March 7

Click on the question mark to ask the class about oceanography, Glacier Bay, or the cruise. Your question and answer will appear on the Questions page under Quick Links.

I have participated in two research cruises since becoming an oceanography major, but as an undergraduate I had never been responsible for much of the planning. As seniors this year, we were first charged with deciding on a research topic and doing some background work to learn a little more about our areas of interest. This was not a big deal for us, since most of us have been doing this kind of thing since high school. The next task we faced was to figure out the feasibility of carrying out our idea given the four day timeframe we are working with. They called this the Ship Time Request. Most of us had not previously had to think about logistics; that was always something the professors and TA’s did behind the scenes.

There are 21 students all with individual projects and like I said before, only four days of “science time” inside Glacier Bay. The week following our research proposal and ship time request due date was exclusively dedicated to planning the cruise. To give you more of an idea of the level of complication we were dealing with, here are some of the things we had to consider when creating our plan. People wanted to stop and do some kind of science at over 60 locations. The type of science proposed at each of these locations ranged from getting off the ship and going ashore, dropping several different types of sediment cores to the bottom, performing up to four vertical net tows, casting CTDs during the day, casting CTDs during the night, deploying drifters, deploying sediment traps, returning to get the deployed drifters and traps, spending 12 hours in an area to monitor Doppler profiler data and making transects of the bay to record bathymetry data. To add complication, many of the activities described in the massive list you just read were to occur at the same station, but most of them could not occur simultaneously. Futhermore, we had some types of research that needed to be conducted during dark and others that could only be carried out during daylight.

Our group started the planning by going through all of the ship time requests to find out exactly what type of science was to occur and where it was supposed to occur. After doing this, we assigned time to each activity in order to make an estimation of how long the ship would need to sit at each location. Next, we took into consideration the amount of travel time between each location, the time needed at each location, and the time of day we arrived at each location to accommodate the day/night restrictions. Planning a route that made this all fall into place took hours, but we finally arrived at something resembling a cruise plan.

-Andrew Clos

March 7, 2008