The Last Supper

So concludes my final day on the R/V Kilo Moana. Today was pretty low key, just had my 8 am to noon shift, hopped on the stationary bike one last time, cleaned my room and packed, and then had a fabulous BBQ on the back deck of the ship! Complete with three different kinds of sausage, steak, ribs (they were awesome), cole slaw, mac salad, baked beans, rolls, and brownies! With wonderful weather, and a great sunset, and some reggae jams playing, who could ask for more?

Although a lot of this trip has been disappointing, I will be sad to leave the ship tomorrow. I have met a lot of wonderful people with who have rich and interesting stories. It also makes me sad to know that I may never get a chance like this again. I do love being at sea.

Tomorrow we port into Guam, where we will probably take and $80 cab ride (ridiculously expensive, but its an island so they can jack up the price) to our hotel in Tuman Bay. There is a beautiful beach there calling my name, as well as a few brews at the bar ;) I don't know if I will feel adventurous or just be content laying on the beach (probably the latter), but I hope to meet up with some of the crew and the techs for a drink or two!

Sesame Street Gangster Victory

Tonight was the Quoits championship of the KM1021 cruise (the 21st cruise of 2010 on the Kilo Moana). The staging bay was packed with spectators and they broke out the big speakers to blare some music. It was the battle from the Galley- the Sesame Street Gangsters (the head chef Shawn and the second kitchen assistant Carston) vs. the Pinoy Posse (the first kitchen assistant Donny and the science lab tech Kuhio). I guess there was a lot of tension in the kitchen today! At dinner, a special cake inscribed in blue frosting read "Congratulations 2010 Quoits Champs, Shawn and Carston" complete with sprinkles (this was two hours before the match began). There was also a picture of Shawn and Carston with the cake holding up some #1 hand gestures posted in the mess. By the end of dinner, the cake had been defaced to read "Chumps." But, the cake was correct, the Sesame Street Gangsters came out on top. Pretty fun to watch.

Today, I didn't do much other than be a fatty. I had a great blueberry pancake for breakfast, grilled cheese and tomato soup for lunch, and some fettucini for dinner. And I haven't even made it to the cake yet.

Really, otherwise I sat outside watching the water and knitted for about four hours. I was joined by Ernie, one of the OBS techs, for a couple of those hours and enjoyed some conversation.

Tomorrow is our last full day on the ship! Watch ends at 8 pm tomorrow night (just in time for this to be my last 8 pm to midnight shift!), and we are celebrating by having a BBQ on the upper deck of the ship (yes, they have a gas grill on board). As disappointing as this recovery has been, I will miss being out here. Going back to real life is going to be tough. Especially going back to northeast winter life. So I will try to enjoy my last day on the ocean tomorrow and prepare myself for two days of beer and beach time in Guam before returning to the frozen waste land that is the northeast.

Guam-ward bound

We are officially on our way to Guam now! We are still surveying on the way, so we have to keep up our watch shifts but it is pretty low key at this point. So, there is not much to report. I am just trying to soak in the experience for the last couple days, along with the tropical weather, because Lord knows I won't be able to wear shorts for a very long time upon my return to Providence.

The semifinals of the Quiots tournament occurred tonight! There was a lot of excitement, a big crowd watching and music going. The big championship is tomorrow night!

McCall has also taught me how to purl. I am trying to come up with a good way to use the rest of my yarn.

Breakfast this morning was pineapple waffles! Yum! Dinner was delicious grilled mahi, italian sausage with peppers, onions, and mushrooms, sautéed squash, and garlic herbed rice. I am really going to miss having such wonderful food prepared for me daily!

Sobering

As if losing 4 instruments to the ocean wasn't enough, my advisor and I started looking at the data, and it is not good news. Three of the Scripps instruments and one of the Lamont ones did not provide any useful data at all. So, that leaves us with 8 functioning seismometers. Four of these 8 did not record for the whole time they were deployed so what it boils down to is this:

The colored circles show the seismometers that actually worked. Those that have a portion of black indicate how long they were working (black shows the proportion of time they weren't working). If you look closely, there are small black triangles. Those are the stations we should have had but don't due to loss at sea or crappy data.





So, in reality, this is less than 50% data return, the worst Don has ever had (which is just perfect for me and my thesis!). We won't be able to do a lot of what we set out to do. But, there are glimmers of hope. In going through the data, we have found some interesting features that may unfold into a unique story that we weren't planning on telling. So, we might have some unexpected blessings. I guess you have to run with what you've got.

As far as what we were planning on doing with the data, I'll try to give you a quick run down of the problems we were trying to address. First, you need to know a little bit about earth's structure. If you were to take a slice of the earth, you would see that it is made up of layers. The brittle and thin outermost layer is the crust. Beneath the crust is the lithosphere, which is also rigid but thicker than the crust. The crust and the lithosphere make up the plates that move around the surface of the earth. Beneath the lithosphere is a region called the asthenosphere. The asthenosphere is more ductile, and accommodates the motion of the rigid plates above. Think of it like the consistency of silly putty, it's not liquid but it deforms. If you were to keep traveling down to the center of the earth, you would go through the mantle, the liquid outer core, and into the solid inner core. We are mostly interested in learning about the lithosphere and the asthenosphere associated with old oceanic plates.

Oceanic plates are made at mid ocean ridges (sometimes referred to as spreading centers). Here, melts from the mantle rise up to the crest of the mid ocean ridge, as the two plates on either side of the mid ocean ridge pull away from the ridge crest, and the melts erupt at the surface, cool and make new crust. The region of the mantle that the melt came from is now cold and chemically depleted (since it lost the melt), this is the lithosphere. With time, this newly formed crust and lithosphere move away from the spreading center and continue to cool off. With more and more cooling over time, the lithosphere thickens (as you are adding more cold material).

So, this is what we know. A big question that remains in the earth sciences is whether the oceanic lithosphere continues to thicken through all time, or does it reach some steady state thickness around 80 million years, as some data suggest. We wanted to try to answer this question by studying really old oceanic lithosphere. In our study area, the crust is about 150 million years old. So, although we would not be able to say how the lithosphere changes through time, we would be able to provide a great snap shot of what the upper earth structure looks like in this old oceanic region.

We were going to try to answer this question in a couple of different ways. We can use seismic waves that travel through the earth to basically get a cat scan of the region. By measuring differences in travel times (or phases and amplitudes of seismic waves) from earthquakes coming from all around the world, we can determine what the seismic velocity is in the material that lies under the seismometers. Since the lithosphere is cold, it would have a faster seismic velocity than the underlying asthenosphere. This is one way we could look at the thickness of the lithosphere.

Another unique way we were going to look at it involves seismic anisotropy. Sorry if this is getting too complicated and convoluted. The mineral olivine, that makes up most of the upper earth structure (aside from the crust) is highly anisotropic. So, seismic waves travel at different speeds on it's different crystallographic axes. When groups of olivine crystals are subject to stress (such as at the mid ocean ridge crest where the plates are pulling apart), they tend to all align in a certain way. Here, all of the axes along which seismic waves travel the fastest align in the direction of stress.

This is also where the choice of the location of our experiment comes in. The crust and lithosphere that underly the two groups seismometers were formed by two different mid ocean ridges. There are faint red lines on the first graphic with the stations plotted that show the orientation of the mid ocean ridge that formed those two regions. If you can't see them, these lines are nearly perpendicular to each other. We can measure seismic anisotropy with our seismometers, which tells us about the direction of the stress field that is responsible for the anisotropy. What we would expect to see is a difference in seismic anisotropy beneath the two groups of seismometers, reflecting the fossil spreading direction of the mid ocean ridge that formed these two different regions. But, as we go deeper into the asthenosphere, we expect the anisotropy to tell us something different. Here, the stress field is dictated by the current plate motion, as the crust/lithosphere plate that rides above the asthenosphere kind of shears it in the direction that it is moving. So, although these two different regions should have different directions of seismic anisotropy shallow in the lithosphere, in the asthenosphere it should be in the same direction since they are both a part of the Pacific plate that is moving coherently as one to the north west. This is the other way we would try to answer the question about lithospheric thickness, by looking at what depth the direction of seismic anisotropy changes.

Sorry for all the science. Hopefully most of you can understand this, but if not leave me a comment or something and I can try to better explain it. Needless to say, I was very excited about this project, and if the data set had come out more favorably, we would have been able to answer these questions in a lot of different ways using different techniques. Now we are going to be very very limited. But, like I said, hopefully we will stumble upon some unexpected scientific breakthroughs. You never know.

On the upside, food today was GREAT. After that near sob session of looking at the data with my advisor, we went down for lunch and much to my delight it was Mexican! Some delicious beef tamales, Kalua pork taquitos  (they called them enchiladas, but they were really taquitos), jalepeno poppers, black beans and rice. Just what the doctor ordered. And of course, Aloha Friday = pizza night! I had Hawaiian and a slice of artichoke feta. I am sure going to miss Aloha Friday.

Hopefully I can get my spirits back up to enjoy the last few days at sea!

OBS #5, the Heartbreaker

We returned to the Lamont OBS that we weren't able to communicate with the first time (the one I was talking about in the 'Stake Out' post, it is the northern most red circle in the left group of OBSes). Here, we spent another 12 hours pulling out all the tricks we had. We circled it with the portable transponder, sent down the Rescue Beacon to depths ranging from 1000 to 5000 m to communciate with it, all the while still sending communication over our regular transducer. When I came on shift, we actually got quite a few pings back, just enough to get my hopes up again. I am sure we were communicating with the instrument. But just because we established spotty communication doesn't mean that it wouldn't have had the same anchor release problem as the previous ones. So, we stuck around for another 6 hours or so after that, just in case one of our burn commands got through and it was able to burn off the anchors, to give it enough time to potentially get to the surface. But, after I got off shift, they got very few pings, losing communication. The stupid OBS was teasing me, giving me a glimmer of hope then breaking my heart again.

I had an exciting afternoon nonetheless. McCall and I got a tour of the innards of the ship, which is compartmentalized into maybe 5 or 6 different rooms on each side. One of the crew members took us downstairs into each of these rooms (that are not connected so it's a lot of going up and down and around) to see the generators, engines, water purification systems, propellor turners, etc. It involved climbing a lot of ladders into tight spaces, and at some points we were 40 ft below the surface! We could hear the waves crashing, kind of scary but also very cool. We also found where they keep the stocks of candy. There is a whole lot of food on this ship! Enough to feed everyone for 5 weeks I believe. There is also a whole lot of fuel, I think 130,000 gallons. That's a lot of liquid money. No wonder it costs $33,000 a day to be out here.

Speaking of food, dinner was excellent, again. There was chicken fried steak, but I opted for the stuffed green pepper. It was stuffed with rice and ground beef, and topped with tomato sauce and cheese. Mmmm so tasty! There was also mashed potatoes and steamed veggies.

Sadly, the Salty Stitchers lost their first game in the single elimination Quoits tournament. McCall was pulling us through and got a ringer, but unfortunately we lost 21-12. Oh well, we are thinking of starting a losers bracket to play some more.

Right now we are just surveying for the next few days before we have to start our four day transit to Guam! And I'm telling you, right now, a beer sounds so so good. I know what I'll be doing once we get into port.

Lazy surveying

Well, after more than 12 hours of trying to communicate with that Lamont OBS, we gave up. We tried just about everything, but we never really heard from it. So, another $70,000 gift to the sea floor. At this point, we won't even reach a 2/3 data return. I was told that 2/3 is typical, but I guess I didn't really believe it and I just had high hopes. But we went ahead and undershot that statistic with this experiment! It's rough when it's so out of your control.

Right now we are taking a break from attempted recovery (we have attempted with all 16 now though) and are doing a 20 hour survey. We are basically just cruising around recording bathymetry, gravity anomalies, and magnetic anomalies on the sea floor. It's a nice break from the anxiety of recovery. I can veg out during my shift (aka write this blog, check email, watch a movie), rather than be down in the labs trying to listen for pings. But, at 3:30 am we should be back at the previous Lamont site where we weren't able to establish communication to give it one more shot. I have little faith, but we should do everything we can.

Otherwise, there's not much more to report. Other than food! This morning I had a fabulous macadamia nut pancake (pretty sure it was whole wheat too), lunch I skipped but it was sloppy joes and cajun catfish. Dinner was quite fancy, bacon wrapped chicken breasts, cheese ravioli with tomato caper sauce (they really seem to like their capers on this ship), scalloped dill potatoes, and zuchinni. It was one of the other grad student's birthday yesterday, so the kitchen made him a cake and we sang as he came downstairs tonight. I'm holding out for ice cream later, but I heard the frosting was really good. There were fresh baked chocolate chip cookies sitting out today too, they are like hockey pucks, they look so good.

I spent the rest of the day watching movies in the lounge and not doing much of anything. Don has the data from all the Scripps instruments, and in the correct format now, so we should be able to start looking at data quality tomorrow! Hopefully this won't also be a disappointment.

Not promising, 12-4

I may officially be ready to be done with this cruise. All these frustrations trying to recover these Lamont instruments is really getting me down and I think I am ready to go home and return to normalcy. We picked up the last two Scripps instruments today, but one of them has a 22 second clock delay, which means its going to be a pain correcting for that in the data. If I had known that recovery cruises would end up being this depressing, maybe I wouldn't have come!

As for the last Lamont instrument, we've been trying to communicate with it for about three hours now with no success. Just like the previous one. Don seems to think that perhaps the glass spheres imploded and damaged the transponder. This would be why we aren't able to establish communication at all. We've tried lots of different things, and now we are towing the portable transducer around trying to get a ping. I am about to go on shift and the thought of sitting downstairs in their lab for four hours, hopelessly listening to nothingness is giving me a headache. I really don't want to do this. We have about two-three days left before we need to start our four day transit back to Guam, so this could go on for a while.

Luckily tonight was spaghetti and meatballs, a nice big bowl of comfort for me. I topped it off with some butter pecan ice cream, but I don't know what will fill the void of not getting these instruments back.

As far as I can tell, I bet this is going to be our final outcome:

Stake Out, 10-3

After six hours of desperately trying to communicate to the Lamont instrument, we decided to leave. We sent enable codes, burn codes, and tried to range to it to get a location, but we were just unable to get any consistent pings in return from the instrument. So, we basically don't know anything. We don't know whether the OBS was enabled, whether it received our burn commands, and if it did receive our burn commands whether or not it even moved off the bottom. Chances are that it probably was enabled and heard the burns, but is having the same problems as the previous instruments and did not burn off its anchors. The fact that we never got improved communication with it gives a slight indication that it is still on the bottom. We will return to it after two more attempted recoveries and see if we can't establish better communication. But for now, it's not looking good.

The Scripps instrument we recovered very early this morning came up, but didn't have all of its data (which we were told to expect, they knew this one was going to have problems, I don't remember why). But it has about 80% of it, so not too terrible.

The rest of the day I spent knitting with McCall and trying to stay cool and collected. This whole process is very frustrating. The deployment cruise was so much more fun, you just dropped things over the edge and moved on. Now, you get all these problems and uncertainties, not quite as fun.

But, we had a good lunch of Kalua pork sandwiches. And there are butterscotch brownies that I will certainly be indulging in shortly. Dinner was really great too, game hens, cheese manicotti, sauted veggies, and rosemary potatoes. We are on our way to another Scripps site, hopefully we will have better luck with the communication. Even the recovery last night for Scripps took a while for us to ping with the instrument. I think it may be because the seas are slightly choppier. But, trying to keep my hopes up!

Scuttled Hopes and Dreams, 9-2

Happy Halloween! From this side of the date line anyway. We were super productive today and managed to do 3 recoveries in 24 hours. We will just miss doing 4 actually probably by an hour. In honor of Halloween I set out a bowl of candy corn that was demolished before noon, and some of the crew dressed up. One of our kitchen hands Carston wore his brightest clothing, tye dye shirt, pink shorts, and a bright orange hair band. We decided he was a rainbow. Or a rainbow warrior, as the University of Hawaii mascot used to be (they are now just the warriors). Another person, Frank, actually shaved his head into a mohawk and had a shirt spray painted 'Sons of Anarchy, Kilo Moana.' He wore goggles all day too, way to commit. And I also saw Larson dressed up as a ghost buster.

The day started out well. There was supposed to be a Lamont recovery early in the morning, arriving on site around 1 am. When I felt the ship moving around 5 am, I figured that we had left it behind (that it probably had anchor releasing problems like the rest), since the others have been taking 5 hours to rise. I have lost a lot of faith in these ones. But, when I woke up to get breakfast, I was informed that the Lamont recovery was a complete success! It came up properly, released both of its weights, and most importantly recorded all the data (the previous two we recovered only recorded for 250 and a measly 80 days...). So, that was a high note.

Now the low note. We moved on to our next recovery site, which happened to be a Scripps site much to my delight, because these guys have been coming up consistently and with no problems. It reached the surface without a hitch, and we happily brought it on board. Yet, when one of the techs removed the cylinder in the bottom that has the batteries and data cards, the other end of the cylinder popped open and water spilled out. Not only had it leaked, but the lithium batteries inside had also leaked, which is very very dangerous. And not only is the battery acid incredible corrosive, but the amount of power in that cylinder is equivalent to a stick of dynamite. They immediately swung the cylinder to the edge of the boat to drain it, and then dumped the innards of that cylinder, along with my hopes and dreams, into the ocean. It was very sad to watch. A years worth of potential data, crucial parts to my PhD thesis, scuttled off the back deck. Granted, those data cards were corroded and worthless so it didn't matter that we were dumping it overboard. It was still figuratively crushing.

Too bad this was after I opted out of the comfort food lunch: meatloaf, garlic mashed potatoes, mac and cheese, and green beans. I had a salad. I could have used that meatloaf. Instead I got on the bike and listened to some angry music. Dinner was calamari steaks with a tomato caper sauces, mango glazed ham, rice, and asparagus. There is some chocolate cake down there also beckoning, so maybe I'll have a little Halloween indulgence later.

We had one more Scripps recovery tonight, and luckily this one went without a hitch. I got to play pole girl for both Scripps recoveries today, adding to the excitement. We are now en route again to another Scripps instrument. We should arrive on site while I am still on shift, but it will probably surface after midnight again.

So, the one Scripps failure has some interesting and scary implications. Now that we have lost that OBS, we are really relying on two Lamont instruments for success in this experiment. We have three more Scripps instuments to recover, yet these guys all lie in a row. Without getting to sciency, we really want a good azimuthal distribution of stations to be able to get at our problem. So stations in a line would not be ideal. You can really see this when you look at a map of the stations

So, here the green circles are Scripps instruments, red are Lamont. A black check mark indicates a completely successful recovery, and a white check shows the two Lamont OBSes that didn't record all the data. The X shows the two OBSes that failed. So, you can see to get good spatial coverage on the group on the left, we need those last two red OBSes. Getting the rest of the green ones would be great, but they are in a line and we'd only have that one Lamont OBS off the line. The green Scripps one we lost today was a major player. I am mourning the loss of our soldier.

I was just thinking to myself, I am surprised Ernie (one of the OBS techs) hasn't tried to play a practical joke today, on Halloween. He has been quite mischievous on this trip. He was the one behind the 'I'm on a Boat' video. A few days ago they roped McCall into a scientist trap on deck. But, we just got a call in the computer lab that they needed help downstairs. So I headed down, but on my way down, I was a little suspicious. As I peeked my head into their lab, I saw a camera sitting next to Ernie. I knew they were up to something, so when I stepped in and a small piece of foam on a string (aka a spider) swung down in my face I wasn't too surprised. I think I bummed Ernie and Mark out a bit because my reaction wasn't quite what they were looking for. So, I sent Julia down into the trap, hoping their work wouldn't go for nothing. But the thing landed right above her head so she didn't notice. Nice try Mark and Ernie.

So, say a little prayer for those two Lamont instruments. My thesis may depend on it!

Half way, 7-1

We are officially half way through our recoveries and on an 11 hour transit to the second group of 8 OBSes. Today we managed to get two more! We recovered another Scripps instrument very early in the morning, I believe after 1 am so I didn't stay awake for it. We again had some troubles with the Lamont instrument, but it came up, slowly but surely.

We found out what is going wrong with those guys. The burn cables are encased in these plastic cylinders, and those cylinders were cracked (from the high pressure that deep in the ocean) on the one Lamont instrument we did recover. So, this is probably the reason why we never recovered the first one, its anchors were unable to burn off. This is also the reason why only one of the anchors burned off the OBS we did recover, the one that didn't burn off had this cracked cable housing cylinder. And again today, the Lamont OBS only was able to burn off one anchor weight. So it took 5 hours for it to get to the surface. I'm trying not to complain, because slow is better than not at all. It took 7 tries to get it to burn its single weight, and in that process I honestly started to believe it wasn't coming up at all. So, we are really holding our breath with those ones.

Otherwise, its super calm seas! It's been very nice the last few days, and its supposed to stay nice for the next 5-6 days which is perfect! By then we should be done, or almost done, with the recoveries and starting our 4 day transit to port in Guam!

Food is still excellent. Lunch was BLTs, sausages with peppers, and clam chowder. I opted to make myself a turkey sandwich for something a little lighter. Dinner was also delicious. Pork loin and crusted snapper, both were very good. With dirty rice and steamed zucchini, yum! Cookie of the day was oatmeal raisin, and there was leftover macadamia nut cheesecake from last night available for dessert. Tempting tempting.

Right now I am working the eight to midnight shift, and it will be extended an extra hour because we are switching time zones again. Too bad. So, Julia and I will be watching a couple movies again as we transit! The next pick up will occur a bit after 1 am this morning, and it's another Lamont OBS, so keep your fingers crossed for us!

5-1

This morning began with an unexpectedly slow recovery. I believe we initially estimated the OBS would be on the surface at around 4:00 am, but it arrived at the surface around 8:50 am. After getting it on board, we saw that it didn't burn off one of its anchor weights, so it was rising to the surface at a snail's pace. This was our first Lamont instrument to be recovered. Talking to the techs, it looks like it had some problems though. It didn't record all of the data, only about 250 some days worth rather than an entire year.

This was our first daylight recovery, and it sure is different trying to spot these things when it is bright out. I didn't see this first one at all. The strobe in the darkness is much easier to see than a tiny orange flag bobbing in the waves. Here is a picture of a Lamont instrument. You can see that the top is yellow rather than orange (the yellow part is the glass spheres used for flotation). You can also see the orange ball (where the seismometer is housed) dangling from it is different than the green one that Scripps has.

On the bright side, I finally got the programs working to look at some of the data from the Scripps OBSes! We aren't exactly sure what we are looking at yet (we don't know which channel it is in the miniseed, for you seismologists out there. There are four on an OBS: X,Y,Z and the DPG- differential pressure gauge), but I can show you what we think is an earthquake that occurred on November 8, 2009:

Yay! That big squiggle in the middle is the eartquake :) It's amazing that we are able to look at this stuff so quickly!

After McCall and my rowing/biking session, it was time to do yet another recovery. This one was one from Scripps, and it came up without a hitch again! This also happened during the daylight hours and props to McCall for spotting the sucker first! It is going to take some practice for me to spot these guys. It arrived safely on board, the water was nice and and calm. So, that makes a total of 5 successful recoveries so far!

And guess what, it's Aloha Friday and that means pizza for dinner!! I had three slices again, have to keep it consistent: Hawaiian, veggie, and spinach and feta. Yum! We brought our slices outside to watch the sunset because it looked like it had green flash potential. It wasn't quite a flash, more of a streak, so more subtle than last time. But still pretty fabulous!

We are about two hours away from our next site, so here's hoping we pull another Scripps instrument on board to make it 6-1.

3-1

We have had two successful recoveries today! Both Scipps instruments, so I am quite pleased. One occurred early this morning right around 6. I woke up to see it happen, and McCall was the first to spot it this time. So, again, we were in the cover of darkness so the strobe light made it easier to see. The other one happened tonight, right around 9 pm. It was a tie between me, McCall and Ernie (one of the OBS techs from Scripps) to spot it first, but I pointed first, so it went down in the log as mine :)

We went back to the first recovery spot where the Lamont instrument never came up to try again, but to no avail. Our fallen soldier will remain at the bottom of the ocean. Others think of it as our $70,000 gift to the Pacific. On a brighter note though, we already have the data off two of the instruments that have come up, so that is very exciting! Don and I are working to get the data unpacked so we can look at seismograms, but we are still troubleshooting a bit. So, no word about the data quality, but it is there!! All 24 GB of it (that is for just ONE station, I will be busy for the next three years).

Tonight McCall and I strapped on work vests and hard hats to be the 'pole girls' for the recovery. Basically we just had to grab the long poles the techs use to get a tag line on the instrument so we can crane it up on board. Not a huge responsibility, but it sure got my adrenaline going! I just didn't want something to go wrong and it be my fault! But we did just fine! And I managed to get the poles out of the way without knocking anyone in the water, so I call that a success.

Today, I certainly enjoyed breakfast. Fresh baked cinnamon rolls! Lunch was chili dogs, but I averted for just a bowl of minestrone soup. Dinner was pretty good as well! Beef stroganoff with egg noodles, grilled asparagus, but the show stopper was the honey macadamia nut shrimp. So good! There was also cherry pie (which it took all my power to not indulge in a slice a la mode) and I got a nibble of the butterscotch pecan cookies. Those I may have to indulge in later ;) McCall and I finally got on the rowing machine, and I am going to be sore tomorrow. But the more we work out, the more cookies I can eat, so I'll take it!

1-1/green flash/glowing squid

So much has happened in the last 24 hours, I hope I can remember to document it all here! Well, it all started on a sour note. Our first attempted recovery was unsuccessful. As we got to the recovery site, we were able to enable and communicate with the OBS using transducers. So we know it is alive down there. However, we told it to burn its anchor off, and nothing happened. We can tell how far away it is, and that range wasn't changing, thus it wasn't moving. We sent it the burn signal 9 times, and were forced to give up on account of time (we need to make sure we still will have enough time to recover the other 15 instruments). I figured we might have some troubles getting the OBSes to the surface, but I just hoped it wouldn't be our first one. This was one of the instruments from Lamont, and they rely on glass spheres for flotation. But, we are sending these instruments to record depths, and there is a chance of these things imploding, in which case they won't float to the surface. Any number of things could have prevented it from coming up, it could be stuck in the mud (it's been sitting at the bottom of the ocean for a year), the glass spheres could have imploded, the burn cable may have had problems, etc. We don't know. So we were forced to disable it, and we may swing back and try again if we have time later.

I proceeded to hop on the stationary bike for a while to blow off some steam and burn off one of the two pieces of pumpkin pie I ate last night. Afterwards, the Salty Stitches won their first quoits match! We played the Ring Worms and won 21-11. McCall reverted to the horse shoe style throw rather than the frisbee throw and was rocking it! She threw two ringers, yet they were canceled out by the other team. Nonetheless, we pulled out a win!

The rest of the afternoon we spent transiting to our next recovery location. This instrument was one of the ones from Scripps, and is, in my opinion, overall more reliable than the Lamont version. It uses syntactic foam rather than glass spheres for flotation (so no worries about implosions there) and the seismometer itself is encased in a complete sphere, whereas Lamonts are sealed in two half spheres of glass stuck together. So, we had high hopes for this one.

Everything was going according to plan, and as the instrument was on its two hour journey to the surface, I witnessed the spectacular. I got to see the green flash as the sun set! It's subtle, but it's real! I didn't get a picture because I was too focused on keeping my eyes peeled on the horizon. I missed seeing it last year, but I got to witness it tonight! Not only was that amazing, but the sunset that followed was absolutely gorgeous. It's nice not being on the midnight to 4 am shift now because I get to see sunsets again (rather than trying to be asleep already).

After the sun went down, and the lights on deck went on, one of our lab techs pulled out his fishing poll and we went squid fishing! They are attracted to the light apparently. The first one we pulled out of the water was quite amazing! I believe they are bioluminescent. At first, it was a red and orange color, then after squiring some water at us as a defense mechanism, it flushed and went white. Then you could see it kind of glowing in a pulsing fashion. We got a great view of its nervous system! McCall gave it a try and I got to witness her catch her first squid! So proud :) We practiced catch and release with a few more squid, and soon enough it was getting close to the time we estimated the instrument to be on the surface.

We also got to see some lightning on the horizon. Also pretty spectacular at sea. Luckily we are supposed to have good weather for the next few days.

So, after sending the transducer back in the water, we figured it must be at the surface by now. But we weren't getting any radio contact. Luckily, these things are easier to spot at night believe it or not because they have a strobe light on top. I'd like to believe I was the first one to see it off the port side stern, so I'm going to say I was the first to see it. Because I got to shout and point, so I felt important. We then pulled the ship up close to it, and we could see our little OBS floating waiting to be recovered!

The orchestration of the recovery process was remarkable. I'm glad I was watching from above! Basically we backed the boat up to the instrument, two of the OBS techs stood ready with a hooked pole that had a rope and clasp attached. Once it got hooked, the rope was hitched on, and the other end of the rope was attached to a wench that would crane it up over the side. It all worked beautifully, such professionals, and soon enough our little soldier was safe on board! It is so crazy to think that that little guy was on the bottom of the ocean, 6 km down, recording earthquakes for a year! And it made it back safely. I'm so glad!

We celebrated accordingly, as I greeted our instrument excitedly with a hug, and proceeded inside to have another slice of pumpkin pie :)

Feast

Most of the excitement yesterday revolves around food. Again, I can't comment on breakfast (but not for long probably! This is my last midnight shift woo!), but lunch was one of my favorites! Fish tacos and kalua pork quesadillas. So delicious. They were accompanied by red beans and rice, refried beans, and jalepeno poppers, not to mention a dollop of yummy guacamole :)

Dinner last night was Thanksgiving in October! The cooks must be reading our minds, because McCall and I have lately been discussing the holidays during our Salty Stitching sessions, and commenting on how much we love Thanksgiving fare. It had everything. Roast turkey and gravy, mashed potatoes, stuffing, sweet potatoes (the variety with marshmallows on top), steamed veggies, cranberry sauce, and potato rolls. I took this as a Thanksgiving warm up, so in order to be prepared for the real holiday I had to practice going back for seconds on turkey, sweet potatoes and stuffing. No Thanksgiving meal would be complete without PUMPKIN PIE! McCall and I decided they were tiny slices so we just HAD to have two, plus Julia and Dayanthie didn't have a slice so SOMEONE had to eat theirs! So so good. I couldn't have been more excited about that meal! I'm seriously going to leave this ship overweight. McCall and I hope to get our butts on the rowing machine this afternoon.

Lots of excitement is about to ensue today. We should be recovering our first OBS in a little less than 8 hours. We should arrive on site around 5:00 am local time, upon which time we will communicate with the instrument and tell it to burn off it's anchor. It will rise through the water at a rate of about 40 m/min. This instrument is sitting at about 5994 m depth, so it will take approximately 2 - 2.5 hours to get to the surface. Then, we play the waiting and watching game, and once it is spotted, the captain will back up the boat toward the instrument, but not too fast as to run it over or let it get thrashed onto the side of the boat by the swells. The OBS techs will then use a hooked pole to get a handle on the instrument, and I'm not sure how we get it on board after that. I think a crane is involved. I'll have a better description tomorrow after I've witnessed this happen. It is going to be tricky, I'm glad I'm not the one in charge! Our jobs will be to take detailed notes about when and where everything happens, and get the poles out of the way of the people on deck once they are done with them.

So, it's going to be a long day for me. I guess it's good I got a huge meal last night! I'll get off at 2 am (Julia and I are working half shifts again), go back to bed until around 7 am and start helping with the recovery. Then I'm on shift again at noon to 4 pm, and since we are switching shifts I will also work 8 pm to midnight so the other two can take over their first midnight shift tonight. If all goes well, we should be doing about 3 recoveries every 24 hours, so we will be quite busy from here on out! Wish us luck today!

A close match

The good news is the weather has let up considerably! Yesterday swells were only ~15 ft. Still not ideal for recovery conditions, but much better than sustained 50 knot winds. I don't think we'll see those glassy calm seas again, and there seem to be depressions popping up everywhere (middle of typhoon season), but we'll hope for the best.

We are supposed to reach our first recovery location in about 30 hours or so! I don't know whether to be excited or nervous, a little bit of both I guess. It will be fun to finally be seeing some action on the cruise, but nerve racking hoping that all goes well for the sake of my thesis. This morning and tomorrow Julia and I are working half shifts. We were given the option to take a day off and alternate, but we decided since we're already in our schedules that working two hours in stead of four for two days would be just as rewarding. So, I may not have to work another full midnight to 4 am shift as we are shuffling to the 8-12 on Thursday (bearing in mind it is Tuesday here right now). The end is in sight!

McCall and I had an epic Quoits match yesterday against L-CHEAPO (the two OBS techs from Scripps). We sadly lost in a close match 21-20. I will have to give you a brief break down of the rules for you to understand how close this was. So one team member from each team throws three quoits (rings) per turn. Only one team can score at a time, one ring within a ring's diameter of the pole gets you 1 point, a ring leaning on the pole gets you 2 points, and a ringer over the pole gets you 3 points. So, if there are no ringers or leaners, who ever throws the ring closest to the pole gets a point (or if no one throws a ring within a ring of the pole, no one gets points). It was close the whole way through the match, changing who was in the lead. Finally it came down to 20-17, L-CHEAPO in the lead. Ernie and I were tossing for the potential game point. As Ernie threw his last ring, he was the closest to the poll and I had one shot left to get closer or else they would get the 1 point to make it 21. And I throw a ringer! Making it 20-20. So it came down to McCall and Mark for the game point, but Mark got it. So close!!

Lunch yesterday was heavy, beef lasagna and cheese ravioli with a pesto cream sauce, so I stuck with the chicken and lentil soup which was still delicious. Dinner was Cajun catfish and chicken with tomato and capers with some yummy roast vegetables and rice pilaf. They also made these cream cheese brownies, but the cream cheese was mixed in the batter so you couldn't see it. It made for a more subtle flavor and less intense chocolate taste. Yum.

Heavy Weather

I had the ride of my life last night on this ship. So, we hit bad weather. The ship is currently on lock down, you can't go outside unless you are accompanied by someone and are wearing slickers and flotation. I wish I could put a movie on here of what it looks like outside, the ocean is certainly angry. I can't tell if this is worse than the typhoon we hit last year, but I think this ship handles the waves much worse. I don't think I got more than an hour of sleep last night because I was being thrown around in my bed. The sounds of water crashing and spraying outside my room didn't help either. I've heard gail force winds, and numbers over 40-50 knots. Pretty crazy.

Absolutely everything in my room was thrown from where it sat. My chair toppled over at my desk, along with the phone (that was fun hearing it smash and ring against the ground). I had to get up several times to run and secure some things, like my nalgene bottle and a can of air freshener that had gotten loose and was annoying clacking around in the bathroom. The rest I left where it lay, I'll deal with the broken phone and things that were on my desk that became dislodged later. I figure why put them back if they're just going to go flying again!

I am just very thankful I don't get sea sick. People are dropping like flies, but I think the verdict from McCall is to take medicine and it helps tremendously. Luckily I have a stomach of steel (knock on wood). Also, the internet satellite was down for a little while, but thank god it is back up or this shift would have been very very long. I will hopefully get some sleep after this, as it seems that the sea has calmed down a little bit.

That's the big news around here! Otherwise, the Salty Stitchers lost another game of extreme Quoits. It was pretty crazy in this weather. The staging bay where we play opens up to the outside so I could see the waves toppling and the ship pitching up and down in the background as I was trying to throw some ringers! But we had the best lunch to accompany this weather, grilled cheese and tomato soup! Mmm! I had to go back for seconds on that one. And for dinner, scallops and short ribs. McCall, Don, and I all gave into the carrot cake last night. It was worth it.

The video debut of "I'm on a Boat" occurred last night. We gathered in the nice lounge area with the big flat screen and laughed our heads off! They did such a good job with it! I also wish I had good enough internet to post it, because it is hysterical. I guess you'll have to wait until I get back! There is a great gangster shot of Don though, he has this hood tough look on his face that I never hope to witness!

Well, keep your fingers crossed that we've seen the worst of it! It is so much less fun being out here when the weather is THAT bad. Earlier in the day it was still fun, but last night, that just sucks. Not being able to sleep because you can lay still is quite a bummer. Hope you all out there are having better weather than we are!

A bit of a ride

The good news is I don't think we are going to hit the tropical depression anymore! I believe it is supposed to have dissipated by the time we intercept it. But, the winds have picked up considerably (~20 knots or so), and the ship is feeling it. The waves really aren't that big (or so I can tell), but we are certainly going on a bit of a ride here. McCall describes it perfectly, like being on a mechanical bull. It's unpredictable and jerky. I was quickly reminded what it's like to be walking down the hallways slamming into the walls. We are also experiencing a bit of the cannon effect in the back, but apparently this isn't nearly as loud as it can get. It's pretty strange. The steep walls of the ship also make for perfect ramps for these waves, I got a bit of a spray on deck yesterday.

The Salty Stitchers have fallen in their first quoits match. We played my advisor's team, and his partner is totally carrying them. She scored three ringers which is good for three points each (we play to 21). I threw a ringer near the end, but it was too late. We lost 21-9. But it is fun! Our next match is today at 10:30 am. The waves sure throw an added twist into this game.

Otherwise, it's more of the same! Chugging along, but we have passed the half way point I think to get to our location. There was more filming of the music video yesterday, Julia and I got to yell some obscenities in the lab. We also had class yesterday, learning about how the ship can detect the sea floor beneath it using sound waves. It is hard to get my brain to snap out of its post-prelims coma.

Food yesterday continued to be spectacular! I missed out on blueberry pancakes for breakfast, but lunch was BBQ ribs (could smell them down the hall, so good!) with mac and cheese, green beans, and clam chowder. Dinner was another double protein night for me with beef (tenderloin?) with a béarnaise sauce and swordfish steaks, accompanied by baked potatoes and corn with roasted red peppers. I was able to resist the white chocolate macadamia nut cookies and the carrot cake, but both were staring at me this morning begging me to let them become my midnight breakfast. We'll see if I can continue to fend them off through the hours this morning...

20 lbs later...

Last night was the pizza feast. Known as Aloha Friday, some of the crew celebrates by donning their Hawaiian shirts. I'm also not sure if the pizza happens every Friday as well (like it was steak night every Sunday on the Revelle), but I hope for the sake of my waistline that it doesn't! Not only was it a pizza buffet (I indulged in a slice of veggie, pepperoni, AND Hawaiian), but it was also a brownie sundae bar! Complete with fresh brownies, fudge, shaved coconut, crushed oreos and M&Ms, cherries, and a freezer full of ice cream to top it off (oh yeah and gummie bears if you're weird like McCall). Needless to say, the food is still excellent. Good thing I slept through breakfast yesterday! I also caught one of the crew members on a rowing machine outside yesterday. I'm not sure if that is personal equipment, but I found out where it lives, and I might have to get in on that. It'd be nice to work out on deck!

My eyes were much better yesterday, still not up to snuff, but it didn't feel like I was dragging them over concrete every time I blinked anymore. They also weren't watering so bad. This morning they are still doing better, still a bit dry, but I think I'm on the mend. Like I said, I slept through breakfast yesterday to get a few more hours of shut eye and maybe that helped. I might have to start making that a regular thing.

Yesterday Julia and I watched Hot Fuzz during the last part of our shift, and that helped pass the time a whole lot. We might have to start making a movie in the morning a regular thing too. At least when we are transiting and the rest is boring. During our afternoon shift we got to take off for a little while to help with the filming of the "I'm on a Boat" music video. I put on my gangster face (and my flippie floppies) and let my Miami swagger flow. If you haven't seen this SNL skit, you must google it and check it out. Featuring T-Pain and Andy Sandberg. Everyone is having a lot of fun dancing around on deck, and one of the OBS techs is taking me completely by surprise. I pegged him to be the quiet type, but as soon as his sun glasses and skull cap come on, he's a straight up G.

The water has been so calm it's almost glassy. But I don't think it's going to be like this for long. Word on the street is we are headed for a tropical depression and they have been working to secure everything on deck. I guess it's better we run into weather now rather than when we are trying to pick up OBSes out of the ocean (not that there isn't any guarantee that that won't happen too). So we'll see how bad that's going to be. After hitting the typhoon with 40 knot winds and 30 foot swells last year, I'm not too scared. But, I don't know how this double hulled boat will handle big waves. Apparently you can hear them crashing into the space in the stern that separates the two hulls. Sounds like fun.

The Quoits tourny has officially begun! I think the first match was played last night, the Rayleigh Waves lost to L-CHEAPO. How do I know about this? The winners printed out a fake ESPN news brief about their victory and left it in the lab for us to enjoy. People are taking this pretty seriously! I practiced a little bit yesterday and it's pretty fun! Apparently my advisor has been practicing like there is no tomorrow and getting on his partner's case for not doing the same (go figure, he is a very competitive guy!). McCall seems to think that we can fall back on distraction if our beginners luck begins to fade, being two of the five ladies on board ;)

So keep your fingers crossed for us for not too terrible weather in the coming days!

No sight for sore eyes

Not too much has changed on board, still cruising along. We are gearing up for a Quoits tournament, think horseshoes on a ship. Rather we will be using rope rings wrapped in duct tape and some poles on board. McCall and I are the Salty Stitchers, and she has been talking enough smack for the both of us. Pretty confident for two people who have never played! But those who have played seem to be very excited about it. A good way to pass time I guess! I believe there are 10 teams. My advisor and the co-PI Dayanthie are the Rayleigh Waves, but some of the most creative names include the Lord of the Rings, the Pinja Posse, L-CHEAPO (it's a Scripps thing), and the Ring Worms...

As for me, I have been having some real trouble with my eyes the past couple days. Waking up for my midnight to four shift yesterday my eyes were so dry I could barely see. They continued to be red and sting and water the rest of the day. I'm not sure if it's an allergy or if my eyes are just super dry. They seem to be slightly better this morning, but still very dry. Unfortunately, I didn't bring any eye drops and the only other ones on board are antibiotic drops, so I am going to have to make due. Hopefully this gets better soon, not only is it very uncomfortable, but I am going to need my sight for Quoits! As thought my poor hand eye coordination is not enough of a handicap!

Also, I believe a music video is going to be filmed today. Think SNL's "I'm on a boat"...

So, right now I am living the only two hours of 10/21/2010 I will experience. At 2:00 am we are crossing the date line and it will become 10/22/2010. I'm not sure if I feel a little robbed, losing a day of my life. I feel more robbed in that this is going to make me work an extra hour during this horrid midnight to 4 am shift since we are turning the clocks.

Oh yeah, and a food update. Last night, dinner was fabulous! I had to make it a double protein night as we had snapper and grilled duck breast! Yum! The duck was so so good. There was also a decadent pie, rumored to be banana cheesecake, but I didn't indulge. And the cookie of the day was oatmeal raisin with white chocolate chips :)

Calm seas conducive to knitting

Not much new to report aboard the Kilo Moana. We have exceptionally calm seas and this ship is equipped with a double hull, which makes the ride even more smooth. The pitch and roll of the ship (how it moves) are slightly more unpredictable with this double hull geometry, but in general I think it adds stability.

We are still transiting to our recovery location and just collecting gravity, bathymetry, and magnetic data along the way. So, to kill some time, McCall has taught me how to knit! I may or may not be working on a scarf for someone special :) She is working on a blanket for her brother who will be getting married next month. The time we spend knitting together she has deemed Salty Crafts.

The rest of my time I spend reading murder mysteries either on deck or in my bed, which often leads to sleeping. I haven't quite got accustomed to these crazy 12-4 shifts yet, so it seems like every spare moment I find myself dozing off. But, soon enough we are going to resume our Marine Geophysics class on board, which means I have to do some science reading. I don't think my brain is prepared to get back into thinking again, seeing as I haven't done much of that in the past two weeks.

What else I haven't done much of and am starting to resume is working out. I found out sadly that the elliptical trainer doesn't seem to be working so the only cardio option is the stationary bike. This might get pretty boring pretty fast. But hopefully all the food on board will keep me motivated! Speaking of the food, last night we had calamari steaks (don't ask me how those work, they were actual breaded steaks of squid) and pasta with bolognese. This morning, french toast and several varieties of sausage (including pineapple), and for lunch, fried rice, shrimp tempura, chicken stir fry, and some pot stickers. Did I mention the gigantic cookies from heaven? Yeah, that stationary bike and me are going to become real good friends. I can't remember what is on the tall menu for dinner tonight, but I'm pretty sure it involves a pesto pasta bake...

Graveyard Shifts

Hello and welcome from the Pacific Ocean! We have been underway for less than 24 hours aboard the University of Hawaii vessel the Kilo Moana. You may or may not be able to track where we are at http://www.soest.hawaii.edu/UMC/KiloMoana.htm. Right now there is little excitement, calm seas and just transiting. We will be cruising for about 9 days before we reach our first recovery location.

For those of you who don't know why I am out here, this is a research cruise I am doing for my graduate studies. I just took my preliminary examinations a week and a half ago, so I can officially call myself a Ph.D. candidate! Hopefully the results from this cruise will turn into my dissertation. Last year I was on the first leg of this cruise. We ported out of Taiwan, transited for 8 days or so, sent 16 ocean bottom seismometers (OBSes) down ~6 km to the ocean floor where they have resided for the past 11 months, and sailed back into Guam. These seismometers measure ground motion from earthquakes all around the world.  I will be using this information to learn about the structure of the upper mantle (more precisely, the thickness of the lithosphere) in this region. That's probably enough of the science for most of you!

The ship we are on this year is slightly smaller than the one we were on last year (the R/V Roger Revelle). But the rooms are much nicer. There are TV screens in every room where you can look at channels that show our location, feed from the deck webcams, and they even broadcast movies from the lounge. Unfortunately there aren't nice chairs on deck like last year, but being on the open ocean is still fascinating.

Food wise, this ship is going to have big shoes to fill. I had two marvelous chefs on board last year, but so far so good! We had chicken fajitas for lunch yesterday and grilled Mahi and breaded pork chops with some mashed potatoes, green beans, and butternut squash for dinner. And in the fashion of last years cruise, there is no shortage of sweets. So far I've seen pecan pie and pinapple upside down cake for our desserts yesterday, not to mention a freezer FULL of Eddy's ice cream (I am in so much trouble), and a whole bunch of dry snacks (M&Ms, candy bars, oreos, Reese's cups...). I am going to have to make a lot of use of the exercise equipment with all these temptations. This ship has an elliptical trainer, stationary bike, and weight machine which I hope to hop on this afternoon.

So, right now it is 2:50 am local time. I have the unfortunate duty of working the 12-4 shift for watch (which means noon to 4 pm and midnight to 4 am). Basically, we work 4 hours on and 8 hours off, and work consists of checking some huge monitors to make sure the equipment is working and writing down our location every 15 minutes or so. How did I get stuck with this? Well, the options for the shifts are 12-4, 4-8, and 8-12 am and pm. Our authorities (my advisor and the co-primary investigator on this project) are splitting up the 4-8 (my advisor taking the am and Dayanthie taking the pm) which leaves me and Cristo (one of Dayanthie's students) as the only other people who have done this kind of thing before. So they wanted to make sure at least one person on watch had experience. I will be working the 12-4 for the first half of the cruise, and then Cristo and I will switch and I can take the slightly less terrible 8-12 (8 am to noon and 8 pm to midnight). Last year I worked the 4-8 and I like that much more. I still haven't quite figured out when I am going to sleep, seeing as breakfast and dinner are served in the middle of my off time (7:15-8:15 am and 5:00-6:00 pm respectively). I guess it will be lots of short periods of sleep for now.

But I can't complain too much. I just spent the last week vacationing in Hawaii (4 days on the big island and 3 on Oahu) which was a marvelous adventure with one of my friends/fellow graduate students McCall. Great geology, excellent food, and good company. What more can you ask for?