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!)