Day 1: Leaving Newport
Today was the day! We started the first real day of the cruise with briefings from both the deck lead from OOI (Alex Wick) and the captain and his crew. Both centered around a really important subject on board a working ship: Safety! We got information on muster stations in case of emergency and learned how to put on an immersion suit (also known as a gumby suit). These are stored in our staterooms and are used in the event that we need to abandon ship into the cold waters of the Pacific.
Speaking of staterooms, I forgot to show you our staterooms in my last post. Normally, they would be loaded with two members of the science party, but lucky for me we have a fairly small science team on this trip, and I can have a whole room to myself! The room is not big, and it isn’t fancy, but it is a comfortable place to get some sleep after a hard day. Interesting note: ships are not quiet places, and the staterooms are no different. There is limited space on the vessel and so you are near noisy equipment and machinery no matter where you are on board. Earplugs are recommended, or you can just work hard enough that sleep comes quickly no matter what.
The R/V Thomas G. Thompson left Newport at high tide and sailed out into the Pacific. The trip out of port was highlighted by the passage under the Yaquina Bay Bridge, the sight of sea lions lazing happily on the navigation buoys, and the beautiful Oregon coast.
Only a few hours after leaving port the work began. Our first activity supporting the OOI Endurance mission was the deployment of two gliders. These amazing machines (that look like the cross between a torpedo and a cruise missile) are independent and autonomous submersibles that can perform scientific sampling over a range of water depths as they slowly traverse their plotted course.
Most impressively they can do all of this for as long as three months at a time! Their buoyancy drive allows them to move through the water with extreme efficiency at a speed of about half a knot. It works by taking in sea water to decrease its buoyancy and causing it to sink. The wings convert some of that vertical motion into forward propulsion, allowing it to gain forward speed without any extra expenditure of power.
The gliders contain a modular payload of scientific instruments allowing it to be tailored to the needs of the science being done. Ours had a package of a CTD (a standard tool used to measure salinity, temperature, and depth), a PAR (Photosynthetically Available Radiation) detector, an ADCP (Acoustic Doppler Current Profiler), a fluorometer, and a dissolved oxygen sensor. This sensor package will continuously record data as the glider follows its course. Occasionally the gliders will surface so that they can transmit their recorded data and potentially receive new instructions by satellite.
When the glider is on the surface, can sometimes be thought by members of the public to be broken or in distress. A few years ago a glider was picked up by a fisherman who believed that it was adrift and needed to be rescued. He hauled the glider into his boat and returned to shore with it taking it all the way back to his house. Little did he know that the glider was reporting its GPS location back to OOI the whole time, and while it was functioning perfectly when it was picked up, it quickly began reporting a distress signal as it was now no longer at the location or depth that it was expecting. Before the fisherman could call OOI to report that he had the glider, an OOI employee was knocking at his door saying kindly: “Can I have my glider back please.” The fisherman was not expecting that OOI personnel had watched the gliders trip to his house in real time but was happy to return it.
Later in the evening, the crew was tasked with retrieving two gliders that had completed their missions and were ready for pickup. The ocean after sunset is a difficult environment to find the small glider, even with it broadcasting its GPS locations. Crew on the bridge scanned the waters until they saw the small beacon light flashing from the glider’s tail. Once spotted, another crew member used one of the ship’s spotlights to mark the glider’s location so the ship could move to intercept it.
The ship came alongside the glider and a crew member hooked a line to it and brought it aboard. As you can see from the picture below, the glider had become a home for a colony of tiny barnacles. To combat this, the crew now covers the glider with a zinc oxide cream prior to its deployment which protects the glider from colonization.
It was a fun day, and a good way to get our feet wet as we begin this two-week expedition, but we all knew that the real work would begin tomorrow.
Until then, calm seas and good science!
