
degrees above freezing. I know I explained yesterday about the splitting - but
before we split it, we run the whole core sections through a
multi-sensor-core-logger which has detectors that look through the core barrel
-- that has to be done when it's whole and when the core has warmed up. The
core we got 2 days ago we only finished processing late last night and the one
we got last night we are just finishing working on now. What we discovered since the last email
I sent is that the first core we got didn't have one of the important features
we were looking for in it. When we
looked at the core we could see lots of
layers - and we don’t want that many so close together. What we were looking for was a sandy pinkish
layer all by itself. This is called
a tephra – a layer of ash deposited all at once from a volcanic eruption.
If we find that layer we will recognize it is an ash fall from a volcano on the
North Island of New Zealand. We
know that the eruption occurred 25,000 years ago because other scientists have
studied it before us, and we use what they have learned so we know what to look
for. That is why we take our time carefully
cleaning and describing the core, and looking at all the layers. When we
are done describing we put the cores in labeled tubes to store them and send
them back home in.
One of the
things that is really different about working on a ship is that the ship runs
24 hours a day. Every job on the ship has to be taken care of all day and
night. We even do the coring all
night. So everyone on the ship works in shifts. On a ship that's called
“standing watch”. Most
of the people on the ship stand what we call split 8 hour watches - that means
you work for 4 hrs then get 8 off and then you work another 4 and get 8 more
hours off. There are 3 watches, the
12-4, the 4-8 and the 8-12. So, for
example, I am on the 8-12 watch.
That means I stand watch from 8-12 in the morning and then again from
8-12 at night. So for those 4 hours twice a day I do whatever work there is to
do, whether it is helping with getting the core over or the core back, or
slicing it up. There is ALMOST always something for the scientists to do. The
crew is always busy because they run the ship. We the scientists are there to
do science work, but we couldn't do what we need to without the work of the
crew. They drive the ship, cook the
food, and keep everything running.
The coring and ships technicians run all the science gear and make sure
it runs, and they are the ones who fix any of the gear that breaks when it goes
over the side. So someone is working all the time. For the scientists, some
times are more busy than others, so we get breaks and can do things like play scrabble in the lab.
As I
mentioned in the last report, the scientists couldn't do any of the things we
do here if it weren't for the crew and the ship technicians, or techs for
short. The techs are the ones that
know how the gear and the ship works.
Because they do this sort of work much, much more often than the
scientists, they can do it faster and safer than those of us who only got to
sea every few years – so they are the ones who direct and do a lot of the
work. On this cruise we have 2
coring techs, Pete and Dale, who work hand in hand with Bob and Brent who are the ships techs or resident
techs (res techs for short) and a computer tech, Woody, who makes all the
electronic and computer gear work for us.
Pete and Dale are also training 2 more coring techs, Dan and
If you were
out on deck you would notice that they are always wearing a life vest and a
hard hat and steel toed boots, and usually water proof overalls or trousers. If
you work on a boat you are going to get wet, so you have to dress right (here’s Dale and Brent with one of our
students Jesse all suited up to go on deck). In fact wearing a hard hat and
what we call a working vest is required if you are going out on deck (see one of the scientists, Hugh in his working
vest and hard hat). This is because
all that heavy gear swings around once you lift it off the deck, so you can
easily get banged in the head, and if the ship swings when you are leaning out
you could fall over. Don't worry, it doesn't often happen but in case it does
we want to be prepared. If you
don't have a hard hat on you must watch from inside (see Amy watching from the door). So we all suit up when working on deck.
We call
them working vests, because they are big enough to keep you afloat for a little
while if you fall overboard when you are working - but they are small enough so
you can work. But, they aren't big
enough to keep you floating for a long time. We have bigger life vests in case
we have to abandon ship - these are really big, and so they will keep you
afloat for a long time even if you can't swim at all. We had to all try the life vests on at
our abandon ship drill earlier in the cruise (Sindia
in her vest). We look and feel
a bit silly in those things - but it is good to know they are there!!! Another safety thing they have on the
ship is an immersion suit. This is
because if you have to abandon ship, it's not just important to stay afloat,
it's important to stay warm – because if the water is cold, it is the
cold that will hurt you more than anything else. We have to all try them on because they
are hard to get into and we need to practice (Hugh in his immersion suit). They are also pretty funny looking!!!
Last night
we got another good long piston core so we are pretty happy about that. Those
are the cores that we will use to look back in time to the ice age. But we are
still having trouble with our multi-core.
That's the coring gizmo that looks like a pyramid.
We use that
to get just short cores that let us look at the surface of the mud really
carefully, so we can understand what is happening right now, not in the
past. The way it works is it
has that pyramid shaped frame and we lower it down to set on the bottom. Then it has weights inside the frame
that lower short tubes very gently into the mud just getting the top. This is very different from our huge
pipe with the huge weight that slams REALLY hard into the mud. So, it's a more gentle coring device (as
we call it). Even though it has gotten pretty calm for the southern ocean, the
swell is pretty big and we are having trouble because it keeps doing what we
call a "pre-trip" which means it closes in mid water while it's still
hanging on the wire before it hits bottom.
What we think is happening is, as the corer heaves up and down (that
means bounces up and down) in the swell under the water, it thinks it's hit
bottom and it releases and closes all it's tubes (it has 8) and so when it gets
to the bottom we don't get any mud.
We spent all last night trying to get one-we finally did, but we are
going to try and fix the corer today so it will work better. We have the time to do that today,
because we are done coring in the first location we wanted to core, and we are
now going to steam for 12 hours now to get to the next place we want to
core. So we have time to do that.
Well, the
weather has turned rough again – we have gale warnings (that’s winds
above 30 miles per hour) and we’ve been in them since last night. We managed to get another long piston
core yesterday, but it was too rough to try and get a multi-core. Since we got
the piston core on board (about midnight last night) we’ve been steaming
north to our next coring location but also to try to get out of the
weather. As I said before, even
though we can’t core we still have things to do - we’ve been
splitting and describing the cores we took before. It takes us about 8 hours to split them
and get them described… and then we have to go back later and sample
them. I will do some more sampling
tonight … so there are things for us scientists to do, but it’s not
frantic like it is when we are actually coring. We will finish one core today and then
we have one more still to do.
Unlike the
scientists, the crew always has something to do. The captain is in charge and
the officers stand watches like everyone else on the ship. The captain is responsible for seeing
that everything on the ship goes well.
Our captain is always on deck whenever we put something over the side (Capt. Murline on deck). The mates steer and run
the ship (1st mate Murray on the
bridge). The seamen clean and
paint and generally keep everything “ship shape.” They have been
doing a lot of painting the last few days. (Picture of seaman Brian
all decked out in his gear for sanding the surface before he paints it).
(Picture of the
Bosun in the house for driving the crane.) The
Chief Engineer, and the engineers keep the engines running and they and the
engineering crew run the winches, and there is also an electrician with a
complete shop so they can repair anything that breaks on the ship (Manny the electrician in his shop).
The Chief (as they call him) helps us fix anything that breaks –
including our multicore that had to be fixed twice! (Chief Engineer
at work on the multicore) There is a full machine shop – if we break
anything metal the engineering officers and crew usually have the part (see a
picture of the store room) or can make it – they even welded the
multicore back together. There are of course cooks on board too. We have 2 cooks and they make everything
from homemade soup to baking fresh bread (Senior Cook Jay and scientist
Julia). We are pretty lucky,
the cooks on the Revelle are really good and so is the food. You can imagine that if the food
isn’t good people could get pretty down about it, but when it’s
good you always have something to look forward to, and we do. We have steak every Sunday… and we
had
Last night
we had a little excitement that had nothing to do with work. Two birds landed on the ship. We don’t know if they were
confused by the lights, or if they were tired and needed a rest because it was
windy (blowing about miles an hour).
But the first one flew right into me!
We see
birds all the time out in this part of the ocean. It’s kind of neat because they
keep us company, and give us something different to look at beside the water
and the waves. Believe me the water
and the waves get a little boring sometimes, and the birds are great to look at
with their acrobatics. Some places
have very few birds, but where we have been in the Southern Ocean, there are a
lot. Mostly we get albatrosses. These are the biggest sea birds in the
world – they look like giant seagulls with long elegant wings. The
biggest of them all are the wandering
albatrosses with white heads and backs, but there are also smaller ones
with dark heads and dark wings called mollymawks
(a Salvins Mollymawk sitting on the
water). The mollymawks are
still big, with a wingspan of almost 9 ft and a body is as big as a
goose—but they are so graceful when they are flying you’d never
think they are so big. The
way they fly, especially in big winds, is amazing — they never flap their
wings they just soar around the ship doing loops and zooming in front and then
back (see picture of albatross on the wing). They are amazing – they get really close to the ship
– clearly they are having a good curious look at us. Often, when we are stopped on station
taking a core, they will set down on the water and wait to see what we bring up
– and I think what they think is that we are a fishing boat bringing in
our nets – and they are waiting
for a free meal . Sometimes we
had up to 100 of them hanging around the ship (sort of like a coring party).
There are a lot of fishing vessels out and around the Chatham Rise, in the
colder waters, and it would be only the fishing vessels that would stop in the
middle of the ocean (lets face it, oceanographic vessels are very few and far
between). So these birds have probably
gotten really used to fishing boats.
I keep trying to tell them they are wasting their time, but they
don’t get it (either that or they don’t speak English!). The other amazing thing is how in strong
winds and rough seas they just bob up and down on top of these waves like
corks, while we are getting slammed around by them and breaking equipment left
and right.
But we
aren’t seeing many of these big birds anymore – over the last few
days, we steamed over 120 miles north, and we are we are now well away from the
cold water that has food for those big birds. If we see them, there are only a very
few. The birds that crashed into
the boat last night were much smaller petrels (petrel
in hand). I’m not totally sure but we think they were Diving
Petrels. We think they might have
been confused by all the lights on the ship that we have to have on when we are
working at night. We picked up the bird to keep
them from hurting themselves and threw them back overboard over the back of the
ship. But the silly thing came
right back so we put them in a box to calm down and then set them free in the
morning – we think they are OK because they flew off pretty happily.
That was
the big excitement for last night… it was kind of a treat, because you
can imagine that after 10 days of working all the time, and doing the same jobs
over and over again, it’s nice to have something different to break the
routine.
Last night,
in fairly calm seas (that means not very big waves), we were piston coring in
3600 meters of water and we lost the piston core. Yep, we really truly did. 3600 meters is a pretty deep depth for
us on this cruise – which means there is a lot wire out, and the
combination of the wire (which weighs a lot when so much is wound out) and the
corer itself puts a lot of tension (or pull) on the wire. We had the piston core on the bottom and
there was a funny ”trip”.
What I mean by this is that we watch the tension on the wire very
carefully as it gets close to the bottom. We know it has reached the bottom
when the tension drops quickly -- we call this the “trip”. Think
about it… when the trigger core and the very heavy corer hit the bottom,
then there is much less weight, on the wire, and we can see that on a meter in
the lab. In a way it’s like a rope or string going slack when you stop
pulling on it.
Once the
core is in the bottom we have to pull pretty hard to suck it back out of the
mud again, so the tension goes way, way up until the pipe gets sucked out of
the mud, and we can see that too, on the meter. Once the core is free of the
bottom then the tension comes back up to about where it was going down because
the weight of the corer is back hanging on the wire. Well, last night there was a quick spike
in the tension just on the bottom and then way too little tension, and then no
pullout tension increase when we wound the wire back up. We could also see that
there was much too little weight on the wire – which meant that there
couldn’t be a core on the end of the wire anymore. So we new something
was wrong.
Keep in
mind we are trying to guess what is happening under the water, and the bottom
of the ocean is a long way away (about 2 miles! or 3.6 kilometers!) so we have
to make educated guesses about what’s up. It takes almost an hour and a
half to reel in the wire from that deep.
What the Chief Engineer could tell was that we’d lost the core,
but from the tension still on the wire he could tell we had almost all the wire
and the trigger core still on the end of the wire. He was absolutely right.
Sure enough, when we got all the wire reeled back in that’s what was
there (trigger hanging with no wire or
core beneath). So, yup, we
lost the core and it snapped KAPWING (!!) right where the trigger is clamped on
the wire. This spot is where a lot
of stress is on the wire, it is a place where the wire is more likely to snap
if you’re going to be that unlucky (notice how the trigger is hanging at
a funny angle in that picture).
To help you
understand let’s see some pictures of what it looks like when things go
right. Remember, when we put the
core over the side, we put a clamp on the wire with an arm that holds the
trigger core, and then loop enough wire to be the length of the core, and clamp
it right above the big weight on the coring pipe (also called a bomb because it’s so big). Because that wire is looped up, the
trigger clamp itself sits right above the big weight stack (see the trigger
loaded and being lifted out of crutch) and the trigger weight (which is
a small core) hangs below the core.
The idea is that the trigger core hits bottom first which releases the
trigger and the loops of wire and the piston core falls, hard, into the mud
(thud!) and we get a core. When the
trigger arm is down and the loops of wire set (picture of core and trigger with line over the
side) the thing is loaded and ready to go down. If all goes well, when we get the core
back on board the trigger arm comes up about 50 feet above the core and then we
take the trigger core off the line (picture of the trigger core off the
line, but the trigger still on with wire beneath), then the trigger
clamp and arm (picture of
recovering the trigger) and then reel up the last of the wire and
recover the core (see picture
of core recovery with it hanging alone on the line). So now go back and look at that picture
of the trigger arm on the wire with NO wire, and so, no core hanging
below. You can imagine what a
sinking feeling it is to know that there is no core—but then to see that
there is no wire below the trigger… well, it’s not a pretty site if
you know what you are looking at.
However, we
can’t get it back and I didn’t get upset. That’s because, when you are at
sea, you really have to expect that this sort of thing can happen. It happens so often. There is a saying that everyone who goes
to sea will tell you in their own way, which is: If you put anything over the
side of the ship, sooner or later it won’t come back. They are expensive too – about
$50,000 to replace the set up. We
don’t like it but you have to expect that sooner or later you will loose
a piece of equipment. So we always come
prepared with extras of everything. Because we plan in case this ort of thing
goes wrong, we have a whole spare piston core on board. You’d never go to
sea with out 2 of the most important piece of equipment you need! So, as soon as we could we got on to
getting the spare piston core built.
I should
also point out that there was a bit of good news in this. It snapped right below the trigger -- so
the trigger and the trigger core came back -- and we didn't lose much wire. Think about it… there is only so
much wire on the spool – if you lose too much wire, you don’t have
enough to reach the bottom.
The job at
hand the next day was to get the very heavy weight from where it was bolted to
the deck, across the deck and into the crutch (the big bucket that holds it on
the side of the ship). The thing is so heavy that it’s kind of dangerous
shifting it around on the deck while the ship is heaving around on the
waves. Fortunately, we had a pretty
calm day. So first they unbolted
the holder it was in from the deck and moved it across the fantail
(that’s what we call the flat open deck at the back of the ship) then
they lifted it out of it’s holder (see picture lifting bomb into
position) and up and into the bucket that it sits in on the side of the
ship (see
picture of bomb going into crutch). I don’t have any really great
pictures of that because they had 6 people holding tag lines on it and they
really wanted everyone else to stay away – but count the number of tag
lines (ropes) coming off of that thing – at the end of each one is a
person pulling hard so that it can’t start to swing, cause if it gets out
of control it can smash things up pretty quickly. Once the bomb is in the crutch, they
chain it in, and pivot the bucket to horizontal so that they can put pipes on
the bottom of it (see picture of bomb
with no pipes on it). Once
it’s flat, they can just bolt pipe barrels onto it and we were back in
business.
Last night
we got 2 cores – so everything is working fine – and we are working
our way west towards the North Island of new Zealand. We are now coring in
At sea it
is amazing how fast your life and luck can seem to change. Just a week ago we were battling the
rough seas and getting our multicore banged around—and not getting any mud
despite the fact that we would put it over, try changing something, and then
put it over again and it would still come back empty. But finally, after a lot of work,
including taking the whole thing apart, and putting together the spare, and
then taking parts from one and putting it on the other … the coring techs
finally hit on what was wrong. They
think that a part got banged up in the heavy waves, and banged in so badly that
the whole gizmo that keeps the 2 parts of the corer from bouncing up and down
against each other stopped working so it was bounding more than it should and
pre-tripping. Pre-tripping means
the whole thing thinks it’s on the bottom when actually it’s
somewhere in the middle of the water column – so all the bottles close
before it gets to the bottom. Then when it’s on the bottom it
doesn’t get any mud of course.
It was banging around so much it ripped apart a water bottle that was
clamped on the frame (water
bottle—it’s the grey tube strapped to the frame). The cap (or plug I suppose is a better
name) from it was stuck so hard in the middle they had to take it apart to get
it out! (bottle cap stuck in
multicorer). Well, they
finally got the multicore working by sealing up the valve in the center. They just gooed it up with stuff like
silly putty or chewing gum (but stronger) so it wouldn’t leak. And I suppose there you have one of the real
truths about going to sea. You have
all this fancy equipment and when it gets rough you have to fix it—and
sometimes it seems like the whole project is relying on chewing gum! But if it works, we go with it.
Just about
the time the multicorer began to work is when we lost the piston core…
and right after we got the spare piston core working is when the weather turned
glorious. It couldn’t have
been more calm or beautiful all day while we were coring off of Hawkes Bay (bird flying over water)
We had a glorious sunrise and a
beautiful sunset – which was made even more interesting because it was
over land – the first land we have seen in 16 days (sunset over Bluffs). It was so calm, some of the people began
feeding the albatross, so they
got up quite close to the boat —and you can really see how calm it
was!
We got some
nice long cores, got caught up on processing them, we are getting pretty good
at it—and everyone was smiling. I think that was as much the fact that it
was such good weather. You have to
remember, even though we get our “sea legs” after a few days at sea
(which means you stop feeling seasick) that when it is rough you just get
banged around a lot—everyone walks in zig-zags and it’s a lot of
work to just do some of the normal things like carry those heavy core sections
around. So when it’s calm
everyone tries to get outside and enjoy it (Will reading on deck). So with the weather good we spent the
time catching up on processing the cores, and we are getting pretty good at
running them through our fancy detector that sees through the liner and
measures things like the density of the mud (Tom and Amy in the MSD lab).
After we split the core along its length it has to be lugged into the lab (but
at least each piece only weighs one half of what it did whole (Alissa bringing split
core into lab). After we
split the core one of the slow and boring steps is scanning, yet Lilian was
smiling while she did this most boring task (Lilian optically scanning core). We also got some nice long multicores
and everyone on the multicore team was smiling as they cut up the cores into
sections (Suzanne, and Lisa and
Hugh slabbing mud). People
were even being silly on the deck.
Bob, the senior res-tech, who usually has a lot on his mind was just as
cheerful (Bob and Jesse) as Dale and Brent. What a change a change a few
days makes! The good weather really
helps!
We spent
most of the night before last and all yesterday morning steaming up the east
coast of the
Those
layered rocks give you a good idea of why we are out here. One of the main points of this cruise
was to get cores from the ocean floor with ash layers in them. Because mud settles on the bottom of the
ocean all the time, in our cores we see normal oceanic mud around and between
the ash layers (ash
layer marked for sampling).
Because the ash layers look a lot like those layers on
Being in
the
One thing
most people don’t think about much is how much water that deep weighs
– or rather how much pressure it puts on things that you send down that
deep. For every 10 meters that you
go down in the water column, the pressure on anything that is down there is
another atmosphere more. What that
means is if you are 10 meters deep (33 feet) you have twice as much pressure on
you as you do standing at the surface.
It’s the opposite to what happens when you go up in
elevation. When you go up in a
plane your ears pop because the pressure outside is less than inside your ears
and eventually some of the air rushes out. When you go down in the ocean
pressure increases quickly because water is so much heavier than air. SCUBA
divers know all about this and are careful to “clear” their ears as
they go down to keep the pressure balanced. Anyway, that change in pressure is
something oceanographers have to think about all the time. Either the
instruments we send down are very simple (like the metal pipes and the piston
core) and can’t get crushed by the weight of the water – OR they
are in a pressure casing that can’t get squished under all that weight. For example, we put a fancy pinger on
the wire just above the multi core to help us see when it hits the bottom
– that pinger is electronic and has lots of batteries in it and just like
a radio or a CD player it can’t get wet or crushed or it won’t work. The pinger makes sound that bounces off
the sea bottom and let’s us know how far above the seafloor our
instruments are. So it has a cylindrical pressure casing on it (picture of pinger). The reason the casing is round is
because a cylinder or a sphere (a ball) can’t be easily crushed if the
pressure on it is the same on all sides.
Think about it – if you could push on a ball from all sides at
once you can’t squish it because you are pushing on all sides
equally…. Anyway if you send something over the side that’s not
something simple like metal pipes, or in a pressure casing, and it goes a long
way down it will squish. One of the
fun things we did to show how this works – and to make souvenirs for
ourselves – was to put styrofoam cups into a mesh bag, attach them to the
pinger, and send them down to the bottom with the multi-core. Of course, we all took a lot of time to
decorate them first (decorated cups). We then put them in a mesh bag and then
attached them very carefully to the pinger (attaching bag of cups to the
wire) and down they go, with the instrument. At 1000 meters the pressure is 100 times
what it is at the surface, and at 2000 it’s 200 times that. Well, styrofoam has lots of teeny tiny
bubbles of air in it, so when it gets squished at 100 or 200 atmospheres all
the gas comes out – and guess what?
Those cups get REALLY small!!! Have a look back at the picture of the
decorated cups getting ready to go down—see those teeny little shriveled
up cups? Those are the ones that
already went down and came back tiny!
I guess you can tell that about this point in the cruise we are going a
little crazy for something to do we have been doing the same thing every day
without a real break for almost 3 weeks.
We really had a great time decorating the cups and seeing how they
looked when they came back—because not only does the cup shrink—so
does all the writing – and most of them get a little shriveled looking
too…
We have
been getting a lot of cores, and most of them have been pretty good. We know that because when we open them
up and look at them we can see the ashes and we can see color changes in the
mud down the core that we know come from changes in climate (that’s
weather) back in the past. The time
that we are looking for in these cores is the last ice age – and we know
it was a lot colder then and the color change goes with that change to colder
weather.
But how do
you get a good core??? It’s not that easy. You can’t just steam along to any
old where ever in the ocean and drop that big fat pipe over the side and expect
to come back with it full of mud that you can use. If the sediment is too hard it will just
bend and bounce off the bottom. If
the mud is too soft it will stick and get stuck. We have actually stuck the core in the
bottom twice on this cruise already – and it took up to 2 hours of gently
wiggling to get it out. You
can’t pull too hard or the wire will break. In fact that is always a worry. We’ve already lost a corer –
we can’t afford to lose another one.
So, we choose our coring locations very carefully. We use 2 kinds of echo locators. We have one, called the multi-beam,
which makes a picture of the bottom beneath us in a swath (picture of the multibeam readout). Sorry the pictures blurry, but you can
see in the big black box on the screen that the colored part is the shape of
the bottom, with the red being shallower end blue deeper. What is on there is a little sea
mountain to the south of the ship (that’s the little red circle). The gold lines on that picture are the
trace of where we have already been.
In the little black box on the left is the same thing, but it’s
drawn as if you are standing on the bottom of the ocean looking back at where
we have just been. Again, you can see the bump to the right, that’s the
red on the other picture. With this
we can see where it’s flat and where it’s bumpy. Good, soft deep mud, is always in a flat
spot. Think about it —
that’s because when the little mud particles settle down to the bottom
they will collect in the flat low lying places – not on the steep sides
of things. It’s kind of like
when snow falls — it won’t stay on the side of something steep, and
even if it collects on the top of a pole or fence – that’s the
first place it gets knocked off if the wind blows…. So when we are
looking for mud, we look for low spots.
After we
see if it’s flat down there we need to see how deep the mud is. To do this we use the 3.5 kHz locator
– this uses a beam of sound that sees into the sediment – and we can
see if the mud is deep and if it has layers that are good for coring (picture of the 3.5 readout). You can see on
that picture, the top of the mud is to the left. So, the lines under the top of the sediment
are what we call reflectors, and if there are nice even ones below the surface,
that can mean that the mud is nice and deep and soft. You can see that someone has put an
arrow on that trace saying possible coring site. And what you are seeing is how the
bottom changes as we steam over it.
If you look at the top of that chart you can see that we’ve
started to steam over some bumps that are probably not good for coring. We don’t want it too hard,
and we don’t want it too bumpy.
We then look at the readout from the bridges to see where we have been (picture of ships track, the gold line is the
ships course). Then we check all
that against the charts to try and decide if it’s a good place to try (see
Will and Scott plotting up
the data). We work hard at
this – we spend up to 6 hours looking for a good spot because we
don’t want to break equipment!
We do have a lot of computers to process this data and help us make
sense of it – and it Woody works pretty hard to keep it all going (pic
of Woody at the computer bank).
Two days ago he spent 6 hrs getting the computer that runs the ships navigation
fixed. During those hours we had to do it all by hand!
There are
no weekends and no days off out here at sea, and sometimes it gets pretty
DARNED boring. Everyone has their
thing they do keep from going a little nuts. While we are on watch and working people
try to keep a sense of humor… Sometimes they make sculptures of the extra
mud. So far we’ve had a
really good horses head (mud horse on railing)
and because Pete has been coring for 30 years (wow!) they made a sculpture of
him for his birthday (sculpture
of Mr. Pete). Of course we
tell lots and lots of silly jokes!
After we
had used up some of the core tubes that were stored in the lab we had room to
put up the ships ping-pong table so a lot of
people play ping-pong now to burn off energy (Al and Heather). Most people like to play
doubles—it’s hard to play ping –pong when the ship is moving
around – the ball takes some weird dips! Sometimes people want to be quiet and
relax – so they sit and read or talk (sitting and talking) or
they want to be alone—and just sit and think. A couple of weeks ago the captain and
crew set up a saltwater hot tub
on the fan tail. You can sit and
relax and soak in it when nothing big is over the side. Of course, you don’t have to relax
you can be silly too (Jessie in the
hot tub paddling home!).
One thing the captain and crew do whenever we don’t have something
over the side is put out fishing lines.
We can’t fish when we have the core wire over because the fishing
line might get tangled up in the wire.
Just last night they caught the first fish of the cruise – and it
was a beauty. A short nosed sword
fish almost 5 feet long!!! (big
fish). We’re having
fresh fish for dinner tonight!
We are
still coring away – and getting a lot of cores – we stack them up
in the lab in their D-tubes for a while.
Can you guess why they are called D-tubes? (picture of D-tubes). But when the rack gets full we have to
put them in the refrigerator van to go back home. We also need to put them in
the fridge because it keeps the cores better – and they need to last a
long time – sometimes people go back to re-sample a core as long as 30
years later—so we need to take care of them! So, they get loaded into boxes (5 split
halves in a box) and then stacked in the big van that’s kept cold like a
fridge (picture of cores
going into reefer van).
That’s their last stop ‘til the van gets loaded on another
ship and they get shipped home that way.
I realize
that I have been telling you about how we get the cores – especially the
long cores, but I haven’t taken the time to tell you why we want those
multi-cores, or why there is a trigger core on the piston (rather than
just a trigger weight). The reason we take 3 kinds of cores is because
when you take a piston core there is a lot of weight, and it hits the ground
pretty darned hard and fast. Think
about what happens when you stomp your foot in soft mud—a lot of the top
of the mud splats away. That often
happens with the piston core – the top of the mud gets blown off when the
piston core slams into the bottom.
Sometimes we can tell from the mark of mud on the outside of the weight
stack that the core went in “over its head” And we never know how
much is missing. So we always use a
trigger core… although part of its purpose is to serve as the trigger
weight -- when it hits bottom it releases the piston core so it falls really
fast that last little bit. The
reason the trigger weight is a core, not just a bunch of lead, is that it takes
a small core (Dan taking the
weights off the top of the trigger core). Because it doesn’t weigh as much
it hits the bottom at the speed the winch is letting out the wire (about 40
meters a minute). So it goes in slower - not as hard as the piston core. That way the trigger core doesn’t
stomp the top of the mud so hard and we get the surface of the mud in the core
– or I should say we hope that we get the surface of the mud. That
of course doesn’t always happen.
If the waves are big, sometimes the trigger core will hit the bottom
twice while we are pulling the big core out of the mud and we get 2 sets of the
core top in the core tube– but we don’t really know how good that
is either.
Anyway,
because the long cores don’t always have the top of the mud — we
use the multi core. It has 8 cores
in the middle supported in a frame.
The frame holds the tubes off the ground when you either have it hanging
by a wire (Dale attaching the
wire to the top of the corer) – or you have to put big pins to
hold it up, because if you don’t the lead weights in the middle push
those tubes slowly, almost a meter below the frame into the mud.and when you
pull back the tops and bottoms of the tubes close. So, when it goes up all the tubes are
open (see picture of corer going
up) and when it comes back they are all closed – and (we hope!!) full
of mud (picture of corer coming
in with mud). Once the
corer is on board it’s way too tight inside the frame to work on the
tubes (see picture of people
working in frame), so they have to be taken off and put on a rack so we
can work on them (2 pictures one of frame with no cores and one of cores on frame). We then have to push the mud out of
those cores into ones we can slice up (the ones on the corer are really hard
and really expensive) ( pushing
mud into tube for cutting).
For this we have a special pole that
is just the right size.
If this
sounds like a lot of work it is—especially because the multi-corer is
much more delicate, and fiddly to get to work. Remember how much trouble we had getting
it to work back when the weather was so rough???
So why do
we do this? Why do you need a
perfect core top? Well, if you want
to study what is happening in the mud now – you need to study the little
creatures that live at the top of the sediment – and you have to capture
them, not blow them away. And
believe me they are there (picture
of worm tubes in multicore).
So it’s a lot of work – but to understand how it all works
now and in the past sometimes you have to use both very gentle tools – as
well as big tough ones.
We have
been getting lots and lots of multicores and piston cores here in the
We’ve
been having really good weather the last few days – so nice in fact that
it’s hard to remember what it was like just a few short weeks ago when we
were trying to core in such rough weather in the Southern Ocean. It’s just like that out here at
sea, when the weather is with you – everything seems good and when
it’s rough nothing seems right.
It is hard
to really explain how rough weather can really beat you up. It’s a little like being on a baby
roller coaster all the time – you never quite know which direction you
will get thrown next. I can try and
show how much the boat can move…I took 2 pictures one at the top of a
wave and then one a few seconds later at the bottom of a wave – and you
can see how much the boat heaved as that wave went beneath us(see two
pictures of the big swell up and down). The thing is, you expect it to be rough
when the wind is blowing (like in those pictures it was blowing about 35
knots). But unless you are a surfer, people don’t think often about the
fact that waves from big storms run away from the wind and end up as swell in
places where it’s calm.
Although we have had great weather the last week or so, several days we
have had a long, low swell running under the ship – and we know that has
come from storms down where we used to be, or further away. It’s hard to get a picture of that
– but if you look carefully at this picture (picture of the big swell running) you
can see the water is calm—but look at the long shadow running
horizontally across the picture – that is the swell – about 4 feet
that was running – we had even bigger swell the day before. So it was calm and warm and lovely but
there was still a swell.
That’s quite different to the absolute calm we had one day (see
picture of bird on calm seas) or
the little bit of a chop (those are small, short, waves) we almost always have
around (see picture of slight
chop at sunset).
The other
change in weather we have had is that as we came north (that’s closer to
the equator around here) it’s gotten warmer. That of course helps too. At the beginning of the cruise we were
all working out on deck in all our heavy gear both to stay dry and warm (see
picture of
working in wet weather gear) and
now it’s all T-shirts and smiles (see picture of Tom in a Tshirt and all smiles).
I think
it’s a pretty good thing too that the weather is with us now…
it’s been almost a month at sea and though we’re still working
hard, everyone is ready to be done – and when it’s rough it’s
just so much harder to work – all my bruises from the first week or so
are just now healed. We have just 2
more days of work and then we head into port – and everyone is looking
forward to it… me too.
The weather
has been good to great the last couple weeks of the cruise. As I said, this was really important to
all of us. We have been working
really hard and getting lots of samples.
The reason for that is partly because the
With all
the great weather lots of people have been sunning themselves when they
aren’t on watch, and it’s been a treat to catch glimpses of land at
a distance once in a while.
However, on our last night at sea as we tried to get our last cores, the
wind came up. We do get weather
warnings… the Captain gets a weather report several times a day and we
knew the wind was going to come up, but boy oh boy, Thursday (March 24) was a
real squall. The wind whipped up
and the seas came up too. The weather
was coming from the right direction (northeast) so that the sea state could
build. What I mean by that is that
not only does the wind have to blow on the water for a while to make
waves—it has to blow across the water for a long distance for the waves
to get big. That is called
fetch. The farther the wind can
blow across the water, the bigger the waves can get. So, with the wind coming from the right
direction and blowing strong, there were pretty big waves. But the wind was also very intense
— we even saw a water spout!
A water spout is a tornado at sea — the wind sucks up water into
the tornado and so you can really see it.
We didn’t realize it, but there were tornados on the land too
– so it was a pretty bad storm.
And of course we were trying to work – then the first multicore
came up pretty beaten up again. So
we had to make a decision – we only had about 12 hours left to work
– could we get it fixed with the weather as bad as it was? Even if we got it fixed would the
weather be good enough that we would be able to take that last core? Well, with the water spouts around and
things looking pretty rough – we decided that it was just too rough and
time too short… so after 27 days at sea, we tucked our tail between our
legs and headed into port.
Of course
what that means is we got into port Friday night instead of Saturday morning
– so we had a lovely ride in during daylight… with a great view of Rangitoto Island – which is a dormant
“shield” volcano (notice how you can see the volcano shape really
well?) and a great view of Auckland
City skyline as we came in. Coming into port is always exciting –
it’s hard to explain how happy you feel when you come along side dock and
know that you are almost done! (Jesse happy to be in port)
– they even have a name for the feeling that you just CAN’T WAIT to
get off the ship – they call it “channel fever” because it’s the excitement you
feel when you are steaming into the channel to the harbor. But we aren’t quite done yet. The ship has to be tied up carefully at
the dock – and the lines (sea-going name for ropes) they use to do this
are huge!! (tying up at the dock). But even when we are tied up we
aren’t done. However, Friday
night we all took the evening off – everyone was so happy to get off the
ship and do and see something different.
People are always so happy to get off the ship after a long cruise. But we STILL aren’t done. We have to spend the next 2 days
unloading the ship of all the gear we put on it a month ago—there is
still a lot of work to do! But it
can wait one evening…..
Well, we
spent 2 whole days packing up all the gear that was loaded onto the ship a
month before. It took every hand
working to get things packed carefully into boxes so that they wouldn’t
break on the way home… and then those boxes had to go into a
container. A
“container” is a big box that is the size of the back of a tractor
trailer truck. Just about
everything that gets shipped on a cargo ship these days goes into a container
first and then gets loaded and sent that way. All our sediment cores went in their own
refrigerator container (remember the “reefer van” we put them in
during the cruise). We had two 40
ft containers, and 2 reefer vans that had to be loaded and taken away. Most of the stuff was lifted off the
ship in slings by crane and then put into vans using a forklift. We were so busy doing this no one
thought to take pictures… but we worked late on Friday and then all day
Saturday as well – but by dinner time on Sunday we were pretty much done,
and the vans loaded and locked. All
that was left on Monday was to be sure all the paper work was in order….
And on Tuesday at 4:00 – right on schedule – the R/V Roger Revelle steamed out of
Auckland Harbor. I did get a
picture of her leaving port – and if you look closely you can see how
empty the fantail was compared to when we were onboard. I don’t know why ships are always
referred to as “she” but I can understand why you want to personify
a ship (see picture of Revelle leaving
That’s
the end of my blog form the South Pacific.
Thanks for
following along, Liz.
Cruise information:
