Hello! It is currently Sunday, March 10th, and we only have one week left of sampling! During the transit, it feels like the days are super long, but by the end of it, it feels like time has flown by.
We just got out of our first (and hopefully only) major storm. Swells were at ~14ft, and wind picked up to a whopping 45 knots (51 mph). During the storm, there was quite a bit of rolling and pitching, although it did not inhibit walking around. Our maximum roll was 16.8 degrees. While we could have potentially sampled through this, it was 1. not safe to be on deck, 2. a considerable amount of water was coming up from the main deck, and 3. it was not worth risking the ship rolling over the ctd during cast, which would have significantly damaged the boat. We have also officially sailed past Africa, currently at 42.48 degrees South, and hope to hit 52 by the end of our sampling. There is a chance he hit another storm, but will not know until late Monday or early Tuesday. On another non-logistical note, one of the traditions on the ship is called 'cup shrinking'. Apparently, if you take a styrofoam cup, attach it to the CTD, and send it to the bottom of the ocean, the styrofoam cups with harden and shrink to about an 1/4 of their original size! I got the chance to do this (shoutout to Anna of CFCs for helping me decorate my cups) and made four cups, I think they came out great! We also passed by some Pyrosomes two nights ago (March 8th)! Some were bioluminescent, although I was a little too late to see them. I've attached a pictures of a large one we saw below. Thanks for reading, and I will update everyone in a few days!
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Hellloooooooo everyone and happy Monday! First off, wow, I am bad at doing updates. But here I am, finally updating! It is currently day 33/52, so only ~20 more days until we hit land! While being onboard has been so so so fun, I am definitely looking forward to seeing my friends, family, land, and maybe some plants sometime soon. Although we have 20 days left, we only have about 14 more days of sampling stations due to 5-6 days of transit back to cape town. So we are in the home stretch! Currently, morale on the boat is a bit low because we are in the thick of it and weather has been making it hard to sleep, but by the end of the week everyone should be getting excited about Cape Town.
Some cool facts that I saw today (thanks to our awesome chief scientist Zach, we have currently): -Sampled 1,840 niskin bottles -Sampled 22,000 Liters of water (wow!) -Deployed 9 BGC Argo Floats , 1 Deep Argo float, 4 EM-Apex floats, and 8 drifters -Maximum rock that the boat has seen is 16.28° -Travelled 7,484 kilometers/ 4,041 nautical miles (which is almost twice the width of the continental U.S!!) Seeing those facts today was pretty astonishing. When on board, its easy to get lost in the hard routine and difficult weather, but by seeing how far you've come, you really realize how amazing the journey is. Onto boat related updates! This week, our altimeter on the CTD broke. An altimeter measures how close we are to the sea floor we are, which makes the ctd watchstander's job a lot more tricky. We now rely on the results of LADCP (Lowered Acoustic Doppler Current Profiler) and attempt to get about 80m away from the bottom. When I first got on the boat and there were technical issues I was thinking "oh god, how are we possibly going to keep going with xyz broken?" but thankfully, there are amazing engineers onboard, who are professionals in this stuff. Plus if they can't fix it, you kind of just have to keep on going. We just passed over the Angola Basin and are about to enter the Walvis Ridge. We're also about to hit our first major storm at about 35° S. We have currently stopped operations of the CTD until early tomorrow morning due to strong winds and (possibly) large swells. To put in perspective of how bad the boat is rocking, for some reason I thought it would be a good idea to go to the gym in this weather, and the boat was rocking so much it made a 45lb weight fly off a barbell. Thats when I said "nope, getting crushed by a 45 lb weight is not how I go" and left as soon as I could. I hope you enjoyed, and I (for real this time) will be sure to update everyone once were out of the storm. Bye for now! Hello again! I have not updated in quite a bit due to the crazy schedule we have all been having on board, so I thought I would update before our next cast. This past week has been very very hectic, to say the least. But, very fun and educational!
First, I am now helping with HPLC and POC sampling for WHOI! We do these samples whenever we deploy an argo float, which I had the opportunity to deploy last week! It was pretty awesome to experience. On another note, we have passed the equator! Not many sailors get to pass the equator on board, so I'm very grateful I got to experience that :). Casts have been very hectic, and trying to find times to sleep was getting a bit hard at some point. Nevertheless, I was able to get sleep while doing all my casts (and, thankfully, not sleeping through them). Because we passed 3 degrees south, the time in between casts is now about 7-8 hours instead of 3-4. So now being able to get everything I need to get done, sleep, and eat is a lot more doable. In other news not relating to the cruise, I have submitted most of my REU and internship applications for this summer! Again, it was difficult to do this while doing all my duties on board, but somehow, I got it done. Happy late Valentine's Day to anyone reading this! I hope to update the rest of these pages sometime in the next week or two, so stay tuned! That's all for now! It's currently Feb 9th at 3:07 am and we've just completed our first cast! Surprisingly, it went very smoothly! Only hiccups were niskin 4 (one of the things that collects water) misfired, and around niskin 13ish my tubing slipped and I got a face full of water. But besides that it went great. Currently we are on our way to the next station, but are currently stopped because the Ghana government needs to grant us access into their waters. This next station should be a lot easier because I am only taking surface samples (2 vials) instead of a full water profile (~26 vials). I will update in the next few days!
Hello! It is currently 13:12, on Feb 8th. These past few days have been getting more and more busy, but not as busy as when casts come. Speaking of casts, we have out first cast today at 22:00!! It's very exciting, but I feel as though this is a "calm before the storm" situation, meaning its great now but when we stat doing casts it will get chaotic, but I could be wrong. I finally set up my whole station, so I'm ready to start taking samples! Two days ago, on the 6th, a group of scientists and I were able to participate in a "Adopt-A-Float" project, where high schools adopt an ARGO float, we decorate and deploy it, and they get to track and to projects with the data. An Argo float is a remote sensing tool that measures temperature and salinity profiles. These floats drift with the ocean currents and move up and down between the surface and a mid-water level. With these, we can observe BGC processes as well as Carbon Flux. But anyways, we got to decorate them with the schools logo, mascot, and whatever additional things they wanted on it. I got the Sea Pixel, inspired by Sea Pickles. I will update everyone on how the first cast goes, but thats all for now!
Hello! This will be a forum where I actively update everyone on the cruise. Unfortunately, this first blog post will be somewhat boring seen as we are in transit to our station location. During my time in transit, most of the crew (and myself) are taking this time to adjust to the new lifestyle of being at sea. Since some people work the day and others at night, people are up during all hours of the night. For my position, I am both day and night, which means I sleep 4-6 hours during the night, and try to take small naps in the day. Other than that, these past few days I've been working on some classwork, working on applications to summer projects, and making myself very familiar with the movies on board (there are so many). We also had a practice cast today, which means everyone got to practice deploying the CTD, taking water samples from it, and analyzing them. Thats all for today, stay tuned for when we start taking samples!
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