When he wrote these messages, Dan was on a tour of duty aboard the Revelle, currently near New Zealand. Previously he was on the Melville.
January 7, Lyttleton, New Zealand This is the fourth and last letter from the Revelle for this cruise. Tomorrow Alberto, a Spanish oceanographer doing a postdoc at the University of Hawaii, and I set out with a rental car to tour the South Island. Our first stop will be near Mt. Cook, the highest mountain in New Zealand. We are headed down to the fjord country and the Milford Sound to the southwest. A long mountain range makes the South Island impassable east to west for long stretches. Thus, instead of making a loop we will double back. We are certain the scenery will make it worthwhile. We will then make our way up the rainy west coast to the north. At about any point above the half-way line we can cross and head to Christchurch, our schedule is flexible. Alberto wants to see more than I do, I want to hike more than he does, but it should work out well. The weather is quite curious. We've had clouds and cool weather the last three days (it's their July), although there are still drought conditions east of the mountains here. To the west there has been a rain, but for some reason the water hasn't made it over the mountains normally. Last night I stayed in a backpackers' hotel: $9US, soft but comfortable bed, very clean and quiet, pleasant conversation. If that is any indication, the trip is going to go well. New Zealand seems to be full of simple places in the country were you can hike, fish, and rest. Most are delighted with what they've experienced here. Recently I was privilege to a most remarkable sight: a milkman. And when did I see him? At 8pm on a Sunday evening. What have I been telling you, it's a wonderful country...if you aren't a milkman. The cruise finished smoothly. Towards the end we sat on station much of the time. That was fine because we could head into the swells and ride smoothly for the most part. The science went well, due largely to the calm seas. The icebergs were few in number and modest in size. They were also absolutely amazing, and I'll never forget the sight. We first saw tiny pieces of ice the size of coffee cans, then the size of bath tubs, then freight cars. All this with visibility of less than a mile. The ship located the icebergs with radar and steered around them, which left us safe but frustrated. Slowly the ice grew in size but became no more visible until the fog lifted and we no longer had the luxury of keeping them five miles off the beam. And there they were--not huge, not grandiose, but each much larger than the ship and so unique I was hard put to type them, although someone said they have indeed been typed. The classic we saw under full sun from about a mile away. It was shaped like this: | | | You'll have to connect the upper points. | | ----------------------------- It was roughly circular and had sheer faces well over a hundred feet on the low side and over two hundred on the higher. It glowed. All faces were so sheer and so high, it would have been impossible to reach the deadly water safely from above. Other icebergs were shaped like ships or pillars on a broader base. One iceberg had an enormous streak of green ice tilted up at about 60 degrees. At the icepack, where we could go no farther, we saw a huge one in the distance--a monster, but sadly out of distance. And that was it. But now I'm hooked, and I want to see more. I had thought I was getting away with something by not pulling these intense cruises, bu it turned out they are much better and more interesting than I had thought. Too bad. Helen Quinby, one of the scientists on board, thoughtfully explained our project, the Joint Global Ocean Flux Study (JGOFS). The purpose of JGOFS is to note the mechanisms and rates by which oceans take up atmospheric CO2. The Flux in the title refers to the carbon cycle of phytoplankton and CO2. Phytoplankton (plants) fix carbon by taking CO2 out of the atmosphere and converting it to carbon through photosynthesis, just as forests do. If the productivity rate is slow, phytoplankton is broken down in the euphotic zone (the zone of photosynthesis), it decomposes through bacterial action or is consumed there. The organic carbon is used up in the respiration of both plant and animal. Thus the cycle is complete, and no CO2 is absorbed from the air into the water as everything taken has been returned to the water. In productive waters, however, the phytoplankton (plants) grow too abundantly for grazing animals to consume them or for the surface bacteria to decompose them all. Thus they sink to the depths of the ocean locking up carbon for thousands of years. Slowly the carbon will disolve back into the water and return to the surface as disolved organic carbon and CO2. In the meantime, the water at the surface has lost CO2 and replaces it by taking more from the atmosphere. This is the cycle they are studying. Much of the study dealt with limits to the growth of phytoplankton. Incubation studies tried to show the extent to which the grazing of zooplankton was limited phytoplankton production. The silica content of the water was recorded as diatoms build a shell of silica, and the silica can be a limiting factor. Other studies measured the levels of iron, oxygen, CO2, ammonia and nitrogen in the water, as well as temperature and salinity. JGOFS scientists have studied several key areas: the Arab Sea, where twice yearly monsoons well bottom water to the surface enriching the warm water; the equatorial Pacific in the area of the El Nino currents; and the fertile waters of the North Atlantic near Ireland. Now they focus on the rich water of the Southern Ocean at the polar front, where currents meet above the polar ice belt. Helen told me about the beautiful "polyna." These are brilliant blue patches of open water in the ice pack. Currents, winds and increasing light melt patches of ocean ice and warm the surface water slightly. A rise from -2C to +2C plus along with extra light makes an enormous difference in productivity. Surprisingly, life is abundant in the ice. In freezing, sea water crystalizes fresh water on top of increasingly saline water below. Eventually brine channels form below, and they are full of life in the dead of winter. With the spring thraw this life is released and is instantly productive. That's it for now. I'm off to tour New Zealand. You will be able to reach me at jacobson@sdsioa.ucsd.edu from January 20. I look forward to closer contact. Cheers, Dan
Hello to all,
December 17, 8pm CST, December 18 5pm local time; position 63:05S,
169:53W; air and water temperatures both at 32F. Just three days
short of the summer solstice, we find ourselves in a blizzard driven
by 30mph winds. There is great potential here for attracting
midwestern tourists looking for home in faraway places.
I promised you tales of ice in the polar region, but I'm going to put
it off until the next letter in order to honor special requests. A
lot of you have been asking me for clap stories, I don't know why. So
OK, but just one.
The captain, a Scripps retiree who fills in on occasion, was a
quartermaster in the Navy. On one assignment he received the venereal
disease report for the Armed Forces. It would look like this:
Gonorrhea Syphilis
Army 11 0
Air Force 8 1
Navy 593 12
He said the Philippines were the worst, but you clap aficianados know
that. If a sailor got gonorrhea five times in one year, they'd
restrict him to shore duty. (I'm sorry, him or her.) Good Lord, I
asked, who would get it five times in one year? Oh, they had their
offenders. One sailor kept getting it so often they restricted him to
ship while in port. But he kept bugging them: Just one quick drink at
the bar on the pier. C'mon, please, one beer. Finally they shuttled
him in, and he ran over and back while the launch waited. Three days
later he had the clap.
Let's see, that brings us to Kevin. He has thoughtfully sent you the
URL for the Duke web site:
www.env.duke.edu/marinelab/marine.html
Perhaps he passed on the URL of the Antarctic program. There the
Chief Scientist, Richard Barber of Duke, answers questions from school
children while at sea. You will also find reports of other projects
there. Just below is his latest report from the Revelle.
NASA maintains a web site with satellite images of the ocean. Do a
search on SeaWIFS and get one of the chlorophyll map. We've one here
which shows concentrations southeast of New Zealand at 62S 170W.
-------------------
R/V Roger Revelle, Weekly Scientific Report, 17 December 1997: Revelle
Process 1 cruise has completed 6 stations and is now on Sta. 7 at
about 64'09"S and 169'30"W. This station is within a few miles of the
pack ice edge. It has been foggy, so we haven't seen the solid ice;
but Capt. Arsenault said that when the fog lifted for a few minutes
those on the bridge could see a white line a few miles off. We passed
about a dozen big icebergs and lots of small chunks of ice as we
approached the ice edge.
SST at Sta. 7 is -1.0C but down 40 m it is -1.74C. There is a
particle and fluorescence maximum at the top of the subducting cold
water. Current is strong, about 1.1 knots, but varying in direction.
The bottom of a layer of -1.7C water is around 190 m; a few meters
deeper the temp increases to +1.7C. There is lots of structure in the
upper 200 m in all the properties, very unlike the deep mixed layer
Survey 1 observed south of the front.
All the Process 1 programs are progressing very well. The seas have
remained moderate, never more than 12 ft., usually 8 ft. and
occasionally 6 ft. We have lost no time to weather so far. Yesterday
the barometer fell from 1013 to 986 mb in 8 hr, but the seas didn't
exceed 12 ft. The sea ice seems to dampen the swell.
The trace metal group, Measures and Elliot, reported steadily
decreasing surface Fe concentration as the ship worked south. The
values at the ice edge are from 0.12 to 0.14 nM Fe. Biomass of
phytoplankton and zooplankton has varied widely with euphotic zone
chlorophyll concentrations from 0.15 to 2.15 mg m-3. Productivity has
varied from a modest 600 mgC m-2 d-1 to a high of 3220. It's hard to
believe there is light, nutrient or micronutrient limitation on the
basis of the high values.
We have several excellent microscopes aboard. The micrograzing group
(Selph, Albert and Allen) can display the material on their microscope
slides on a video screen for all to view simultaneously. The water at
the high biomass location is loaded with big diatoms.
Nutrients are, of course, extremely high. At this ice edge station
the nutrient folks (Krogslund, Guffy and Codispoti) find about 45 uM
Si and 20 uM nitrate. The particle-optical profiling system (POPS) is
getting a thorough workout by Walsh, Searson and Gunderson. The
complex particle layering in the subducting layers will give them
material to work on for a long time to come.
If the fog lifts we plan to reconnoiter along the ice edge, but if
not, we'll turn north and fill in stations around Mooring #4. For now
it looks as though 64'09"S may be as far south as Revelle Process 1 is
going. All is going very well; we will probably make at least 10 long
stations along the section. (Dick Barber, Chief Scientist)
-------------------
You are pretty much on your own with that one. Still, I'm moved to
find out why the nutrients are,"of course," extremely high at the ice
edge. The reason for that shouldn't be lost in the hinterlands of
chemistry. Bear in mind, now, I ask questions and report what I think
they have told me.
So I go to Lou Codispoti of Old Dominion U. (who first asks what an
'inuendo' is. An Italian suppository.) Silicates, nitrates and
phosphates, the major nutriants, are formed in the deep by bacterial
action of the sort found in sewage plants--a chemical breakdown of the
organic material produced by surface life which rains down from above.
Upwellings then bring the nutriants to the surface. The main reason
equatorial waters are low in nutriants is because the abundant light
enables plants to grow rampantly and consume everything. But southern
waters at the ice edge are dark, so plants don't grow to the extent of
eating themselves out of house and home.
Are there limitations to plant growth other than darkness? What about
the cold? That's not a major factor, says Kathy Krogslund of the
University of Washington, another source. Plants here have adapted to
the environment and are extremely prolific. (Polar waters have great
numbers of fewer species, whereas equatorial waters have lower numbers
of many species.)
Apart from darknes, what are other limiting factors? It turns out
plants also need iron, albeit in limited quantities. So they measure
the iron content of the water here and find it low..."of course."
That's because iron is lost from the water quickly--in about a hundred
years, says Lou, versus thouands for other trace metals--and is
introduced slowly. Mostly it enters sea water as dust borne by winds.
Much comes from the deserts of the Sahara and China; the Australian
and South American deserts are old, with little surface iron
remaining, so they are unimportant souces of iron. I'm told
researchers have introduced iron to the water experimentally to see if
plants would grow better, and found they would.
The "big" diatoms mentioned in the report are still microscopic. They
have a silica shell, which I accept at face value until it dawns on me
diatoms are phytoplankton, plants not animals. Do plants have silica
shells? Back I go to Kathy and learn what a diatom is: a
phytoplankton with a silica shell, one of two major kinds of algae.
She says silica is the stable form, silicate the ionic form.
I've become interested in The Great C02 Deficit. It seems scientists
know the the amount of carbon dioxide added to, present in, and taken
from the atmosphere, and they are puzzled why the three don't add up:
the atmosphere is missing CO2. Perhaps the oceans are absorbing some
of it. As phytoplankton absorbs CO2 from the water, the water absorbs
more from the air. I ask if there is more phytoplankton than they
realize, but they believe their figures are sound. Stay tuned on that
one.
Did I mention that the oceans produce more oxygen than the vegetation
on land? By far more, so they say. I was doubtful, particularly as
we hear of the importance of the Brazilian rain forests, but a couple
of scientists assured me that was the case. Another said it was about
the same. Still, a couple more said they had never heard of such a
thing. Also, it occurs to me, for all the phytoplankton producing
oxygen, there are all those zooplankton and other creatures absoring
it. Surely one acre of forest produces more oxygen than many square
miles of ocean. At this they fall back on the oceans-are-so-big
argument. It reminds me of the old joke of how you can make money
selling at a loss if the volume is high enough. Better hold off on
believing that one.
[Later] Chris Measures, University of Hawaii, has, in his patient,
methodical, and entertaining manner, kindly introduced me to the
complexity of the problem. When you broach the subject of of CO2, the
first thing he asks is whether you mean the cyclical or the total
amount. The amount of oxygen and CO2 that enter and leave the
atmosphere varies from year to year--and during the year-- but the
total amount in existance remains the same.
A tree takes in CO2, fixes carbon, and produces oxygen while growing;
it produces minimal amounts of oxygen when mature; and when it dies
and begins to decompose (oxydize), the process is reversed: the tree
absorbs oxygen and produces CO2. Grasslands produce oxygen and fix
carbon during the growing season; they take back the oxygen and return
the CO2 at the end of the growing season as the grass decomposes. A
small amount of carbon is retained in humus which decomposes much
later, but at the same time older humus is also consuming oxygen in
decomposing now--net balance zero.
If we view CO2 production as bad, a tree is good in the short run, not
so good later, and inconsequential in the long term--its net balance
is zero. It "fixes" carbon by taking CO2 out of the atmosphere and
locking it in its cells, then dies and gives it back. It seems a tree
engages in photosynthesis and its opposite, respiration, which in
laymen's terms is equivalent to oxydation. We eat the products of
photosynthesis, whether directly as vegetables or indirectly as steak;
a tree produces its own food by photosynthesis, then uses it in
respiring.
Our deposits of oil and coal were started at a time when there was
more CO2 in the atmosphere than now. Carbon was fixed, held in the
fuel where it would be to this day if we weren't burning it and
releasing the CO2 again. In geological time, however, the each
deposit beneath the earth and ocean would be raised to the surface and
the carbon dioxide released again.
The CO2 in the atmosphere has gone from 280PPMV (parts per million by
volume) to 360PPMV since the beginning of the Industrial Age. Wait,
that's still less that 1 part per 1000. Yes, says Chris, the small
total amount of CO2 plays a big role. There are other greenhouse
gases, too, such as methane, from ruminants and rice paddies, and
water vapor. By the way, oxygen makes up 21% of the atmosphere and
most of the rest is nitrogen.
Chris says 95% of the world's CO2 is in the ocean, only 5% is in the
atmosphere. Perhaps more is going into the ocean--and they are
measuring CO2 levels on this cruise--but ocean waters only absorb more
as the CO2 in it is depleted, so it is unlikely it will absorb much
more CO2 (although with an appetite like that, I wonder). More CO2
might be taken up on land by additional humus or faster tree growth.
I ask if we should cut all the old growth and build houses. That
would enable newer, growing forest to fix carbon while the wood
harvested would be preserved without rotting. In the short term, yes,
he says, but it's no solution. He's not a fatalist, he warns against
the unrestrained introduction of CO2 into the atmosphere and points
out that there are many stable systems. Ice ages are stable systems
that go on for thousands of years before the balance tips towards
another stable system. The world has seen long, stable periods of ice
and others of high levels of carbon dioxide. As such, he finds the
concept of a "gaiya" (sp?) always keeping the world in balance without
merit.
Oscillation is possible. CO2 produces a greenhouse effect which
raises the temperature and melts the ice bringing ocean levels up.
That results in more clouds which block the sun; temperatures go down,
locking more water in polar ice and diminishing water levels. The
lower temperature bring less water into the air, and the clouds
diminish allowing more sunlight in to warm the earth. Up go the
temperatures...
Chris also says scientists poorly understand the processes, what
affects them, and the direction they are moving. They create models,
many of which disagree with the others. But this only underscores the
importance of the problem; it's not an excuse to throw up your hands
and say no one knows what they are talking about, which is pretty much
the position of the fossil fuel and auto industries would have us
take. SimOcean (like SimCity) gives you a sense of the processes. It
is interesting just for the categories alone. For instance, the deep
ocean plays an important role as a reservoir of fixed carbon.
He suggests a book he hasn't seen: Wally Broker, How to Build a
Habitable Planet. Fred MacKenzie, a colleague of his at the
University of Hawaii, has also written on the subject.
Cool stuff, science, but some of the scientific party are suffering
from stress and boredom. For long hours they do same thing over and
over. I skim the top with my questions, but they work at a low level,
performing the same procedure repeatedly day after day. Still Dennis
Guffy of Texas A&M has been on over a hundred cruises, and he loves
it.
Cool, too, are the birds. Get to your birdbooks and start reading up
on the Arctic birds. They are remarkable fliers whatever their size.
Flitting about are tiny Storm Petrals, swallow-like birds weighing but
one or two ounces, almost lost against the ocean surace. Next in size
are the swallow-like Antarctic Petrals. They fly low to the surface
skimming and straining like baleen whales.
Today we saw a white Giant Petral; ten percent of them are white with
some Dalmation spotting while the rest are dark. We've been seeing
lots of Black-browed Albatrosses, large and lovely fliers with
wingspans over seven feet. They have a white head and body and black
wings and tail. They get their name from a dark stripe that runs up
and back from their eyes. But the Giant Petrals are much larger, and
the Wandering Albatross is the largest we've seen--eleven feet across.
When they cruise past the bridge you are really seeing something. It
is second in size only to the Andean Condor. They might fly over 500
miles in a singe day of foraging. I saw a couple Southern Fulmars,
one of the most elegant of birds, absolutely gorgeous.
The long, narrow wings of the large birds like the albatross are
designed for gliding, not flapping. Even smaller birds like the Storm
Petral can hardly take off if there isn't wind. Should they hit a
ship and fall on deck, they are helpless until someone throws them up
in the air. I saw a Giant Petral lift off by simply unfurling its
wings against the wind.
A favorite is the Cape Petral, also called the Cape Pigeon, a cousin
of the Arctic Petral we also see. It is the size of a pigeon with
black wings accented by white splotches. They have a stiff-winged,
fluttering motion rather like a bat. Three were sitting together
right outside the porthole this afternoon.
The captain thought we would see more and larger birds farther south,
but many deserted us at the polar front I mentioned last time. Also,
it's the breeding season, and many are off at the rookeries. Some of
the albatrosses put to sea for seven or more years before they begin
to breed. I image those who fly with the ship find us welcome
diversion in this endless ocean.
In this region everyone everywhere lives to the north, and you don't
have to watch your back. So at 3PM CST on Tuesday, December 17, as we
were at 64:44S and 169:20W and about to turn back north, I reached for
cousin Marie Ann Queensland's Christmas package in full confidence I
was about to enjoy the southernmost kringla in the world. I also had
one of Margaret Robinson's treats, surely the most southerly
penetration ever of a Sioux Falls caramel.
The days pass. On a boat you run into the same people over and over.
In the course of a day greetings go from a cheery "good morning" to
mute tics and twitches. But we are in good spirits. In keeping with
the holiday season, someone has organized a Christmas cribbage
tournament.
I look forward to vacation in New Zealand, but I would most like to
come back out on the next cruise in order to see more of the ice. I
thought I was getting away with something by missing these cruises.
It turns out they are my favorite.
9pm CST, position 62S 170W, air 35F, water 33F, wind speed 22Kts. I
haven't seen night for several days. We are sitting on station while
the scientific party run their tests.
I wish you all well.
Dan
Greetings,
This is the Chief Scientists first weekly report on the cruise. I'll
add some comments below.
Dan
--------------------------------------------------
Ship News
R/V Roger Revelle, Weekly Scientific Report, JGOFS Process 1, December 9,
1997: The Process 1 cruise of R/V Roger Revelle has been at sea for one
week. Three stations have been completed; the weather has been
exceptionally good. Wind has come up a few times to about 20/25 knots.
When the wind blows and it rains it is very cold on deck. Hard to believe
it's late spring. The wind has also died twice and when that happens the
Southern Ocean calms down very fast. Mike Grogan commented that he'd never
seen the equatorial Pacific as calm as it was last night at 57ƒS.
R/V Roger Revelle is a great platform for oceanography. She is
exceptionally stable in the moderate seas we've been having. The
temperatures inside the labs and staterooms are comfortable.
Vibration and noise are as low as any ship I've worked on.
The fantail is covered with seawater cooled incubators. We have five
different incubator designs, one each for Si, N and C uptake, plus one
each for micrograzing and macrograzing. The ship's seawater lines
were re-plumbed during the last port call to give the incubators more
flow. That work has been successful. So far the incubators have been
a maximum 0.7 deg over ambient and during most of the day there is no
increase. Of course, we haven't reached the really cold water yet.
Surface water temp was 7.5 deg at Sta. 1, 5.5 at Sta. 2 and 5.2 at
Sta. 3.
Sailing from Lyttelton was delayed from Nov. 30 to Dec. 2 to await
arrival of the new Trace Metal Clean Rosette (TMCR) that was
fabricated in record time by Craig Hunter at Moss Landing Marine Labs.
The shipping from Moss Landing to Lyttelton was letter perfect. ASA's
tracking system knew exactly where it was at all times. It arrived
exactly as advertised at 0300 on Dec. 2. Mark Cook and Jonathan
Borden assembled it; Craig Hunter's hand drawn plans were complete,
accurate and helpful.
Because of the delay the ship's labs were well set up, so the usual
frantic last minute activity was missing. On Dec. 4 test deployments
of the CTD, thorium pumps, TMCR, bongo nets and live tow nets were
carried out.
Dec. 5 at 0630 we arrived at Sta. 1, about 57S, 174W. The thorium
pumping and shallow CTD cast went well, but the meter wheel for the
TMCR did not read wire out or rate correctly. The camera on the
Particle Optical Profiling System (POPS) also failed, so Sta. 1 did
not get off to a good start. For the midnight TMCR productivity cast
we marked the cable with colored tape at measured intervals down to
150 m, and the double cast to collect water for biological rate
measurements was successful.
People rushing the TMCR to fill their bottles are a weird sight, but a
common one on JGOFS cruises. Come to think of it, the same happens
when the CTD rosette lands, but it is a slightly different group of
individuals. When CTD and TMC rosettes are landed back to back, 80% of
the scientific team are in the hangar collecting water. Everyone is
polite and O2 always goes first (or else Lou Codispoti would offer a
mild word of admonition), but if you hesitate to check your work
sheet, folks always slip in and get their water ahead of you. It is
civilized competition at its best.
Sta. 1 went pretty well. It was cold on deck and landing the CTD and
TMC rosettes required eight people. Gene Pillard, the Scripps
resident technician, worked out an effective procedure for getting the
rosettes out of the hangar and over the side. Gene and Mike Grogan
run the deck operations under tight control. Everyone has to follow
orders and work together. When that is done, the rosette deployments
are smooth and safe. The deployments take considerable time and tie
up a relatively large group of people. The two-rosette JGOFS plan is
necessary for our mission, but UNOLS ships, even the biggest and
newest, aren't configured for this kind of science. The CTD rosette
has about an inch of clearance through the hangar door.
At the very end of Sta. 1 our deep CTD cast fouled AESOPS Mooring #1
and broke the mooring line. Three sediment traps and one current
meter surfaced right by Revelle. Gene Pillard, with help from Mike
Grogan, Jonathan Borden, Ian Walsh, Jan Gunderson, First Mate Wes Hill
and Boson Ellis Bourbonnais, quickly and smoothly picked up the trap,
floats and current meter. The cause of this very unfortunate incident
was a communications misunderstanding that resulted in the ship being
exactly over the mooring when the deep cast began. The sediment traps
had very nice samples and Ian Walsh has processed the samples
according to instructions from Hedges, Peterson and Honjo.
Sta. 2 at 57S and 170W began at 1000 on Dec. 7 and lasted until 0400
on Dec. 9. At this station some complications developed with the
winches, but a full complement of work was carried out. The thorium
work of Allen Freer and Peter Landry went smoothly. They can always
be counted on to be on schedule and get their samples. Juanita
Urban-Rich and Jay Peterson carried out a diel Bongo study with
sampling every 4 hr as well as their regularly scheduled midnight and
noon grazing experiments. They earned the respect of everyone for
their toughness and endurance. Everyone's performance at Sta. 2 was
excellent.
The weather got a little worse. It was cold and an occasional wave
broke over the rail. Laura Fandino was in the tritium van when one
broke over the van, but fortunately there weren't many like that. It
appears that everyone got the water samples they needed. In fact, it
is apparent that the TMCR and CTD rosette can collect water much
faster than we can process it. Many of the rate measurements are 24
hr long and some are 48 hr. After a brief period of water collecting,
the pace of over-the-side work slows and sometimes stops.
At Sta. 2, POPS made a day/night series of optical and particle
measurements. The shallow, intermediate and deep CTD casts provided
lots of water for the nutrient, CO2, trace metal, DOC, POC and
chlorophyll folks.
The main Markey hydrographic winch failed, but Gene and Jonathan
switched over to the spare Markey in an hour and a half. The TMCR
meter wheel worked, but the aft SeaMac winch lost its wire out and
rate readouts. Right now, we're using the aft Markey and TMC winches
and working on the others.
After leaving Sta. 2 at 0400 on 9 Dec we made a CTD cast and POPS
lowering at 58"30'S. Both operations went smoothly. The SW
temperature at Sta. 3 was about 5.25 deg. The PALMER people say those
temps seem like the tropics; they've had -1.7 for the entire
cruise.
The scientific party is meeting tonight to review the schedule for the
remaining stations. We know the weather won't remain as good as it
has been so far. Tim Cowles lost 10% of the Survey 1 time to weather
too rough to do any work. We are expecting some rotten weather, but
how much is anybody's guess. Capt. Arsenault is running Revelle at
14 knots to make up some of the time we lost waiting for the new
rosette. It appears that we'll be able to get to 66S and concentrate
3 or 4 long stations in the frontal region.
The crew has supported the scientific work with enthusiasm and vigor.
The Chief Engineer has been constantly busy working on the winches and
some other electrical problems. Scott Hiller, a Scripps technician,
has performed several miracles. He and Lisa Borden, Duke University
technician, got the TMCR readout fixed and Lisa has spent a couple of
days on the POPS camera. The first week has had its ups and downs, but
the work is going well now. When the weather changes, we know it will
get much harder to get our work done, but we've gotten a good start.
The data are rolling in. (Dick Barber/Duke)
--------------------------------------
OK, so, what was that all about? It's my first time supporting
studies like these, so I'm rather ignorant. But I'll offer a couple
of insights now and more later when I've talked to the scientists
further. One problem is there are many studies going on at once, and
it would take a lot of time get every explanation and write it up
meaningfully--assuming I understood it myself. But first:
Bad science alert!!! I'm just repeating what I think
I've been told.
One of the main tasks of the cruise is to take water samples at
various depths, some within a few meters of the bottom in four or five
thousand meters of water.
For this they drop a CTD, a device measuring conductivity,
temperature, depth according to its acronym. But that turns out to be
a relic, it really measures conductivity (from which is derived
salinity), temperature and pressure (converted to depth).
The larger of two CTDs also has a transmissometer to measure
chlorophyl floresence which affords a measure of particulate matter in
the water. And it is encircled by a ring--the "rosette" mentioned
above--of 24 bottles which can be filled with water on demand at
desired depths. They winch the CTD down to the bottom--without
hitting it, Heaven forbid!--where the operators "fire off" the first
bottles and then work their way up collecting water at preassigned
depths.
I pictured bottles being sent down to 4000-5000 meters--imagine the
pressure--where they were "fired off" to admit water. How would you
do it? What sort of device would you devise to best capture water at
extreme depths? I'll tack the solution on at the end so people like
Kevin can figure out a mechanism.
The CTD back on deck, there now comes the division of the spoils. It
is said the atmosphere is often that of vultures around carrion.
Scientists draw water for their studies in preassigned sequence. Some
are studying the gas content of the water, and they must have first
chance as the gases begin releasing at once. They quickly add
chemicals to their sample to precipate out the gases in question
before they can escape. The rest follow. The water is precious, and
those who come last often accuse the earlier ones of being wasteful
with it, or even contaminating it.
So the water is analyzed variously, but some ends up in incubators for
the grazing experiments mentioned in the report. They reduce the
zooplankton ("zoo-oh") by half, incubate the sample, and observe the
effect of fewer grazers on the population of phytoplankton (phyto -
plant). From the final incubation they create slides for study under
microscope--although the image is now routinely displayed on the
computer. They look at an image and distinguish the grazer from the
fodder. It is labor intensive, and those who do it are on an uneven
schedule that might keep them up twenty-four hours at a time. My
roommate worked for two entire days at one point, then slept a day
through.
The incubators require a constant flow of sea water, which must be
kept near the temperature of the original. Thus, when they take a
sample for incubation, they sometimes remain in the same area during
the incubation period, usually 48 hours. If we were to steam
southwards the colder water would alter the conditions of the sample.
Already the water has gone from about six degrees centigrade to four
to the present two. Further south it will probably drop to less than
zero, or 32 Fahrenheit. Thus, the scientists can take their samples
quicker than they can process them, so we sometimes linger at a spot
while they work in the labs and await the results of the studies
before moving to the next site.
The vans mentioned are larger containers outfitted as labs and bolted
to the deck. There isn't enough lab space inside and some work out in
vans on deck.
You'll notice there was talk in the report of passing 66 degrees
south. The previous cruise encountered ice at this point--61 south,
but there is none to be seen here a month later. 66 south is five
degrees of latitude south of here, that's 5 times 60 or 300 minutes,
equal to 300 nautical miles. At twelve knots we cover a degree in
about five hours, so under good conditinons we are less than 25 hours
away from 66 south. Maybe...
Every heard of the polar front? Waters collide, temperatures drop,
few birds cross it. Sounds scary, looks tame. It's a defineable line
which, in this region, divides incrementally warmer northern waters
from colder southern (sounds funny, doesn't it?). Where we now are,
northern waters are moving southeast on a collision course with
southern waters moving northwest. The result is subduction: the
heavier southern waters, currently running below zero centigrade, dive
below the lighter, somewhat warmer waters from the north. The most
discernible indication for the naive observer is the reduced numbers
of birds. There are still a few cape petral and pryons, and yesterday
we saw a sooty albatross, but the numbers and varieties of the past
days have diminished.
By the way, it is at about minus 1.6 centigrade that seawater releases
fresh water to freeze.
A clearly defineable line is that of the pack ice, which we will see
in three or four days. It is Monday, Sunday with you, as I write, and
we are at 61-40 south latitude, about two degrees south of the pack
ice at 63-40. The pack ice rests too low in the water to register on
the radar, so when it appears a mile or two ahead of the ship it is
without prior indication. The second mate said last time it was
suddenly there, horizon to horizon.
Pack ice moves from lesser to increasing density from its edge
inwards. We might enter it somewhat, but while the hull of the
Revelle is "strengthened" no one knows just what it can take, and they
won't push it.
At dinner we were talking about the effect of polar melt and increased
fresh water in the sea. In the North Atlantic winds churns the
surface water causing it to turn downwards, an effect which continues
down to some 800 meters and brings up fresh nutrients--meaning more
nitrogen enriched waters--from that depth. Lighter, less saline,
waters from melted ice wouldn't churn as deeply and bring up the same
quantities of nutrients. That would mean less flora which would have
an effect all the way up the food chain.
One reason some of warm Pacific waters are so infertile is that plants
have taken all the nutrients from the water. Apparently there is a
doubling effect in plant growth that will strip water of its nutrients
within two weeks.
So in today's quiz, how do they collect water at depth? I had allowed
the phrase "fire off the bottles" to lead me astray, picturing water
slamming into empty bottles under great pressure. First, they aren't
bottles, they are cylinders, tubes, open at the top and bottom. As
the rosette is lowered the water encountered at each depth simply
flows through. When they "fire off the bottle" they are just tripping
a couple of caps that seal the cylinder top and bottom. There is
never any pressure to deal with at all.
December 17: Alas, we seem to be blocked to the south at 64:44S,
169:11W. Next time--Ice!
Dan
Greetings from the Revelle, where we have heard no Christmas carols before their time. The eleven hour flight from LA to Awkland went by quickly due to plenty of rest and a delightful seat companion, a charming young New Zealand women. Typical of Aussies and Kiwis, she had spent an extended period working and traveling abroad. She seemed to have gone back and forth between England, where she did temp work, and Israel, where she worked with a group supporting Israeli Christians. She slept, talked cheerfully, and busily underlined significant passages in the Bible, of which there seemed to be quite a few. Too late I thought of suggesting an abridged version, or perhaps Cliff Notes. Also met a New Zealand woman on the flight and her cousin upon arrival. She was uneasy about adjusting to life in New Zealand after thirty memorable years in New York City. What is home at that point? They've invited me up to watch the sheepdogs work. And speaking of dogs, upon arrival in Awkland I was nailed by an agricultural inspector, a beagle, in fact. This cute little dog suddenly started pulling at his leash and sniffing my bag. He had smelled fruit, which I gave up all the more readily in appreciation of his performance. Further gauntlets followed. Had I been walking in the woods in those boot? Of course. Off they went to Agriculture to have the soles scrubbed. Stayed at Windsor, a B&B in the center of Christchurch--$60 New Zealand, about $40 US, facilities down the hall, but a bounteous breakfast included "Todays Specialty: spaghetti," canned mushy pasta in a thick sweet tomato sauce. Not for the squeamish. Later I tried a local favorite, hokey-pokey ice cream. It is vanilla with pea-sized balls of crunchy toffee and quite good. The nearby Hagley Park (450 acres) and Botanical Garden (75 acres) dominate the center of the city. The garden has large, well-developed trees worthy of individual appreciation much like objects in a museum. Some date back to the 1860's. One had been planted by the Duke of Edinburgh in 1869. There was a common oak planted in 1893 to commemorate the marriage of George V. An atlas cypress was the most massive tree I've seen outside of the California sequoias, which were also well represented with several trees of astonishing size. Impressive, too, were common linden, or lime, trees. One, a hundred feet high, bore foliage so dense from outside to center trunk that everything above thirty feet was completely obscured from view, even from directly underneath. I once read a story about someone hiding undetected in a tree that dense, even maintaining a sizeable tree house, and I thought it fanciful. Through both the gardens and Hagley Park, the entire city, in fact, meanders the Avon River. Along most of it is park, part of the thirty percent of the entire city devoted to park or nature preserve. Throughout there are many benches where one can sit quietly between passing groups of Chinese. I walked the garden route past splendid houses and gardens. I was trying to find certain themes to describe the houses and why they had their own look so distinct from ours, but only could come up with bigger windows, steeply pitched roofs, sharper lines, and carefully landscaped gardens with much attention to shrubbery. Most had either walls or hedges, and none had the sweep of lawn we see at home. Roses are clearly the flower of choice. Returned to the center of the city in time to see the Christmas parade (Nov 23). And who led it? Ronald McDonald, followed by a sound truck and a passel of uniformed young McDonald's employees. "Hello everyone! Aren't we having fun? What's your name?" Behind came tractors pulling floats from which kids waved listlessly under the hot sun to an undemonstrative crowd. Drill teams of young girls showed grim, sweaty determination. A marching band played the "St. Louis Blues" and American football music. I perked up when bagpipers appeared; they broke into "It's a small world after all..." A tablet in the central square marks the transaction by which an English trading company acquired most of the South Island from the Maoris in 17??. Doesn't mention what the Maoris got. Watched a bit of TV. New Zealand shows alcohol commercials. A safe-driving spot depicts an accident graphically and speaks of the last sound this little boy hears: "His neck breaking." A recent government study said that 45% of Maoris and immigrants and about 35% of retired people read badly. The public were assured, "Our schools are nonetheless doing an excellent job." On a beautiful, sunny Sunday morning I arrived at the Christchurch Cathedral just as a service was about to begin. The weather probably explained the sparse attendance. The sizeable choir was composed of men and boys and three women. The pastor gave a nice sermon on the importance of talking and acting in full awareness of the brevity of our lives. Throughout the service, the head usher, in black with an imposing stock, escorted the participants about, seeing to it they proceeded unhurriedly to the proper place in due time to fulfill their part of the service. One had a marvelous sense of rhythm, movement and continuity throughout the service. At one point during a hymn, the usher proceeded deliberately from the front down the center aisle and stopped by a girl in school uniform who rose and followed forward him to a pulpit on the right. At the moment the hymn ended, she was in position to read from the Scriptures. Upon finishing, as music again filled the cathedral, she again joined him in little procession back to her seat. There they stopped, faced each other, and nodded solemnly before turning away, the usher with another appointment to keep. He reminded me of the black-clad figures in kabuki (or Noh?) that move about the stage seeing to props and people as the story unfolds. A note from the Sunday church bulletin hints at the state of ecumenicalism in Christchurch: "The Cathedral Choir sing Evensong tonight at the parish of Hororata. They were not invited, however, to sing at the Country Gospel service in the parish of St. Mary's, Geraldine, or to enjoy the "free coke and cream buns" served after that service on November 16. This breach of courtesy is noted. The supper at Horarata will be better anyway." That was rather strong stuff for the most English church in "the most English city in New Zealand." In the B&B I talked to a couple of delightful English women about it. They had seen it and were quite taken aback. But might their views be suspect? I recently saw excerpts from an old book of English etiquette, and I've struggled since to put aside my brutish ways. I now accept it as impolite to "greet someone while he is urinating." But at dinner I still transgress and find myself "spitting across the table" instead of beside it. Continued smooth sailing. We are now at 58.30 south with hopes of reaching 66+. "Fat chance!" says the captain. They only made it to 62 degrees last month, but we are hopeful. At about 66.30 south we would cross the Antarctic Circle and attain the status of Blue Noses. And that is a worthy aspiration. Update: we are now at 60 degrees south 170 degrees west. Apart from the ice we'll encounter soon enough, there is farther down slush which can block the intakes for cooling water. The ship runs sea water through heat exchangers to cool fresh water in the engine cooling system. The ship can heat the intake enough to melt a fair amount of slush, but it is a consideration and could limit our range. Time to get this off. Next time I'll try to cover some of the science and the wonderful birds, amazing fliers, that flock around the ship, many more than in the Gulf of Alaska this summer. Perhaps we will see some ice. In ten days there is the summer solstice. Dan
November 17 -- Wrapup I've been back in San Diego since September and am preparing to leave Thursday for New Zealand. I'll be working on the Revelle in port until departure for a cruise from November 30 to January 3. We will be heading well south of New Zealand, farther south than we went north last summer. The last cruise ventured just short of the region of pack ice. Before leaving, I would like to say more about the gravity study of the previous trip. This might be pretty boring stuff for some of you. The study was sponsored by NAVO, a Department of the Navy oceanography group in Mississippi. The Navy owns the boat and Scripps operates it, but the National Science Foundation (NSF) support almost all of the research. It is rare when they do anything directly for the Navy. We know the earth is not exactly round: it bulges at the center and flattens a bit at the poles. As gravity is a function of mass, it varies across the earth, being minimally strongest at the equater and weakest at the poles. At sea there are further influences. Because rock has more mass than water, gravity over a seamount is greater than that over an undersea trench. These variations in gravity play themselves out at the surface, where water "piles up" at a region over a seamount and "dips" over a trench where gravity is lower. According to information from NAVO, these differences from high to low can reach as much as 200 meters across the oceans, a figure I find suspect but one which illustrates the point. Bear in mind, by the way, gravity doesn't cause water to flow; it is at its lowest potential whether "mounded up" or "scooped out." This despite currents and waves, which amount to noise on the surface. Scientist talk of the ellipsoid and geoid. The ellipsoid is the mathematical representation of the earth--there are actually many but they have standardized on one. The geoid is the sea surface as it exists, i.e., with bulges here and depressions there. It stands to reason, if you could measure the sea level at any point, adjusting for currents and waves, you would have a measure of the gravity at that point. This is currently done by satellite. But how can they accurately and precisely measure sea level when tide and waves run into the many feet? The answer I got was that the satellites go over again and again and again and so even out their readings. There must be more to it than that. We surveyed from the boat because gravity instruments on board permitted readings more sensitive than those from satellites. Gravity is measure in Gals (from Galileo) and milligals. Meters allow gravity to be measure to an accuracy of a thousandth of a milligal, or a millionth of the standard value at sea level, and this in spite of movements such as pitch, roll and heave the ship undergoes. It is remarkable. By the way, to record the data, we cruised back and forth on east-west longitudinal lines, much like mowing the lawn--or seaweed. The lines are close enough to allow interpolate between them. Of what use is the data? Today, all ships use global positioning systems (GPS) to fix position with less than a hundred feet. GPS systems are free of the effects of gravity. However, ships also run inertial guidance systems with gyroscopes, and submarines rely on them when under water out of contact with the GPS systems. As I understand it, gyroscopes run with reference to the verticle. As a submarine cruises undersea past mountains and trenches, the differences in gravitational pull introduce a "false" vertical. This leads to tiny errors in fixing position, which could become critical with time. By knowing the gravity at a point, they are able to program correction factors into the positioning system and better maintain true position. Someone also said missiles must be launched from a horizontal plane. Maybe, but I would think the force of a missile moving through water and struggling to launch would throw it off. Of course, missiles themselves might have guidance systems keyed to the vertical for all I know. Finally, a note about global positions. There are 360 degrees of both latitude and longitude. Latitude goes from 0 degrees north or south at the equater to 90 degrees north or south at the poles. One degree of latitude is 1/360 of the way around the world in a north/south direction; no matter what the position on earth, one degree north or south is always 60 nautical miles away. The same is not true with longitude. Only at the equater is a degree of longitude equal to 60 nautical miles, as you move north or south a degree of longitude decreases by a factor of the cosine of the degree. Thus, at the equater, the cosine of 0 degrees is 1; at 60 degrees it is 0.5; at the poles it is 0. So a degree of longitude at 60 degrees is half the distance of a degree at the equator. We used this at sea in writting a program to calculate the distance between any two point, principally the current point and the point towards which we were navigating. Enough of that. More from New Zealand. dan
Hello to all, Well that's it, we have turned tail and are running. Managing but two or three knots on a westerly course against heavy seas, with a huge storm, Ginger, bearing down on us from the west, we have broken off our survey and are headed for Astoria, Washington, a day or two ahead of schedule. The Melville is currently experiencing lists to 25 degrees, but still managing 11-12 knots. We've seen enough of storms for one cruise. About ten days ago we were caught in one covering most of the northern Pacific. The second mate said it was the biggest he had seen, and it was easily the most intense I had seen. The winds ran up over fifty knots. At one point I stood on the forty-foot-high bridge and watched a swell from behind block out the horizon. The storm made the ocean look like a landscape with long, parallel ridges and valleys. In those conditions the wind rips the top off of each crest and sprays water like snow in a ground blizzard. The surface is streaked with foam on line with the wind. The big event occurred as I stood on the bridge. We were running into the swells when one brought us to a near halt and teed us up for the next, which hammered us full on. Water flew back and slammed into the bridge windows with such force I thought they would give, and for an instant there was blue water on the windows as if we were looking out under water. The force partially dislodged the two lifeboats and twisted the forward steel door and bulkhead on each side of the ship. They were not only built to hold, they had held for years. Repairing the bulkheads will be quit an operation; the doors are useless. And another storm is building. This isn't yet serious enough to cause alarm, but it's too serious to be high adventure. I also got sick. Twice. After thinking I had acquired my sea legs, feeling OK in the worst of weather, I would feel the boat would dip and my stomach lurch upwards. And suddenly the race was on. There was no question of was I or wasn't I, would I or wouldn't I, or even when, I was and I would and right noghhhhhhhhhhhh. Whew! Then I was fine, for a while. It's not what you would consider a humbling experience, it's too wrenching for that. So how have you been? dan
Hello again, But this time not from the Gulf of Alaska. In fact, in the last note I incorrectly stated we were still there, when we had gradually moved south to the level of Oregon, though well off the coast. The water is a surprising 64 degrees and the air is also warmer. The seas are fairly calm, which allowed us to load up at lunch: shrimp jambalaya, gumbo, Louisiana sausage. Tonight's fare is teriyaki beef and chicken on a spit, Japanese noodles, sushi, cheese cake for desert. I shall persevere. Food at sea is a revelation: some tastes wonderful, better even than on shore, other tastes awful. To the first belongs watermelon, to the second cantelope and all other melons. There seems to be no pattern. Pasta and rice are most welcome; for everyone desert seems to be the highpoint of the meal. Incidentally, there seems to be no end to the crew's ability to injest cholesteral. There was a crisis today which fully engaged the captain and technical staff: the coffee machine had gone down. You'd have thought from the ensuing panic we had run out of fuel. The captain later announced its repair with obvious relief. The first days on this leg out of Kodiak were rough. Most of the scientific party and a surprising number of the crew went down. In anticipation of rough weather, one of the crew had brought his remedy on board, several bottles of strong ginger ale. It was disheartening to learn he still had occasional problems after all these years, and indeed seasickness seems to strike almost everyone occasionally, randomly. This time I wasn't sick, but the thought that it's waiting for me is unsettling. (Ha, ha. More on this in the next letter.) But getting sick isn't the only problem; after three days of moderately high seas many were exhausted and depressed. Fighting the motion is terribly taxing, and I sometimes reacted with flashes of anger at being hurled suddenly against a bulkhead. Thus, the hurricane off of Baja caused us some anxious moments. The previous low to form in the region didn't move west as usual but took a northwesterly course into our region before dissipating. If this one were to follow we would feel the brunt of it. Of course, it didn't. It has moved west sparing both San Diego, where the crew has vested interests, and our waters. But if three or four days of foul weather was so hard on us, I hate to picture the consequences of a real storm. Good that Scripps do the Pacific and Woods Hole the Atlantic, even if we do envy them the Mediterranean. Being an albatross means...never having to flap your wings. Invariably there are one or two of the birds following the ship. They have a wingspan of up to seven feet, and with sufficient winds they glide endlessly without propelling themselves. They just sail side to side, swoop down to the water, occasionally lost from sight behind the swells, then, adjusting wings to catch the wind, soar aloft and regain speed in the next swoop. I've read the winds are diminished next to the water and offer less resistance. Thus, with a curving sawtooth motion they move forward against headwind. The other day one of them kept circling the boat, swooping back and forth aft, then riding an air current forward along the right side past and on level with the bridge, turning across the bow and sailing back the other side to make more lateral swoops and start forward again--all with only minimal adjustment to the wings. Never once did it power itself. In marvelous contrast to the albatross is the puffin with its stubby wings and pudgy body. They flap their wings like mad which provides just enough elevation to allow them to run across the water. "Lift!" we yell, "Lift!" But they never do, they just churn their wings and and run splat splat splat across the surface. According to the bird book their range is considerable, and we have seen them dozens of miles out at sea. But how is that possible? You can't migrate splat splat splat. Finally, to reward your patience, the turd story. On the pier at Kodiak we noticed small black piles of broken clam shells. We finally came to the conclusions that these were the residue from bird droppings after the rains had washed away the soluble part. Our theory was supported by the evidence of broken shells in the fresh droppings. Some pieces, however, were of startling size, even for the largest of the birds, and we asked ourselves what sort of life that would be. If fact, we were later told the birds regurgitate the larger pieces. And they do so with gusto; just days before the Coast Guard had steam-cleaned the pier, and it was already so covered with broken shells it crunched underfoot like a gravel walk. One of the crew told me about a bar maid in Kodiak. You sailors are all alike, she said. Ashore you talk of how tough the duty was at sea, at sea you talk of how tough the women were ashore. We now look forward to our next port, Astoria, Washington, where we will put in to allow the scientific party to disembark and take on a couple of our people to work on some of the equipment. We then sail to San Diego to arrive the morning of Friday, October 10. I look forward to a newspaper. (Later) Were been battered by heavy seas earlier in the week. About that in the next note. Hello, hello. dan
Hello to all, We are now a few days out of our last port, Kodiak, running on calm seas of 62.5 degrees with air temperature of about 70 degrees. The skies are partly cloudy, and the late sunrise in this region is at its full glory shortly before 8:00am. Kodiak was a great port of call. The green mountains had taken on a slight tinge of brown with the approach of fall, but we were treated to brilliant, sunny weather arrival day and the two following ones, and though it rained the last day it wasn't bothersome. The first day we rented a car and drove to the end of the roads. We saw streams choked with spawning salmon, many looking a bit rough with torn and discolored skin. Some, the sockeyes, were a brilliant red. The silver salmon were starting to run and the fishermen were working the entrance to the rivers to catch those arriving. Some of our party went for them, but for me it was just too easy. It didn't seem fair. Some landed salmon by snagging them accidentally, they were so thick. Part of the crew rented a boat to fish for halibut. They run into the hundreds of pounds in these waters, and an engineer caught one of 150 pounds from which we've been eating. The forests were hushed and lovely, like moss-draped cathedrals. The beaches has a coarse black sand that gave readily underfoot, and conformed to us when we flopped down and snoozed under the warm sun. I'll have to cut this short. Email needs to go out before we change course and the stack blocks our antenna. More later. dan
Greetings to all, Kevin Atkins, a friend at Indiana University, has set up a mail list to enable me to reach you. Email at sea is costly because it bounces off the satellite. The charge by length includes the header. I'm now on the Melville, a research ship operated by the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, (officially) as a programmer/analyst. We left San Diego about a month ago, operated off the coast near Eureka, California, for a few days doing core sampling--they dug up about a ton of mud from various points in the distribution area of silt from the Eel River. We then boarded a new party and embarked for Kodiak, Alaska, where we did a gravity tie for the current study. They had to compare the readings of their gravity instruments with the known base readings at Kodiak in order to establish a correction factor to apply to their data. That completed, we waited for the tide to fill the harbor and enable us to reach the sea again. Since then the Melville has been sailing below Kodiak in the Gulf of Alask. We go back and forth on east/west lines as if cutting the lawn. There is little to report. We may have broken out of the depressing fog of the last few days, and it's good to see sun again. It is important to our comfort that the seas be calm, lest we end up in the dreaded "trough." But the latest forecast indicates bad weather ahead. The unusually calm seas throughout have had us thinking we were living on borrowed time. For some it is probably a relief to know our fears might be realized. I go up to the bridge each day to draw tidbits of seamanship out of the officers. They are generally enthusiastic about their work and answer my questions gracefully. I've learned the four types of fog, the six basic motions of a ship, why they once flew the Blue Peter in preparation for sailing but no longer bother, how to punch up the water temperature on the control panel (it's been running over 60 degrees but today is 58) , and I've even used the sextant and learned they still shoot the sun to establish a correction factor for the gyros of the internal navigation system. I now go to the radar screen, find a blip and its direction, check the compass for our heading, and search for the ship at the proper spot. Not that we've seen many ships. I sometimes glean information from a book, then pose questions with seeming innocence in order to trip them up. A couple of the officers are competitive, and they want me to ask others the same questions to see how well they answer. Yesterday one of them turned the tables on me, asking me to name the nine bowline knots. Quick as a wink I answered the common or European, the foreward, backward, double, Aubrey, split, noose, slip, half and...the Johnson. She said I hadn't listed it, but she'd give me credit for the bullshit, too. We've seen few sea mammals, but the other day there was a remarkable sight. Out of an unbroken extent of open sea suddenly appeared dozens of dolphins across a large area to the right, many leaping way out of the water as they approached. They passed just behind the ship and continued leaping until out of sight. We see groups of them but rarely a fraction of that. I had hoped to see more whales. Those who have been above the Aleutians in the Bering sea say whales are plentiful there in the summer. There is usually a single albatross following the ship, but birds have not been plentiful. I'm well off my feed. Mealtimes are no longer the high points of the day, and I've quit lunging for every morsel. In fact, it is now with a certain distaste that I gorge myself regularly. The gustatory highpoint of the week is Sunday dinner, when we get a glass of wine, white or red. We can buy one can of beer each evening. We are now on schedule to finish this leg early, which could put us into Kodiak before September 2 and lengthen our three-day layover by a day or two . Some of us plan to rent a car and see a bit of the island, perhaps do some fishing. The second leg out of Kodiak finishes in San Diego the second week in October. We are really excited today. It's the weekend, and we get to...start another week. dan
Date: Sun, 10 Aug 1997 22:25:16 -0500 (EST)
From: (Dan Jacobson)
Subject: Rock and Roll!After many days of lovely weather and placid seas we are now tossing under low clouds. At the moment we are going straight into the swells, so there is only moderate pitching and little rolling, but in a few hours our course will be at right angles to the present one, and we will be "in the trough." Being in the trough is the pits, we wallow like hogs. Of course, I'm torn between my desire for immediate comfort on the one hand and wild sea stories for later on the other. In good weather the bridge crew has spotted whales, including pods of orcas or killer whales, which I have missed each time. The other day I did have the glasses on a big humpback when it raised its tail and sounded. Surprisingly, we have been recording sea temperatures of 60 degrees and more, warm enough for Jim to swim in. The talk on board is often of the next port, Kodiak, and what we will do there on our next visit. Turns out there is golf and an indoor pool, but many want to fish, whether by chartering a boat for halibut or casting for salmon from shore. I'm for the latter, another boat is not what I'm after. I was enchanted with Kodiak on the first stop and hope to see more of it this next time. The mountains drop sharply to the sea, the vegetation is lush, and some 3000 bears share the space with 7000 people. It was beautiful coming in, there being brilliant sun and patchy fog. I later went tramping through the brush and along the shore. I regret having come to Alaska so late. If Kodiak on a sunny 70 degree day is any measure, it's a great place to be. As we left it was socked in again, but lifted quickly. The Melville has a splendid bridge with an open catwalk to the rear. It is about four stories above the water and offers a fine vantage point in clear weather. Of course, on ships we don't speak of "stories," instead we use the nautical term "floors," as in first floor, second floor, and so on. The sole exception is the location of the engine room, which is in the "basement." You can imagine how confusing this new vocabulary is to me. Cheers to you all. Hope everyone is well. dan
last updated Jan 23, 2002
URL: http://www.kevinatkins.org/dan/dan1998.html