Twice shrunken heads

The last rosette cast of the trip just came up from 2500 meters, and it had the heads (the five pre-shrunken ones that had already gone down to 1000 meters, earlier) and most of the cups.  Here are some photos.  While these heads can never brag about having visited Pacific bottom waters, they sure got shrunken, and they look pretty good after their journey.  Some cracking, and some variation, but the double dip seems to have shrunken them effectively – in general, more effectively than the single 

deeper dip their sisters got.  They seem to have personalities all their own (demure, creepy, confident).  Tonight I go off shift before 3 am (but can I possibly sleep any earlier than 3 am?), and we'll be back at O'ahu's Snug Harbor around 8 am.  

Heads up, and a trip to Kauai

The 4800-meter heads (6 of them) came up last night, and today I finally got to see them.  They defied my expectations.  What’s amazing (to me and scientists on board) is how DIFFERENT they turned out.  Mr. Hayslip is the big winner – his head shrunk beautifully and everyone’s impressed with his artwork, his vision, and I think especially his use of negative space.  “You see, it IS art, and it IS science”, as one eloquent scientist put it. (That’s eloquent, for a scientist.)

The others are a mixed bag (idiom, although oddly literal, too).  On the right in this picture is the 1000-meter head from an earlier post, included just for scale.  Many didn’t shrink as much as expected, and several got split open painfully at eye level.  No one fully understands the variations.  Some blame it on the arrangement in the bag (some heads were up against metal rods, others squished between heads), and some suspect there’s enough variation between the heads to make this happen.  They want to get to the bottom of this (idiom), so many asked me if they all came from the same manufacturer, and I believe they did.  But I suppose wig models don’t require a high level of uniform density or anything.  Who knows? 

The other news is that we collected a wandering float.  This float, called an ARGOS float (in case you care to google it) has been out to collect scientific data, but it’s not working properly.  It needed picked up, and when we left ‘O’ahu, it was very near station ALOHA.  It wasn’t our primary scientific goal, though, so we saved it for later while we did science.  However, while we worked, a current moved the float.  Now we finally found it north of Kauai, and we’ve just recovered it.  When it’s on the surface, it talks to satellites so we had some clues to locate it. The side trip wound up taking a great deal of extra time (I think something like 10 hours).  Perhaps we should have picked it up at the beginning of the trip.  But you know the old idiom: hindsight is always 20/20. 

Our hope was to do one last rosette cast at station Kaena tonight.  This is where we’d send the 1000-meter heads down for a second dip to 2500 meters.  It’s also where I’d like to get the cups in the water.  However, with this long side trip, the Kaena cast might not happen at all.  Wait and see.  As of this writing, it looks more likely than not.

Shrinking heads

One of tonight's casts was the deepest of the trip, going down near the bottom at 4800 meters.  We knew this was the night for the heads, but we were't sure we had enough room for all the ones I brought.  I've taken some good natured teasing for a volume of styrofoam I brought, but I can take it.  It's for the KIDS!

First, we tied a bag with 6 heads it in onto the rosette.  This was Walt tying them on.  This was NOT the deepest cast, it was only 1000 meters. We were trying to "pre-shrink" some heads - make them smaller so more will fit on a deeper cast.  Here's the very bad news: as the cast was ending, and the rosette was coming up, a head came floating up.  Everyone's heart sank - we DEFINITELY are NOT in the business of polluting the ocean with plastic, so this was sickening.  It couldn't be reached, and it floated away while we couldn't chase it. Worse, we feared the bag had ruptured and all six were lost.  We held our breath (idiom) as the rosette came into sight, and were comforted (somewhat, anyway) that the other heads were still there.  The bag's opening had stretched, and the heads had shrunk, and that one had bobbed up through the hole.  The heads in that bag were grades K-5, and I haven't yet determined which one was lost.  It's a heartbreaker.  I'm getting teary about it - for real - but maybe that's because it's 1 am and not myself.  

Here's a pristine (unshrunken) head beside one that went to 1000 meters.  If all goes well, that head on the right should get a second trip down (to shrink more.)  As I type, the one on the left is on the deepest cast - it is now coming back up from 4800 meters.    

Here you can see the bag of heads ready for the deepest cast.  They are in a mesh bag (sealed up tightly this time!) which is connected to the rosette with zip ties.

Stay tuned!

A map and a mess

Aloha from station ALOHA.  If you wonder WHERE most of this science is going on, here's a map (courtesy of UH's Oceanography school.)

We've been stationed near ALOHA for a few days now - stopped for some science, and on the move for other science (like net tows,which are  just what you'd think they are.)  We're in water that is about 4,500 meters deep.  Tonight we'll do our deepest cast, collecting water from near the bottom.  We'll send as many styrofoam heads down as we can fit.  Any that don't fit will go down tomorrow night when we'll be at station Kaena (which everyone pronounces Ka'ena.)

Before I set out, several students (and grown-ups, too!) asked about the food situation on the ship.  Here's a lousy picture of "the mess" (the very clean room where we eat; ships have odd names for spaces.)

The space doesn't lend itself to photos (and/or I'm a bad photographer) but this is as good an opportunity as any to tell you about the food. The meals have been amazing: I've had filet mignon, pizza, and a fabulous chicken breast stuffed with a pepper stuffed with cheese (I do not ask how, I just worship the cooks.)  Soup and a salad bar are available with most meals.  Desserts abound: cinnamon rolls, brownies, 'smores cupcake (also miraculously stuffed, layer upon layer), lemon merengue pie, cookies. There are two cooks on board - they make three meals a day, everyday, for 3 months.  Then they go off shift for 3 months.  They also make the shopping list - which is pretty serious - and see that the food gets loaded onto the ship while in port.  Mealtimes are strict (7:15am, 11:15 am, and 5:00pm), and seating is limited (it can't accommodate everyone on board, so no lingering - eat and leave your seat for someone else.) Like many on board, I can't make it to every meal (my work schedule and sanity require that I'm asleep at 7:15 am.)  But the mess has a variety of foods accessible even between meals - yogurt, sandwich fixings, pretzels, leftover desserts, ice cream.  I'm not going hungry.  

Shift work

I'm more than halfway through my second 12-hour shift.  I work 3 pm to 3 am.This night has been more fun - both because I slept later into the day (just up in time for 11:30 lunch) and because the night has been much busier with science.  

Here is the gold standard of sea surface temperature (SST) technology.  While SST is approximated by satellites, buoy instruments, ship intake, and in other ways, this method (called the bucket method) is the best.  A bucket and a thermometer, lowered over the side, and read by human eyes.  

The weather and seas on this trip have been warm, calm, muggy and mostly sunny. One of my responsibilities is taking some weather data.  This gizmo is pretty low-tech, too.  There’s a wet thermometer (with a fan to blow a breeze onto it) and a dry thermometer.  Can you see that the bottom thermometer is wearing a sock?  It's a wet sock, ew!  Using the two readings, relative humidity is calculated. 

I think you might have to add your considerable powers of imagination to this photo.  It’s of a pretty striking (if unphotogenic) phemonenon called trichodesmium, which is a nitrogen fixing cyanobacteria.  Darwin saw it from his ship the Beagle, and after his report, it’s been called sea sawdust.  People on this ship keep talking about it (most say they’ve never seen so much of it), and this is the second night when we’ve seen a thick, swirly layer of it atop the sea.  I guess prolonged calm seas make it rise at night.  The sunshine will kill it, though, and it’ll drift down through the water column.  Some near-surface samples have been showing evidence of it.  I've played with the contrast in this photo to make it visible. To my eye it looked like the swirl of a galaxy or like oil on water (but not as colorful).  It doesn't glow, but it was illuminated by the ship's lighting.

This represents my worse moment of the trip so far.  Just as I was being told how breakable these thingies (they’re the bottom lids of the gray bottles on the rosette) are, and as I was in mid-sentence in some attempt at a witty come-back, I was careless and did exactly what they were warning me not to do.  The piece shattered and had to be replaced.  A replacement was on board, and we rushed to fix it. In the end, that bottle of water AND a couple others wound up being unusable.  Whoops.  Humbling and humiliating.  I’ll walk on egg-shells for a while! (Mammoths: Idiom alert!)

Thousands of words . . . worth of photos

I’m exhausted and going off shift after a 12-hour watch (which wasn’t strenuous, but was boring since we were mostly in transit, not doing science) and after 22 hours awake.  I’m not feeling too witty (or coherent), so I’ll throw some photos up here and count them as thousands of words.

Dolphins played in our starboard wake.

 Obligatory sunset photo.  Regular sea-goers aren’t enchanted.  I am!

Here’s a “rosette” (a suite of instruments) being steadied by people with ropes while it’s lifted and lowered by a winch.  This is the physical oceanographers’ bread and butter (Mammoths: that’s an idiom!)  It has gray bottles all around for sampling water, and some instruments on the inside for measuring temperature, salinity, depth and dissolved gasses.  

Here’s the rosette going into the water.

Here we are getting the bottles ready to go – when they go in, they are open at the top and bottom.  When the rosette is at the right depth, a computer command releases a metal tooth  (they look like spokes on a wheel here, in the center), which “fires” the bottle, closing it at both ends at once.  (This was taken before it was lowered into the water.)

Getting underway and getting out of the way

We got underway this morning at about nine a.m.  While some scientists had to begin prepping the instruments, my only goal was to stay out of the way.

This is the suite of instruments that will go in the water to take samples.  The large gray bottles will collect water at different depths.  Jefrey is in it now, checking on the other instruments (which you therefore can't see) but he WON'T be in there when it goes into the water.  It's onto this structure that our bag of cups and heads will be tied.  We're in a garage-like space on the back deck, and I'm on a stairway so I can look down to take the picture.  FYI, if you stand on a stairway on a ship, you are almost certainly in the way.  So I didn't accomplish my one goal, but it's a nice shot, right?

We're underway, traveling out of the harbor, with Honolulu high-rises in view.  It's a gorgeous hot day, so right after this shot I had to choose between sunscreen and the indoors.

The new people on board got to try on our submersion suits, which are cooky-looking coveralls made of wet-suit-fabric. We are in the lounge - comfy couches and an enormous collection of DVD's.  (Kids: DVD's are how people watch movies when they don't have a good internet connection.  Ask your grandma.)

I am supposed to be resting, because I go on shift in about 3 hours.  I'll work the 12-hour shift from 3pm to 3am throughout the cruise.  I don't feel like sleeping now - I think I'll find a shady spot and a reputable novel (no shady novels.)  And I'll try again to stay out of the way.