The Lady Amber and R/V Revelle in Honolulu.
By Eric Lindstrom
Two ships in Honolulu were abuzz with action this last week preparing for SPURS-2, a detailed study of ocean salinity in the eastern tropical Pacific Ocean. The Roger Revelle, upon which all the scientific party sails, had to be loaded with many tons of scientific equipment and installations completed all over the ship. Lady Amber, the 20-meter (66-feet) schooner, was also readied for action with the installation of meteorological and oceanographic gear.
It was amazing to see what was completed in only a week under the supervision of chief scientist Andy Jessup (University of Washington). Containers from Seattle, Woods Hole, and San Diego were unloaded and equipment hauled to the ships. Many scientists and technicians dedicated the entire week prior to Revelle’s departure on August 13 for stowage, assembly, installation, testing, and securing of instruments and gear. It was a very quiet ship over the last 24 hours after we departed as everyone had a well-deserved rest and acquired their sea legs!
The Lady Amber crew successfully tested its new installation of scientific gear but suffered a schedule setback when the crew discovered that the ship required a new engine prior to departure from Honolulu. These arrangements are underway and we are appreciative of the support provided by the University of Hawaii as the Lady Amber work gets completed. Lady Amber is expected to leave Honolulu in about a week and catch up with Revelle at the SPURS central work site, eight days southwest of Hawaii.
Argo the cat, relaxing in the Lady Amber.
Weather was fine on Saturday afternoon for Revelle departure. It was a quick trip out of the harbor with a great view of Waikiki skyline and Diamond Head. We passed by the Big Island of Hawaii on Sunday morning, August 14, giving people one last chance at cell phone calls. The island, really the largest mountain on our planet (from ocean bottom to summit), is a phenomenal sight.
Goodbye to Honolulu!
On Sunday we had our first of weekly safety drills. Everyone got to learn how to decode the various horns that call for assembly, all clear, and abandon ship. We learned about survival suits and life raft deployment. Especially, we learned how to be safe on the Revelle and watch out for one another. We were encouraged to see the expert knowledge and conduct of the crew in their drills. It is over 2000 miles from Hawaii to the site where we begin work in earnest (deployment of moorings that pack the after deck). In the coming week, as we make the transit, the primary occupation will be testing and checking out various systems and training everyone for the complex operations to come. Once we are on site, we will quickly enter 24/7 scientific operations and we hopefully will have worked out all the glitches!
On a sad note, we had to leave our colleague Fred Bingham standing on the wharf in Honolulu, when we had expected him to sail with us. He was struck down with an illness that required he remain ashore and head home to Wilmington, North Carolina. His primary role in SPURS is as data manager. We are all assured that he will be on the mend very soon but we will miss his sunny manner and organizational skills.
The scientific party aboard Revelle is quite diverse – from first timers to old veterans. I’ll try to introduce you to the team in the weeks ahead. I am happy to report that I have seen no severe cases of seasickness during our initial day at sea. No doubt a few people are feeling a bit “green” but all are adapting well.
As always, I welcome your comments and suggestions for this blog. Send your messages to ejlindstrom@rv-revelle.ucsd.edu (case sensitive!). The expected frequency of the blog will be about one every two days.
One of the best parts of a field campaign are the ‘little moments’ that sneak in while you work. They can really make your day. On that front this field campaign has been no slouch. Yesterday for example, we saw a juvenile black bear while we were traveling to a new field site. We also enjoyed a great sunset over Lake La Ronge here in Saskatchewan, and had a beaver sighting later that evening.
The great sunset the team enjoyed over Lake La Ronge on June 5. (Credit: Dieleman)
However, for me one of the best ‘little moments’ happened the day before… Our team is split into a number of different groups that measure different ecosystem characteristics: fire severity, tree density, species and age, as well as soil horizons and depth of burn in the soil. Liz Wiggins and myself work together to collect the soil measurements. As we measure and collect samples from every organic soil horizon, this task can take some time — often causing the soils group to finish up well after the rest of the team. Saturday though, everything came together for us soil diggers, and for the first time on this campaign our little group finished up first. We thought it was worth a victory photo. Sometimes it is the little things.
That Saturday was a particularly eventful day for the whole team. We had a great opportunity to participate in the filming of CBC’s The Nature of Things. Everyone was a pleasant combination of excited with a touch of nerves to be filmed, but generally thrilled to be sharing our science in this medium. The whole filming crew was wonderful, and eased us through the whole process. The sneak peek of the drone footage they shot seemed pretty promising to us, but we will all have to wait till 2017 to see the final footage. I guess some days in the field it is the big things too.
Catherine Dieleman is a post-doctoral researcher in Ecosystem Science at the University of Guelph in Ontario, Canada
By Christine Dow and Ryan Walker
Editor’s note: Ryan Walker and Christine Dow are two researchers at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center who will be spending more a month in Antarctica to study the response of the Nansen Ice Shelf to ocean tides, while blogging from the field.
Christine Dow and Ryan Walker, on the day of their departure for Antarctica.
Christine: Hi! My name is Christine Dow. I’m a postdoctoral fellow and my main area of research is using numerical computer models to examine water flow pathways develop underneath the Antarctic ice sheets. I am particularly interested in what controls the growth and drainage of large lakes that form underneath the ice. Despite being chained to my desk most of the time, I love to go into the field. Not that it’s very easy to directly observe water flow underneath the ice sheets, but I find going to visit glaciers always reinforces the large scales of processes that are reduced to a few lines of code on my computer. I have previously lived and worked on glaciers in the Canadian Rockies; Devon Island in the Canadian High Arctic; and on the Greenland ice sheet. However, this will be my first trip to the Antarctic, and has been top of my bucket list for a very long time.
Ryan: And this is Ryan Walker. I’ve been with the Cryospheric Sciences Laboratory at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center and the University of Maryland since 2012, following five years at Penn State University. I’m a glaciologist now, but most of my background is in mathematics and I’m primarily an ice sheet modeler. This will be my second trip to the Antarctic — I was on a research cruise studying sea ice with the Australian Antarctic Division when I was in grad school — but this will be my first time on the continent. This trip resulted from the Korea Polar Research Institute inviting me to their symposium in 2014. Although they were mostly looking for my advice as a modeler, our discussions eventually led to an offer to collaborate in the field, for which I’m very grateful. I’m looking forward to getting a close-up view of what I’ve been modeling for years.
Christine: We’re almost off. It’s the culmination of more than six months of preparation involving not just a little bit of stress and appearance of more gray hairs. Ryan and myself will be heading to the South Korean Jang Bogo station in Terra Nova Bay for a month to measure flexure of ice tongues due to ocean tides. We will be installing five GPS stations that will record uplift of the ice and two tilt sensors that will record very subtle changes in ice uplift and motion. The GPS will be placed on regions of the ice that are technically floating on the ocean water, whereas the tilt meter will be placed just about the grounding line where the ice is on land. We have very carefully planned exactly where these will go but, I’m sure, as with all fieldwork we will have to be somewhat flexible with our aims. There are logistics to think of, like weather for helicopter flying, including wind (which we’ve heard is quite brutal in that region) and crevasses in the ice which a) we don’t want to fall down and, b) we don’t want the equipment to fall down. For this reason, we have back-up plans and back-up plans for the back-up plans. However, in the end I think going with the flow is probably the best idea.
In terms of organization, the most important/stressful part so far has been our shipping deadline at the end of September. Holes were drilled, plywood was hacksawed and sanded, metal conduit was sawed and of course lots of packing and repacking. All of this equipment is (hopefully) awaiting our arrival in New Zealand before travelling down with us on a plane to the land of ice and snow. All that is left to do is make sure we have enough socks, etc. and to make sure we catch the multiple flights. The route is going to be Washington Dulles to San Francisco to Sydney (with a lovely 8 hours to entertain ourselves between flights) and then finally to Christchurch. We leave Saturday evening (Nov. 7) and arrive Monday evening (Nov. 9)! Good thing that we have a couple of days to acclimatize before we catch the flight down to the Antarctic. We will be in touch from the southern hemisphere!
