With a group of happy people, time flies on the boat especially when hanging around our major ‘goof-balls’: Abi and Prof. Logsdon; both of which must have been drinking all of the ‘good’ coffee, as their energy levels were unmatched throughout the trip.  Good times fooling around on deck, exciting science, and yummy food form the holy trinity that was this cruise; but for me personally, nothing can top how absolutely gorgeous the ENTP has been for us.

This blog will contain more pictures and fewer words, as I believe these photos taken from a variety of our gifted photographers will instill jealousy in any who behold them.  These sunrises and sunsets show the pure wonder that is life on a research vessel.  After a hard day, of often strange hours, being greeted by this type of beauty as the day begins or passes is something I will cherish for years.  The sun, sky, and sea, produce an otherworldly feeling that reinvigorates any spirit.  24-Hours of science every day on the boat becomes feasible when surrounded by a continuous display of nature’s beauty.

I am more than happy of my decision to have a project involving Satellite Remote Sensing which requires data collection during sunny days.  This allowed a maximum amount of exposure to how wonderful the Sun’s rays are… I will miss you Sun… I know you and Seattle are not on the best terms, but please try to work things out so that I can see you before June!

I’ve spent a lot of my time during surveys and in between scheduled watches reading Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, which manages to only briefly mention motorcycle maintenance but has quite a lot to say about the philosophy of observation, reason, and the quest for the definition of “Quality.” For me, it’s provided a much clearer foundation for thinking about the science we do on the Thompson and at UW, and how we observe, interpret, and function in our daily lives. Most oceanographic research involves indirectly observing systems that we’re physically unable to reach and directly observe ourselves. This leaves plenty of room for debate on whether we can arrive at to a scientific conclusion – a truth – about a particular oceanographic system if we’re unable to directly sense and observe it.

“The purpose of the scientific method is to select a single truth from among many hypothetical truths. […] But historically science has done exactly the opposite. Through multiplication upon multiplication of facts, information, theories and hypotheses, it is science itself that is leading mankind from single absolute truths to multiple, indeterminate, relative ones.” (p. 141)

It was easy to come up with questions and hypotheses that our incoming mapping data could help answer. Variation over space: sedimentation, roughness, orientation. The links between the physical space in these results and the time scales of oceanographic processes: tectonics, biology, currents. But as we wrote more drafts of our research proposals and read feedback from our instructors and other students, these questions branched out and formed new hypotheses to be tested. It was frustrating for all of us, because at this point in our oceanography education, we are highly aware of the limits of our equipment and of our own knowledge and endurance. It often feels like making a tiny, highly-specific contribution to the body of knowledge is futile, but it’s worth remembering that scientific breakthroughs stand on the shoulders of a whole crowd of contributions, many of which are uncertain and often disagree with each other.

“The material object of observation, the bicycle or rotisserie, can’t be right or wrong. Molecules are molecules. They don’t have any ethical codes to follow except those people give them. The test of the machine is the satisfaction it gives you. There isn’t any other test. If the machine produces tranquility it’s right. If it disturbs you it’s wrong until either the machine or your mind is changed. The test of the machine is always your own mind. There isn’t any other test.” (p. 207)

These confusing and unexpected results happen all the time in any observational science, and especially in the earth sciences. In our classes, most of the example data, plots, and photos of a particular oceanographic system are just that: clear examples. When studying such a huge and variable part of the Earth, the answers will rarely be obvious, and many phenomena lie behind direct observation. In multibeam sonar, the main dataset – the data cloud of altitude soundings that make up the bathymetry map – doesn’t tell us anything about the material of the seafloor, only its shape:

But with a few clicks, we can switch our view from depth (the speed of sound through the ocean multiplied by the time from when the sonar pings to when the receiver hears the ping bounce off the bottom) to a map of the intensity of the returning sound. A bumpy but otherwise unremarkable region near the spreading ridges then reveals stress lines from nearby transform faulting – exactly the tectonic phenomenon we’re searching for in our projects.

When we’re finally able to fully reconcile our surface impressions of a system with our knowledge of their inner workings, that’s when I think we’ve come closer to the truth.

“The divorce of art from technology is completely unnatural. It’s just that it’s gone on so long you have to be an archeologist to find out where the two separated.” (p. 209)

Sleep has been… challenging. As you can see in this photo, I have cough drops, tea, and in my pocket I have some decongestants. Lack of sleep and a climate adjustment have not been good to me. Some days, I have only been able to sleep for a couple 1-2 hour naps. Naps are the only thing keeping me going at this point.

If there’s anyone out there reading this who doesn’t believe in global warming, anthropogenic inputs affecting the earth, and ocean acidification, please send them my way. I have some very interesting numbers to show them! The most exciting data (exciting because we are scientists doing science, and when hypotheses turn out to be correct, we get kind of excited- even though this data is overall pretty sad) has come from water samples between 800 and 1600 meters’ depth, where the pH has been between 6.6 and 7.0. The average oceanic pH is 8.0 (or at least it used to be). Even the highest values, from surface waters, have been in the mid- 7’s.

There have been whales, sea lions, dolphins, birds getting disoriented on the boat at night, and my favorite: The brightest stars in the sky… Nope! Those are planets! Venus is huge! Jupiter is hanging out, too. Night-time strolls to the hammocks on the bow to look at the night sky are necessary some nights when the mayhem of collecting and analyzing water samples gets me feeling a bit stir-crazy.

Everyone has had to take a shift as watch leader, but my lab being away from everything has made it next to impossible for me. Last night was the final mapping survey and I was finally caught up on my titrations, so it was time. Shortly before my shift started, Liz wrote my name on the board. If you haven’t seen the show Archer, you should. And yes, the hat is required.

Life on the Thomas G Thompson has been a quite a trip. On the first day we set sail out into a storm with 20+ knot winds. The rocking was tempered by some motion sickness drugs which I’m positive helped me through the first few days. After that rough patch sea conditions settled into a calmer norm and we moved south quickly to the 26^th parallel where we were allowed, by our gracias Mexican hosts, to begin scientific sampling.

Luckily for me we ran the ADCP all the way down the peninsula of Baja where I am trying to calculate coastal upwelling. If you don’t know what coastal upwelling it is forced by winds that push surface waters away from the coast and allow cold nutrient rich water to rise to the surface where phytoplankton can take advantage of the increase in nutrients and grow rapidly. Coastal upwelling can then be viewed as a force of increased productivity that drives a bottom up ecosystem by providing nutrients to the bottom of the food chain. Phytoplankton, the grass of the sea, helps small zooplankton grazers grow which in turn provides fish and higher trophic level creatures the food sources they require to grow and reproduce. Thus, upwelling is an important ecosystem component in coastal waters and drives the extremely productive ecosystems of the western coasts of North and South America.

My particular area of study was the cape near Magdalena bay where the coastal orientation is particularly favorable and the winds happened to cooperate and provided me with ideal conditions to cause upwelling.

In recent days we have celebrated 3 birthdays with piñatas abound for all to destroy, the ensuing showers of candy provided sweets and treats for all. The birthday boy today, Matt B., had already destroyed a piñata so he delegated the destruction of the candy boxes to the shortest member of the undergrad scientists Cat for our amusement. After this the job of wild flailing was given to the captain pat who got a good face flogging by the piñata before it succumb to a home run swing by the cap. Even though Veronica, a master rower for UW, has the strength of ten men she didn’t have the technique an American has with a stick in hand and she failed to fell the beast. The last chance was given to me. I proceeded to flail wildly and powerfully, most swings were whiffs but when the cosmos aligned the foul beast, bugs bunny and Elmer Fudd, was destroyed and the sun set behind us on a beautiful Baja night!

Running an extra line to close a data gap. Also, map!

Of course, it’s not really instant; as I mentioned above, it takes hours to complete a bathymetric (seafloor) survey. The ship is generally moving at only half its max speed (6 knots, or jogging speed), and you have to watch in real-time, waiting with bated breath for the multibeam to sloooooowwwwwwlllllyyyyy display the seafloor, including (hopefully) the feature that you were interested in. And if it doesn’t, you have to either take what you get or recreate your survey on the fly, losing more time.

But in the end, no matter where your survey occurred, you get a fabulous-looking map of the seafloor, or a profile of the sediment. The Thompson has two seafloor-survey instruments: the EM302 multibeam, and the Chirp3260 sub-bottom profiler. They are both sonar systems, meaning that they send out a soundwave (“ping” or “chirp”, respectively) and use the time and intensity of its return to determine the depth of the seafloor. The difference between them is that the multibeam sends out a fan of pings over ~120° of the seafloor, resulting in a “swath” of seafloor data that is about 4x as wide as the depth. The sub-bottom profiler uses different frequencies of sound in order to penetrate the seafloor and send back a profile of sediment layers on the bottom.

The mapping lair.

I conducted my survey overnight from 8pm on March 20^th to 4am March 21^st using the multibeam. This was during my normal sleep-time, but there wasn’t anything I could do to change that; it’s just the way the whole schedule worked out. I drafted out my survey lines a month ago, but finalized them only the day before the survey. It was 36 nautical miles long, running up and down the continental slope in about 8 lines. As my normal watch went to bed , I settled back with my caffeine in the computer/electronics lab and let the fabulous crew of the Thompson direct the ship along my survey track.

Six hours, one XBT (expendable bathythermograph; it measures water temperature through the water column in order to calculate sound velocity) and one filled data-hole (due to an unexpectedly shallow region, or poor planning, depending on what/who you want to blame) later, I found myself grinning happily (and slightly sleep-deprived) at my data, a clear image of the continental margin from 1000m, up the slope with a clear shelf-slope break at 290m to the continental shelf at 170-200m. Data density was good enough for 10m resolution, and I had a large enough area to conduct my analysis. Not only did I have all the data I had hoped to collect, I also had data that I hadn’t expected: intensity of return, which basically shows hard and soft sediment on the seafloor, which shows the shape of shelf canyons almost better than the bathymetry alone.

Miles with a giant hairdryer! ...ok, an XBT.

The trick with seafloor surveying is what you DO with the data after you have it, however. Many long hours of data cleaning and analysis await me back in Seattle, or even here on the boat if I care to use my free time to get a head start. Ultimately, the pretty-looking map of the seafloor means almost nothing; we KNOW the seafloor is there, and we KNEW there would be a shelf-slope break, but my project depends entirely on statistical analysis of that data, which can’t be seen at a glance.

But in the meantime, I might just frame my map and wonder about the amazing concept of creating a map based on sound.

Map on the left, and intensity on the right. Pretty pictures!