More Cores

We have been very busy. I expect it will slow down some, because (as
of yesterday) we have twelve days of transit time to Manila if we go
without stopping, so we can't keep coring at this pace and still get
home before Thanksgiving. I was out on deck almost right after my
shift started yesterday deploying the whole suite (multicore, gravity
core, and piston core) over about 8 hours. It was very hot, and when
we work on deck we have to wear life vests and hard hats, so we were
all sweating buckets. I think I drank 5 liters of water before dinner.
There are only a few core techs on board, so those of us in the
science party spend a lot of time helping to put the cores together.
We have to assemble the liners, cut them to the right length, label
them, rivet on the core cutter (the sharp thing on the end that slices
through the sediment) and the core catcher (interlocking fingers
inside the core tube that hold the mud in), bolt on the end cap with
all the weights, attach it to a crane and use guide ropes to keep it
level as it goes in the water. When it comes up we have to do all that
in reverse, then siphon the water off the top, cut it into 150 cm
sections, cap each section, and then ready the next core. The piston
core, which is 40' long, requires some extra work to get into it's
launcher, and lots of work to extrude it when it comes back up. So we
worked from 1pm until 10, pausing to wolf down dinner (chicken and
noodles, which I ate covered in soy sauce and salt to replenish some
electrolytes) around 5:30. Yesterday, after an equally long shift, I
went out on the fantail after we'd gotten underway and turned off all
the lights (the bridge likes it dark when we're moving) and after my
eyes adjusted saw a sky full of stars, with the milky way especially
bright, shooting stars, a distant thunderstorm, and bio-luminescent
algae in our wake, popping up like fireflies and swirling around in
the baffles before flying off astern. It was amazing. We stood out
there for about 45 minutes until the flood lights came on and the
midnight to noon shift had to get to work. That was probably a good
thing, because I could have stood there until the sun came up.

Posted by Chris

Cruising through the Bismarck Sea

We're cruising to our next site through the Bismarck Sea north of New
Guinea, and haven't dropped a core since 4 yesterday morning. The
night shift took care of that one, and we've had very little to do
since.

Today our A-Team (the midnight to noon watch, which apparently it is)
had an awesome, if not incredibly hectic and tiring, work shift! The
five of us (Jeremy, Kelly, Sam, Debs, Ryan and Greg) worked all
through the night sampling, recording, and sectioning all three of the
coring methods available to us on the ship.

The night started right as the multi-corer was being pulled from the
water. As soon as it hit the deck, the five of us were ready to go,
archiving the four longest cores, and sampling/slabbing the remaining
four, for a total of eight cores with good mud recovery! The process
of archiving and sampling all eight took about 3 hours, a bit slow
because the five of us are new to the multi-core device and its
methods.

After the multi-core, we had three more cores to work with – the
trigger core, which is a part of the piston core system, the gravity
core, and the piston core itself. All of the cores came back with a
good amount of mud, much like the multi-corer, with recovery lengths
of 4.1 m and 11.45 m for the gravity and piston cores, respectively.
Our team sectioned each of these into 150 cm sections, and now they
are prepped and ready for the multi sensor track! Overall, it was a
very productive night, leaving all of us happy, tired, muddy, and
ready for bed!

The subsequent noon to midnight shift (Chris, Clara, Clint, Angel,
Kim, and Yair, who are secure enough in their competence that they
don't feel the need to give themselves a self-congratulatory
nick-name) was very slow. There's some work in the lab, but we are
neither sweaty nor covered in mud. We did stop to take a CTD
(Conductivity, which gives you salinity, Temperature, Depth) around
7pm. We lowered a rosette (a large cylindrical frame) with instruments
to measure temperature, conductivity and depth and 24 niskin bottles
(spring-loaded bottles which are lowered open and triggered to close)
which can be closed at certain depths to capture water samples for
later chemistry analysis. The whole evolution has been a staple of
oceanographic research for decades, and it's how we know how
temperature and density change with depth in the ocean, and how we can
track water masses to map currents. In the plot to the left [update:
just kidding, the CTD log isn't on the ship's server yet. We'll post
one for you to see later. Sorry!] you can see the temperature profile
(red) of the water column with a mixed layer near the surface, where
wind and wave action mix the water and the temperature doesn't change.
The salinity (yellow) is lower at the surface because of frequent rain
here in the tropics. At about 80 meters water depth you can see a
sudden dramatic decrease in temperature. This is the thermocline, a
major density gradient in the ocean, and it corresponds to a salinity
maximum. This interval extends to about 450 meters. The salinity
minimum around 690 m is Antarctic Intermediate Water; we are along a
major passage north for AIW. Other than that it's been ping pong and
lab work. This afternoon we're going to start splitting the cores
(down the long axis) so we can describe them. It's hard to believe
we've only been at sea 4 days. With luck the sky will stay clear and
we'll get a good sunset. I woke up this morning and drank my first cup
of coffee forward with the whale watchers as we cruised along the
northern coast of New Guinea. It's a dramatic coast with tall green
mountains and palm trees along the beach. We're at one marine mammal
sighting, by the way. Gary saw some Spinner's Dolphins several miles
away from the ship this morning.

Posted by Chris and Jeremy

Bandwidth

To some of us old hands, having the Internet at sea is a mixed blessing.  Not long ago we had little more than phone patch conversations through a volunteer radio operator in Florida (with eavesdroppers spread far and wide listening in).  Email? Spam? Dunning notices about overdue proposal reviews? Hah. We could legitimately say most things had to wait until we got back to port; no longer.  The office and complexities of life track us to here and distract our full attention from the job at hand, but they also keep us in touch with things of the heart and mind that matter back home.

There are practical limits to just how much Internet access can be maintained.  I'm composing this note on my laptop before the start of my 12-hr watch (Yair and I divide the 24-hr job of management and planning).  When done I'll use a browser to connect and then begin a lengthy wait to upload text and images to blogspot.com.  Blogging is designed with today's broad-band (i.e. high-speed) land-based access in mind; it's not a nimble way to contribute from sea for the simple reason that we on the Revelle, like anyone in the UNOLS fleet, are using shared access on the HighSeasNet satellite system.  This is made possible by the Ntl. Science Foundation and while appreciated, it's like any new and useful highway construction -- as soon as the concrete sets and the painted lines are dry it's packed with traffic.  At the moment we are 1 of 5 ships in the Pacific sharing this link to the Internet, and there's lots of traffic.  The team back at Scripps, and Ben Cohen the IT specialist here on the Revelle, do what they can to make this link accessible to everyone on board, but there's only so much 'bandwidth' that can be divided among the many users.  While it brings simple and often much desired text to us and sends it ashore, transferring large files or linking to sites that expect numerous and instantaneous back+forth exchanges are frustratingly slow or impossible.

We've been experimenting with ways to streamline the process of posting to this blog so that others onboard who want to contribute don't have to face these long and tedious upload delays.  Within a day or 2 we hope to have it worked out, and you ought to start seeing a variety of posts about the life and times aboard Revelle cruise 1313.  --- Greg Mountain

Night Core

OSU Coring technicians, Chris and Paul, work late into the night preparing the first 40 ft piston core of the cruise.

---Angel Mojarro

All Aboard

We remained busy during the transit from Samoa to 

Papua New Guinea, preparing for the start of data 

acquisition.  Clear but windy skies kept us on schedule 

while completing tasks near the bottom of our 'must-do' 

lists.  Here you see the 2 GI airguns on the fantail, tied 

down and ready.  They will be towed in tandem, 2 meters 

below the sea surface, 25 m behind the ship to provide 

the acoustic source during our seismic surveys for IODP 

drill sites.

We arrived on time at Alotau, Papua New Guinea in 

the early hours of Sept 8.  Low clouds provided a dramatic 

cover to the lush mountainsides on both sides of the 

estuary.  We dropped anchor 300 m off the main dock 

of this small town and were soon greeted by the pilot 

boat bringing customs agents aboard for the requisite 

checking in.  Paperwork and passports passing back 

and forth kept the Captain busy with a full complement 

of PNG officials in the ship's library.  The pilot returned 

to shore and came back with a boatload of smiling faces.  

Luggage was handed up to Revelle's main deck and 

each joining member of cruise RR1313 then climbed 

aboard.  Seen here are Ch. Scientist Yair Rosenthal 

in front, with the remaining Science Party members behind.  

All are rested to various degrees after long journeys to 

this eastern tip of PNG.

We weighed anchor at 1pm and began a short echosounder 

survey along the center off the Alotau estuary.  An attractive 

coring target was identified, we circled back for an intersecting 

profile across it, called the bridge, and by 4pm we were raising 

our first seabed sample.  Seen here is the first such effort - a 

successful MultiCore containing 8 separate cores of the topmost 

sediment, each several 10's of cm long.  Next we recovered a 

15 ft gravity core, and that was followed by a 40 ft piston core 

that when recovered was lashed to the starboard rail at 2am 

the next morning. 

It's been a crash course for some of the newcomers in the handling of marine cores.  Despite the hour, the unfamiliar setting, and the long journeys to get here, the mood is satisfied fatigue and interest in what lays ahead.  After a CTD cast to measure properties of the water column, we're off to deeper water. ---- Greg Mountain

Setting Up

Three days until the rest of the science party comes aboard, and we're getting equipment ready.

A new computer-based controller was recently installed 

on Revelle to manage deploying and recovering the CTD 

(Conductivity-Temperature-Depth) instrument that 

measures in-situ seawater properties and brings 

samples of seawater back to the surface.   Crew members 

operate the controls and we've hove-to a few times for all 

to get familiar with this operation before we 'go live' a few 

days from now.  This picture shows the 'hand's off' 

over-the-side position of the CTD crane and the wire 

descending 1500 m into the abyss.

Hundreds of meters of sediment cores will be taken during 

the cruise and pre-labeling liners and assembling hardware 

that makes up the various types of coring devices we'll use 

has begun.  Here Angel Mojarro rivets a core cutter/catcher 

assembly on the bottom of a core liner, under the watchful 

eyes of Coring Techs Paul Walczak and Chris Holm.  Kim 

Baldwin's turn is next.

A string of hydrophones will be towed behind the ship to 

record subseafloor echoes during the seismic collection 

phase of the cruise.  Towing depth will be carefully maintained 

at 2 m below the sea surface by bright orange mechanical 'birds' 

attached to the hydrophones, and whose 'wings' can be controlled 

from the ship.  Here Seismic Techs Lee Ellett and Jay Turnbull are 

training Kim Baldwin in the workings of these devices and guiding

her pre-programming instructions for the birds to follow during the 

first seismic deployment not long from now.

Meanwhile, steady 20-25 knot SE Trade Winds push and roll us along towards our rendezvous off Alotau, Papua New Guinea.  ----- Greg Mountain

What a difference a day makes

We left Pago Pago, American Samoa under azure skies shortly after noon yesterday, heading towards our rendezvous with the rest of the Science Party at Alotau, Papua New Guinea.  The top two sections of our first piston core, ready for their arrival, were already assembled along the starboard rail.

Noticeably increased rolling and a few resounding thuds of seas against the hull woke some up during the night.  Breakfast arrived with pelting rain and white caps on running seas.  Outside work was replaced by chores set aside for days just like this.  And there's no end to those.  

Core description / sampling tables were arranged by Core Techs Paul Walczak and Chris Holm to accommodate the expected flow of sediment that will begin with core recovery, sectioning and labeling along the starboard rail.  Then into a lab on the port side for temperature equilibration followed by thru-liner measurements of sound velocity, magnetic susceptibility, resistivity and density using the multi-sensor track.  Angel Mojarro has been get this gear set up and calibrated.   Then the cores will go back aft to the splitting room for separation into Archive and Working halves.  The former will go immediately into a refrigerated van chained down on the fantail, the other forward into the main lab for photography, description and sampling.  More about the sampling by specialists in a later blog.  The cores will then be inserted into storage 'D-tubes' and placed alongside their Archive halves in the refrigerated van where they'll remain at 4°C until delivered to the Rutgers Core Repository sometime in the Fall.

In parallel, Seismic Techs Lee Ellett and Jay Turnbull worked today on the crucial synchronization of computer triggers, airgun control and satellite-guided navigation.  We'll be firing the airgun each time the ship has advanced 25 m along a pre-plotted track, meaning these systems must be in constant communication and not lose time by more than a millisecond while we are collecting data.  Computer communication between the lab and the bridge will be set up and tested in the next few days to ensure the helmsman is familiar with steering the ship within narrow tolerances to either side of that pre-plotted line.  

All of us are keeping Research Techs Matt Durham and Keith Shadle busy with questions of where can I find "X"? is there any "Y" on board?  who can help me do "Z" ?  Their jobs touch on an enormous range of activities that keep a research cruise functioning.

Rounding out the staff that will make our data gathering possible is Computer Tech Ben Cohen.  Today's rain may not be altering his place of work, but like every other day he's got a list of must-do items that is constantly interrupted by flare-up issues of one type or another from up on the bridge, to the main lab to items of importance down in the engine room.  Modern research ships are a buzzing hub of interconnected computer systems that very often make his a hectic job.  

Due to internet traffic on the HighSeasNet we've had long waits getting pictures sent along with the text of these blogs.  Tonight is no exception, but we'll try nonetheless.  Perhaps with a little experimentation we'll find a time of day that is better than others for uploads and will be able to include more visuals of what we're doing out here on the R/V Revelle.  ---- Greg Mountain