August 23-24, 2024
When aboard the Atlantis it’s impossible not to feel small in a meaningful way. At night the sky opens its arms to reveal an arresting profusion of stars and satellites. The water reaches every corner of your sight and if you are patient through the dusk, a morning sun sets the expanse ablaze in crimson hues contrasting electric blues. Yet you are there, a diminutive observer nestled into the adventure and discovery of it all.
On the morning of the 23rd I had my first wild sighting of a sunfish (regionally known as the moonfish); most likely the Pacific Mola Mola. Memories of the hours spent growing up gazing at this silly pancake of the sea from behind the wall of glass at the Monterey Bay Aquarium rushed back to me. The floppy mola was riding the waves and basking lazily out. The Mola is the heaviest bony fish and they are slow moving creatures with ample surface area. This leads them to being parasite prone; a dilemma they solve creatively.
If you gaze out at sea long enough you might find this curious creature meandering to the surface and flopping to its side near birds. It’s possibly a way for it to ask for a cleaning while simultaneously being a buggy food source and rest stop for whoever takes the offer up. Starstruck (literally and figuratively),
I was able to look at the rest of my activities throughout the day with the reminder of how absurdly special being at sea is and how excited that curious child would be for me now. I logged for ROV Jason during the photomosaic of Southern Hydrate Ridge alongside the next Pinnacle surveying, completed oxygen titrations, aided Dr. Lapham with push cores, and labeled sample tubes; all in absolute glee.
As the Atlantis guided us back to land I watched as Trina Litchendorf, an Applied Physics Laboratory engineer, delicately opened the container to a crate. Within slept a sandpiper, fragile and small, she held him close and offered him to take back to the wind and shore he had washed away from. Midway through our cruise at our furthest point from the coast it had found the refuge of our bow and lingered in exhaustion. The team had come prepared for involuntary stowaways and kept him warm and fed throughout the remainder of the week. As he took off into the jetty I was once again reminded of the little things; not just in due diligence to the project you dedicate yourself to but in the observance of the world around you and finding it in yourself to care.
Seeing weird fish in the water and wondering how that could possibly happen or feeling the earth beneath you and wondering where it’s been. Keeping that passion alive as you go through your education or research and putting in the effort to keep caring is a huge task; but you just have to start small.
August 21-22, 2024
These two days were dedicated as Dr. Laura Lapham’s science days. Two busy days consisting of 36 benthic push-cores, and 4 niskin bottles. The niskin’s posed an interesting dilemma as the water had to be collected and processed into their proper containers procedurally. When every part of the day is subject to change and there are sudden time crunches there’s an order of importance in sampling for if there are worst-case scenarios of things getting lost. Sampling priority goes to people aboard (Anna Hildebrand and Dr. Lapham), then the early career scientists, and then finally the rest of the associated projects. I have always dreamed of field research and assisting Anna and Laura aboard the Atlantis has not let me down. Like everything in life there’s a significant learning curve to learning the proper movements and lingo throughout the process. It’s been exceptionable to be able to learn from a scientist with admirable priorities such as Dr. Lapham. Examples of this can be seen by her ability to stay level-headed and calm, when she makes sure that the early career scientists take priority in sampling, when her and Anna ensure that my VISIONS’24 peers all understand her process and feel involved while simultaneously understanding the science, and also while wrangling every hurdle full force with everything at her disposal to make sure the samples are safe, secure and uncontaminated no matter what. This due diligence and strong procedural ethics are all things I am incredibly grateful to learn from and witness.
Carrying out science in such a manner is what makes it work since, as chief engineer Kellen Rosburg puts it, “it’s the little things that trip you”. It’s the little things like a leaky Particulate Organic Matter (POC) filter placing a strain on niskin bottle turnaround, or where you place your hand when capping a push core, it’s babysitting a Niskin bottle without a handle that can roll around. it’s a beautiful, organized chaos that’s as fluid in change as the water that tosses us around beneath our feet.
I was once again hit with an intensity of magical surrealism as I learned to prepare the push cores for processing. As I learned the flow of the process and focused on not putting the integrity of any of the samples at risk, I recited to myself “wingnut out, righty tighty lefty loosey, pressure present, ready core out, cap, stopper in, ready again, cap, tape, ring band, electric tape off, duct tape off, cap on, tape on, label, refrigerate, check in again”. Yet while concentrating I would get lost in moments of realization that I had just watched this very core get gathered in 4K nearly 800 meters down and that the water spilling onto my hands has most likely not seen the light of day in hundreds of years and the sediment even more so. Thermohaline circulation or the ocean’s ‘conveyor belt’ of water is driven by both temperature and salinity (both major contributors to density) and takes an average of around 1,000 years. This doesn’t necessarily apply to all water and all carbon. Carbon age is incredibly variable and is often associated with the last time it touched the surface, generally we associate seep and vent carbon as older because of a variety of hypotheses (such as geological activity for example). The age of a sample is one of the characteristics a scientist receiving samples will be looking at and can be measured in a variety of ways. It’s most commonly done through measuring the carbon-14 content; a radioactive isotope that is bountiful in the atmosphere and decays over time with measurable half-lives. The sink rate and retention rate of dissolved organic matter (DOM), particularly carbon (DOC), is critical in our understanding of climate change and ocean health. Only an incredibly small percentage of DOC is actually retained in the deep, most carbon is retained within the biological carbon pump which continually cycles carbon through different phases thanks to organisms as big as whales and as small as primary producers and bacteria. One of the ways in which we understand carbon is in its bioavailability or ease of consumption to the critters of the sea. This can be tested via nutrient profiles, physical and chemical analyses. Biotic and abiotic processes can also shift the age of carbon!
This is all to say that when looking at carbon, there are many factors to put into consideration of its fluxes; what it’s doing, where it’s been, and where it could go. Where our ocean’s carbon could go is one of the fundamental pieces to mitigating climate impact since, in a nutshell, the atmosphere and ocean’s carbon interactions are either in a positive feedback loop (more carbon going out than in) or negative feedback loop (more carbon going in the ocean then out). Understanding these models of carbons travels through the atmosphere, and the ocean’s different pools leads to an understanding of carbon globally.
August 20, 2024
In the early afternoon of the day, as a black footed Albatross flew close by, I cast an Expendable Bathythermograph (XPT) into the water column. The torpedo-like probe jumped over the deck while remaining attached to the casting gun in my hand via a thin copper wire. As the probe makes its way to the seafloor we can calculate temperature via sensor, and depth via a lead weight falling at a known rate. The readings, or calculable speed velocity data, given by the XPT are vital for conducting proper bathymetry readings. With improper speed velocity readings, we aren’t able to be sure of the density of the water and therefore the sonar can’t be calibrated correctly. To truly ensure that the XPT input accurate; the collected information is cross referenced with the World Ocean Atlas’s data and adjusted for anomalies. After snapping the copper wire, we made our way back to Mitch Elend within the laboratory who was carefully reviewing the exploratory data and watching for vents and plumes to be recorded as coordinates. Multibeam sonar has a transducer array that tracks emitted sound to eventually ‘clean up’ and turn into 3-D designs of the seafloor.
In Dr. Laura Lapham’s lab, I held up the niskin they’ll need for in situ water sampling the following day. The top and bottom of the niskin’s sampling chamber have a cap that is held on by outstretched coils within. This tensions makes it possible for the caps to fire, or snap closed, at the desired depth and have water from a specific part of the water column. The caps being held closed by tension also means that attaching it within a lab space while filled with water is a hefty and delicate endeavor since we’ll need it hoisted and secured while not risking either cap being bumped (and spilling all of the water). After testing different spots around the wet lab we ended up with the solution of someone holding the niskin while it sits on a modified bucket in the sink.
Later on in the day, as Jason entered the deeps of Southern Hydrate Ridge, we were able to witness the successful extraction of Dr. Lapham’s first two cores and the deployment of the MOSQUITO and the replacement of a low power junction box. It’s an unreal feeling to look through the monitors and see at around 780 meters beneath your feet aboard the Atlantis, something you touched and contributed to staring back at you. Tomorrow will have more focus around Einstein’s Grotto, a gorgeous methane seep site with hills of bacterial mats, bivalves and crustaceans. A chemosynthetic oases I never dreamed I’d see first-hand from within an ROV control van.
August 19, 2024
I woke up this morning realizing that every piece of life on the water is a puzzle when met with the force of waves; balancing to put a sock on while you’re tired, getting down the stairs with a cup of coffee to cure said tiredness, and of course, the varying ship work itself. Today was filled with witnessing all the ways in which everyday hurdles from equipment malfunctions to weather and current anomalies are overcome by the scientists, Jason crew, and engineers. Every person aboard the ship is united by their sense of duty and care for the cables and the ocean; it’s a truly outstanding and fulfilling thing to witness.
I was able to learn about osmotic pumps that are used to sample water via the pressure created in a chamber while water passes through the membrane. It’s an efficient manner to sample water in an affordable, controlled way without power. Topping off the testing tubes and tubing with solution is something I learned to do since one of the waves during our departure toppled the syringes that were used for recording flow rate. It is crucially important to not let air into the system since it acts as a block to the membrane/osmosis system. Later on, some other VISIONS students and I were guided through the building of the MOSQUITO; The MOSQUITO is essentially the piece of equipment deployed with the osmosis sampling that will poke into the sediment via 5 thin titanium tubes modified to act as needles.
Understanding the equipment itself has been revolutionary in unraveling the meaning behind day-to-day operations and maintenance. Trina, an engineer from the Applied Physics Laboratory (APL), has taken the time to walk me through identifying the different sensors on the Benthic Experiment Package (BEP), Shallow Profiler Mooring, Deep Profiler Moorings and some other commercial instrumentation (COTS) that attach. The Shallow Profiler’s maintenance is comprised of ‘packages’ that can be annually replaced by Jason while it sits atop the platform. The APL engineers aboard are constantly dealing with piecing together varying hurdles from every direction possible whether it be a faulty cable, a pressure sensor that gives out despite rigorous testing or simply bad weather that would create too much tension on one of the specific instruments being deployed. It is critical that every variable is accounted for during every part of deployment and maintenance because the entire mission of OOI’s RCA would be at jeopardy if the data becomes unusable. A single depth pressure sensor’s failure could null the data that that mooring collects for the site for the remainder of the year making this publicly available critical data inaccessible. The data collected through this extensive project is groundbreaking and the potential for how it can be used over extended periods of time is monumental for future research.
One of the pieces of equipment Trina familiarized me with is the BEP. The BEP’s design is as such to give it resistance against unexpected trawling or dragging nets. Despite the zone we are working in being a no fishing zone the thoughtful design is to mitigate the damage from a ‘what if’ situation. Attached to this instrument is a plethora of devices including a sensitive Acoustic Doppler Current Profiler (ADCP). The ADCP is sensitive enough to pick up centimeter objects with accurate high frequency pings. Due to the sensitivity of this instrument zinc oxide coats the exterior of the drum like exterior to discourage organic matter to take root.
August 18, 2024
I keep having to remind myself that Atlantis’s gentle sways and varying groans aren’t part of my imagination and that I am at sea. I’ve dreamt of what it would feel like to be aboard a moving naval ship my entire life and the design of the vessel feeling like a time capsule doesn’t help the surrealism of every passing moment.
Just off the coast at the Oregon shelf, around 80 meters depth, ROV Jason was deployed a few times to maintain the RCA. The last dive of the day was to troubleshoot a log that had found its way onto one of the cables. Looking at science from the side of the public makes everything feel sanitized and straightforward, yet one of my favorite parts of being in science is seeing when that isn’t necessarily true. Seeing people who are deeply passionate and knowledgeable deal with the everyday hurdles of communication and unplanned difficulties is a connecting process. The log was in an odd angle and sunken under sediment which made the Jason team communicate and think through different ideas on how to best get the cable ‘unwedged’. After careful deliberation and repositioning of Jason they decided to gently ‘floss’ the cable back and forth to shimmy it out gently. This led the cable to pop out of the sand revealing that the log had either disintegrated or another mystery had occurred to make it nonexistent.
It may sound odd to think of wood in a spot that light can’t reach but wood is an essential puzzle piece of the intricate ecosystem of the ocean floor. It brings nourishment and shelter for the right organisms that can make quick work of it. Bivalves can bore into the wood as an anchor spot, bacteria feast on the unique make-up that others would struggle with such as the polymers cellulose and lignin, and the crustaceans of the deep feast upon the food that the wood itself provides and harbors. One of the smaller guests at the log dinner table is bacteria; but it’s a guest of honor. The diverse bacteria of the deep-sea function anaerobically while oxidizing the sulfide made available by the wood. It’s also able to live in symbioses with a variety of organisms. The ‘innovations’ that bacteria provide form the foundation of what makes wood falls one of the chemosynthetic oases of the deep sea.
One of the Junction Boxes that was pulled out of the water for maintenance was a medium power junction box. Its main purpose is to supply usable power to its attached sensors by pulling power from the secondary node (in this case 200 Watts). This junction box we pulled from the site during the evening is lovingly called ‘The Sheep’ by the team due to its dense anemone coverage. The Sheep can be smelled before you lay your eyes on it, a slight aroma of salt and sewage waft from it. I was lucky enough to get on deck and work at scraping off all the ‘biological ooze’ with some members from the APL and fellow participants of the VISIONS cohort. Despite the sensory overload of the experience, it’s hard not to feel butterflies from being around specialized heavy-duty equipment.