August 16, 2024
Downhill long jumping is now my favorite non-official sport.
Woke up at 8:45 to make it up to the student meeting at 9, which might as well have been the crack of dawn on my current sleep schedule. Then I went back to sleep again afterward, only waking up as we entered the breakwater into Newport on a beautiful sunny day. We saw the old lighthouse that still stood on the bluff above Newport, and again crossed below the huge town bridge, like reentering a gate into the world of the land-bound creatures.
Once docked in port, just before noon, we had the rest of the day to do whatever we wanted in Newport, so we started by walking over to the Hatfield Marine Science Center and looking at all the sea creatures and touch tanks, even though we had spent the last 8 days staring at similar sea life, and even found the ROV Jason pictured in one of the exhibits, which made us all at least a little proud. We then decided to head into town on the other side of the water, so we all started the trek across the long and tall bridge that we had passed under on our way out of and back into Newport on the ship. Standing on top of it was a very different experience, with cars roaring past just feet away and the water at least 60 feet below on the other side of the guardrail, but the views made the risks worth it, our ship the R.V. Atlantis on one side, almost small from this height, and the endless ocean stretching out to the horizon on the other.
Soon enough we were walking down the hill into the small town, similar to how you might imagine an idyllic port city to look. There was a long street along the waterfront filled with tourists and shops, including the town’s one and only boba shop (of course we had to get boba), as well as fish processing facilities, small markets and quaint seafood shacks, offering the classics like Fish and Chips and Clam Chowder. We also spent probably 45 minutes on one pier staring at the dozens of sea lions that had gathered on a small floating dock just below us, their acrid smell occasionally wafting past, breaking the usual chatter of the tourists with their bellowing, echoing cries.
After the sea lion dock, and hitting at least half a dozen different shops, it was around 6 in the afternoon already, so we headed over to the Rogue Bayfront Public House, which had some amazing salmon and halibut fish and chips, and relaxed and talked there for a while while we waited for the sun to go down a little further (quote of the day: “So metal it’s tetanus.” -Atticus).
After that, we headed out to the beach at Yaquina Bay State Recreation Site, arriving there in peak golden hour, the short windswept pines on the bluff above the coast turning gold-orange in the setting sun. We scrambled down the trail to the grassy flats just before the sand, and climbing out of the grasses up onto the first dune, we could finally see the full beach in front of us, a beautiful, almost surreal sight, a series of tall rolling sand dunes stretching out hundreds of feet towards the ocean, like a snapshot of the waves of the ocean frozen in time. It was interesting to think about how, in a certain sense, these dunes were not much different from the ocean waves that had surrounded us for the last 8 days: they were the same size, looked the same except for their color, and migrated across the surface in a series of ripples, only on different timescales.
I guess in a way, almost everything in this universe seems to behave like waves: light, sound, even things like waterfalls or these dunes. In the end, maybe even life has some wave-like qualities: the patterns of life, like the places you go every day, the routine you keep (or try to escape), the traditions you only do on a certain holiday once a year – all of these things repeat in cycles with a certain frequency, like a wave, and also like a wave, despite its repeating nature, its somehow never exactly the same each time around.
As I stood on that highest dune staring out over the waves of dunes below, I wished I could hold onto this kind of feeling forever, but I knew that, even if
I did this same trip again in the future, it would never be exactly the same as it was now. It’s just like walking on sand dunes, or riding over ocean waves: even though you knew that one wave would follow the next, each never had the same form, and none would ever be the same as the last.
I discovered one of the only places in life where you can disregard the effects of leaping off of tall objects is on the beach, where I took a running start and flung myself off of ten foot tall dunes, only to land in the deep, soft sand completely unaffected. As we watched the last light fade over the ocean, I leaped off the highest dune again and again, trying to see how far down the dune I could make it in one jump, like a long jumping competition.
We also spent at least half an hour out in the ocean, wading into the shallow waters at the edge of the breaking waves, and taking pictures, watching the sandpipers run up and down the beach, and just enjoying the beautiful sunset over the Pacific.
All in all, one of the most rare and beautiful opportunities I’ve had as a student, learning how to use scientific instruments in fields I never would have had the opportunity to work in before, seeing creatures and sights that I never could have experienced living on land, and going out into a place on Earth that very few people will ever get to see.
August 15, 2024
What a day. Started the same as always: 11:30 wake up time + lunch, then out to Jason for the first shift of the day. Overnight, we had transited back to the continental shelf, and so this dive was only in about 580 m of water. The first difference I noticed between last night and today was just how much life the seafloor was filled with: countless sablefish cruised the silty bottom, a brightly spotted sole rested right beside our station on the sea bottom, and on top of the station, a small octopus shrank away from the bright lights of Jason, curling itself into a tight ball.
The ROV worked on the station for the next couple hours, the dozens of sablefish cruising past the whole time, occasionally photobombing our cams by swimming straight between Jason and the station.
The dive ended early, and so we suddenly had hours until our next shift, so we ate a post-shift snack, wrote for a little while in the main lab, and then went outside for some fresh air on the back deck. We decided to go up to the upper deck for a better view, where we stood out on the bow in the sunny summer’s day, the warmest day of the trip, for once not even having to wear a coat to stay warm. I noticed an area of dark blue just above the horizon, which I suddenly realized was the shore, a line of low forested mountains rising out of the sea, our first sight of unsubmerged ground in a week.
Gazing out on the horizon, suddenly we saw a burst of steam in the distance, like a geyser appearing out of the ocean, and immediately recognized it as the most obvious signature of the biggest animal in the world, a whale. We all ran (in a figurative sense – again, no running) up to the bridge, where the pilot and first officer Andrew all welcomed us up, and so we watched the whales grow closer, then pass by us on our port side, mostly visible as they came to the surface to breathe, occasionally offering us a glimpse of their tail fins like a quick wave to some strangers they would never see again, as they headed off behind us into the endless ocean.
We would see many other groups of whales over the next couple hours, most too far out to see the animal itself, but some came much closer, such as a whale that surfaced right in the path of the boat only seconds before we steamed right over the mass of boiling water it left in its wake. As we stood there gazing out on the third or fourth group of whales through our binoculars, we started talking about some of the other animals on our bucket list that we hadn’t gotten to see yet this trip, such as dolphins and mola mola (sunfish), one of the biggest bony fish in the world, that could sometimes be spotted in these waters. Suddenly, we heard someone yell out that they could see dolphins on our port side, the side we were standing on, and there they were, only a hundred feet out, frequently leaping clear out of the water, almost doing flips through the air. Another ten minutes, and the dolphins were in our wake, like the whales before them, and we stood there talking about sunfish, until suddenly we heard Andrew on the other side of the bridge yell out that he saw one under us, and a huge one as well.
We were across the bridge to the port side in a split second, just in time to see the massive fish, which looked big even from high up here on the bridge, drift by behind us. It was every bit as cool and weird as I had seen in photos, like a single massive floating head, a disk shaped fish that barely moved, only listed on its side along the surface of the water. Over the next hour, we would see at least a dozen more whales, and another equally massive sunfish drift by, more than I could’ve imagined or even hoped for on this trip. With the amount of beautiful and rare wildlife we had seen today, on our last day at sea, it really did feel like the ocean was giving us a highlight reel of some of its most beautiful and bizarre animals.
We went to dinner straight after, where we ate with the rest of the students at a table, sharing funny stories and our plans for the rest of the summer. It was hard to believe we had all barely talked to each other just a couple days before. Then it was back to the main lab, where I wrote here, then left to go watch sunset at the bow of the ship with Nic, Emily, Dom, and Mike, and got to see some sea lions playing on a buoy just off our starboard side, one swimming towards our boat and leaping high into the air every second or so, like it was skipping across the water. After that, we got to see our first Jason recovery from outside the control van, the dark water glowing green as the ROV neared the surface, then shattered the glassy calm of the evening ocean as it was pulled out of the water and was lifted back onto the boat as the last light of the blood-orange dusk faded from the horizon.
We had plenty of time to kill between sunset and our shift, since it would take until after 3am to finally prepare Jason for its role of moving a massive log off of our cables on the seafloor, so we spent it writing blogs, snacking on some delicious late-night galley treats, and exploring the top deck, the air growing cold as a marine layer materialized above the jet black ocean, making everything further than twenty feet from the vessel dissapear into the thin mist. We were only on shift for around 45 minutes before Nikola and Makayla came in to relieve us of our shift, and afterwards we had our last post-shift meal of the trip, as we would begin our transit back to port in only a matter of hours. It was nice knowing that we would no longer be expected to stay up until 4am every night, but almost bittersweet, as it was unlikely that I would step back into that Jason control van for the rest of my life, and witness the beautiful and bizarre sights that had become almost routine after spending a week gazing eight hours a day into the deep ocean.
COOL STUFF COUNT DAY VIII
Whales: 23(?)
Dolphins: 8
Sunfish/Mola Mola: 2
Albatross: 4
August 14, 2024
Apparently zip ties are the only thing holding together the vast majority of oceanography equipment.
Back on the shift schedule: wake up late, eat lunch, and go straight to the Jason van. Today we were doing dives back at the bottom of Slope Base, two hours and 9,500 feet below the surface, so each dive was at least 11 hours long.
While we were latched to one of the stations, staring at the cameras, I noticed a dark shape appear out of the background, slowly getting closer. Suddenly, I noticed a flap, like huge wings being lifted, and realized what I was seeing was a huge deep-sea skate, slowly flying along the ocean bottom. I got super excited and took a bunch of pictures, being one of my favorite sea creatures (now that I think about it, probably due to the fact they’re so closely related to my favorite sea creature, sharks). The dive lasted all the way to the end of our shift, and wouldn’t end until roughly 7 hours after we got out of the van.
As we were finishing up our post shift meal of chocolate ice cream (out of a 20 gallon container), Andrew and Atticus sat down with us and we got to talk for a minute (quote of the day: “But I wanna taste benzene!” -Atticus) before they recruited us to help build the next osmo for deployment, so of course we said yes and headed down to the Main Lab. There, we helped with the final couple steps of assembling the strangely simple (and also frequently jerry-rigged) instrument of science, and I was somewhat shocked at how little was holding together a device that was going to be dropped at the bottom of the ocean, 2 miles below the surface, for a year straight. We also got to see the skeleton of another scientific device, the infamous MOSQUITO, infamous for its similarities to a bear trap for the scientists setting it up, with 5 sharp needles that snapped down into the sea floor as soon as it was deployed.
Afterwards, it was dinner, blogging, and watching the sun set over the Pacific Ocean, lighting up the cumulus around it pink as it finally disappeared behind the band of clouds hugging the horizon.
Some hours later, and we were getting back in the Jason van for another midnight dive. Tonight, the top of the water column was rich in life, with hundreds of jellyfish, and thousands of small silvery fish, schooling around the Jason on all sides, the glimmering fish lighting up the water like a disco ball as our lights hit them.
After a two hour dive to the ocean floor, the rest of the dive was pretty routine, watching the Jason crew work at various instrument stations while we battled to remain conscious in the period from midnight to 4am. Once we got off, we had a little breakfast, then went to sleep, after another busy but fun day.
COOL STUFF COUNT DAY VII
Skates: 1
Rattails: 3
Herring: 1,000(?)
August 13, 2024
Probably the only piece of knowledge I learned that I’ll actually remember from today is that Hershey’s chocolate has additives that also naturally occur in vomit.
Despite going to sleep after 5am, I was able to get myself up for my noon shift, which is feeling a little earlier every day. In the control room, we were just starting what would be our last dive down onto Axial. In tow, underneath the Jason, we had the FETCH tripod, which looked a little bit like the lunar lander, and it was cool to watch the Jason crew carefully scouting out a landing spot in the barren craggy basalt, before settling on a site and carefully and gently setting down the tripod. We did a video survey of the site, got to see a couple strange spider crabs (one kept trying to crawl into Jason and the other was trying to scale the tripod for no apparent reason), got to see a huge lava whirl, where the basalt flows made a perfect spiral on the seafloor, then headed back up to the surface. With that, we were ready to start making our way back towards shore.
Having planned an extra day into the schedule in case one of the seismometers on Slope Base needed complete replacement, now we had a free day on our hands, and having finished everything we came to do at Axial Seamount, we’re headed back to work on some other stations at Slope Base instead.
Even though we still have 3 full days left on the boat, it feels like the trip is already starting to come to an end. This evening, after dinner, we heard about a rainbow going on somewhere outside, so we all walked outside onto the back of the ship. While we never saw a rainbow, we did see an amazing view, scattered cumulus hanging over the ocean with curtains of rain that were illuminated a golden yellow as the setting sun hit them. It’s hard to wrap my mind around the fact that the distance between us and land is the same as the distance between Seattle and Montana, and that there’s no land in any other direction for thousands of miles.
Since it’s a 13 hour ride to Slope Base, none of us are on shift until tomorrow morning, so it’s one of the rare times when we’re all in a room at the same time. It feels like just as our cruise is coming to an end, our group of students is finally starting to feel more like a group of friends than a handful of individuals that just happened to be on the boat at the same time. Even just hanging out at the back of the boat with everyone and watching the sun set, I can already feel myself start to reminisce about all the cool experiences we’ve had over the last 6 days, even though we’re still living them.
We spent the next few hours in the lab, blogging and working on our projects, and then one by one, people went up to get a snack in the galley, and one by one, we met up together at the table until all of us had transitioned to one table, where we talked about everything from food fun facts (if you’re a fake vanilla fan, don’t talk to Finn about beavers) to a zipline for bananas in Costa Rica. Then we decided to go outside, and walked up to the front of the ship to go stargazing on the clear, warm night, the setting moon reflecting off the perfectly still water, the boat barely rocking despite moving at around 12 knots.
While not as spectacular as the night before, due to the light from the moon, the stars were still amazing, especially for the students coming from Queen’s college in New York, where virtually no stars are visible. We spent at least 3 hours out there, watching shooting stars and satellites streak across the night sky, and talking about virtually everything (quote of the day: “So basically Charlie Brown is a spy” -Nic), especially the state of the world and how us as a generation would change it, or had to change it. It was easy to forget the state of human civilization 300 miles out at sea, where the nearest people were probably those in planes that flew by seven miles above our heads, but also a great place to put it all in perspective, all of us coming from different backgrounds and some of us different parts of the country, yet all isolated on a boat in an area of the world that was completely new to every one of us.
Finally, around 12:30 or so, we all called it a night, as the first shift tomorrow still was at 8:00, so we went back inside and got in bed, and me and Emily were finally able to get a good night’s sleep after so many late nights.
August 12, 2024 Jason having a technical failure isn’t ALL a bad thing.
I woke up at the respectable hour of 11:15 am this morning, and went upstairs for brunch (the ship’s lunch time, for me it was brunch) before getting down to the lab by 11:45, just in time for my shift, which I figured would be in the van. Once in the Main Lab, however, I was told we didn’t have anything to do until Jason got in the water in an hour or two, which eventually evolved into more like 12 hours as it was discovered there was an error with Jason’s ground fault detection system. This required them to partially disassemble the incredibly complicated piece of engineering and troubleshoot it before putting it back in the water for its next dive. However, we suddenly had almost countless hours of free time, something none of us were used to at this point, so we all spent it in our own ways. For me, this meant finally finishing my signal bracelet, and finally starting my research project.
The topic I finally decided on was trying to quantify how much earthquakes varied with the tidal cycle at Axial volcano to see if they fluctuate more as the volcano neared eruption. Followed by seeing if I could use this to estimate the amount of time before Axial erupted again. I don’t expect to finish my project by the end of this cruise, but I do expect to finish it by the end of the year, as long as my main research project doesn’t take too much of my time.
After sitting around working on this project for a couple hours, doing laundry, and finishing the bracelet, I had dinner, then came back down to the lab to write here a little longer. Soon enough, around 19:40, Jason was headed back down to the deep, and so it retrieved the FETCH while I spent a little more down time, enjoying doing nothing before the middle of the night shift.
At midnight, we were back in the Jason van as they went through their launch procedures. Half an hour later, just as Jason was just getting picked up to go in the water, the crew realized half of the latch on the crane wasn’t latching onto Jason as they lifted it, and so they had to go do maintenance on it before they could try again. This second technical error of the day gave us about half an hour to go outside and look at the stars, and it also just happened that the Perseid meteor shower was also peaking that night, so within seconds of leaving the Jason control room, we already saw our first meteor light up the sky just above the horizon, burning a brilliant green that left a streak in the sky even after it disappeared. After that, the shooting stars just kept coming, burning bright yellow, red, and even blue, some travelling large stretches across the sky.
In between meteors, I realized this might be the most stars I’ve ever been able to see in my life, millions filling up every tiny pixel-sized piece of the night sky, the Milky Way visible in incredible detail as an unmistakable pale band that acted like a massive cosmic backdrop to all of the stars and meteors we watched. Being 300 miles out into the biggest ocean on Earth, seeing ourselves in the even bigger sea that was the universe all around us, it was impossible not to be humbled, a speck in a sea that was a speck in a far bigger sea.
We stopped counting meteors sometime after the 15th or 16th one, and even though we were out there for less than half an hour, we saw well over two dozen by the time Joe came back out to tell us they were ready to launch.
We began the long dive down to a mile below the ocean’s surface, numerous squid darting past, as well as many species of jellies that seemed to levitate motionless as we dived past into the black depths where it was always night. As we cruised over the seafloor in the middle of Axial’s caldera, we spotted a large creature wrapped around a rock not far below, a huge octopus. Jason stopped and zoomed in on the creature for all of us to watch, and we spent at least 5 minutes watching it slowly dance across the seafloor, eyeing us warily, probably the most intelligent sea creature we would encounter on this trip.
We spent a couple hours taking video footage of various stations and the hydrothermal vents shimmering next to them, speckled with the beautiful lapis lazuli-colored copper sulfate crystals deposited by the hydrothermal fluids. My favorite site of the night was ‘’Escargot’, a 40 foot tall hydrothermal vent with a perfectly flat top where one of the RCA data loggers was perched, in a seemingly impossible position. On its flank near the top there was also a small natural arch that had somehow formed out of the rock, and almost seemed to make a face when viewed from the right angle.
Soon enough, it was 4am, and even though we wanted to see more of the caldera’s unreal features, it was only 8 hours until we had to be back in the control van anyway, so we had our early breakfast (or late dinner?) and headed to sleep.
August 11, 2024
Some say you’re never more than 3 feet from a spider; out here in the open ocean, I’m beginning to think we’re never more than 30 feet from a shark.
I woke up today around 11:55: as those of you paying attention to previous posts might remember, my shift always starts at 12, so I threw on some clothes and “walked with purpose” (running is not allowed on the ship) up to the Jason van, where I was just in time to take over from Finn and Nic. We spent the whole shift inside the van, as the Jason crew worked with lightning speed to complete 3 dives down to a station at 200m depth in only about 5 hours total. On the way, we once again got to glimpse some beautiful Blue sharks, one of my favorite species as a kid – I still have a tooth from one that I found just down the street from my old house in North Carolina. One almost seemed to bite one of the cables on Jason as it descended, and another cruised right in front of the submersible, perfectly framed in our $250,000 camera.
At 16:00, we finally left the dark van and stepped outside into the blinding sunlight, our first sunny day of the trip, with fluffy cumulus breaking up the pale blue sky that stretched all the way to the horizon in all directions. It was a beautiful sight that few probably get to experience; blue above and below as far as the eye could see, and us sitting in the middle, in that thin layer of the Earth that humans inhabit.
Afterwards, we had our traditional post-shift meal, and not long after that, dinner, which was a series of delicious and unique soups, such as a curried sweet potato soup, an unexpected combination that was probably one of my favorite dishes of the trip so far. After that, we transited out to the ASHES hydrothermal site, our first site on the Axial Caldera and our first hydrothermal field, which everyone was of course incredibly excited about. After only a couple hours, we were there, and Jason went straight into the water, down a vertical mile into the icy depths.
Going in for my shift at 23:45, expecting everyone but us to be fast asleep, I was surprised to find the full student crew there instead, all sitting on the bench glued to the screens like we were watching the Superbowl. To be honest, it was much cooler than any sporting event. The seafloor was a twisting, rolling, chaotic mass of black pillow basalts, which had very little flora growing on their surface, and were only interrupted by the gnarled, blocky hydrothermal vents which suddenly jutted up vertically out of seafloor, their flanks covered in a mass of vegetation that swayed like a field of grass as it was caught in rotor wash from the Jason. T
his dive was set to be a very long one, so we were in the control room the whole time as they moved around sonar beacons, stations, and switched cables while we got to sit in the back and observe the strange and beautiful environment down there on a mid ocean ridge. We then tested water temperatures at different areas to find a good place to set down the osmo we had helped with just the night before, and we found one small crack where the hydrothermal fluids seeping out measured 128° Ce, a huge contrast to the 3°C water around it.
One of my favorite parts of the dive was after they got the camera station back online and turned on its lights, then shut the Jason lights off, so that everything around was black except for the up lit ‘Inferno’ tower (the tallest hydrothermal vent of the dive) above us.
Finally, at 4:15, we were off our shift, and so had the post-shift meal, where we got to sample the ship’s much talked about banana bread, and then finally headed to sleep after another busy day on the Atlantis.
August 10, 2024
This trip has given me a sudden fascination with rattails.
The day started late for me again, trying to change my sleep schedule to fit the 12-4 shifts every day, so I had lunch and immediately went to the Jason van, where I was just in time (slightly late) to take over from Nic and Finn, at the bottom of our last dive at Slope Base. The ecosystem at the bottom there was sparse but fascinating: sea cucumbers, star fish, some small crustaceans, and best of all, rattails (no relation to the hair style). My best guess is they were named this due to their long, pale, slender tails, which instead of being lobed to make a fin, tapered all the way to the end, and almost slithered through the water. Rattails are the most prehistoric looking fish I’ve ever seen, and we even got to see one snatch up an unsuspecting fish in its jaws on camera.
We were relieved of our shift early, at 2, to participate in Nic’s signal bracelet making exercise, part of work she’s been doing on redefining mental health treatment and the role of psychology in improving it. While I still have yet to actually finish one, it was a nice activity to break up routine a bit, and engage the right side of our brains for a change. We then went back to the Jason control room to finish up our shift, on the slow climb back to the surface, and not long later, we were leaving Slope Base for the long haul out to Axial Base, where the second half of our trip would begin.
I helped Julie in the lab with filtering out chlorophyll samples a bit, then went back to the Main Lab to write in the blog, the drizzly night bringing with it bigger waves, which made a deep grumble like thunder as they thumped into the hull.
The nice thing about being in transit was that we didn’t have to be up for our 12 pm – 4 am shift, so I decided to stay up til midnight just to make sure, and was told that I could go to sleep at any point, but trying to stick to my stay-up-late, sleep-in-late sleep schedule, I instead helped out building the osmo, which was to be deployed on Axial Seamount tomorrow, staggering around in the lab as we tried to delicately assemble the device (quote of the day: “Now we just need to get out all of the… (trying to remember the word for air) …not water.” -Alex). After helping out for around half an hour, I decided to call it a day, and went downstairs, gradually making my way to sleep as I tried to decide if the waves made the boat feel more like a cradle or a roller coaster.
COOL STUFF COUNT DAY III
Sea Cucumbers: 1
Rattails: 3
Starfish: 1
August 9, 2024
All good days start and end with a CTD.
After waking up just in time for lunch, where I again tried to sample every food in the galley in the 15 minutes before my shift (the food in the ship is crazy good – shout out to Ben and Sarah) I met the group down in the Main Lab, and we went out and got to witness the CTD getting dropped in the water, then went to the computer lab to collect the Niskin samples (quote of the day: “Quiet down back there or I’m turning this CTD around!” -Andrew).
Not long after, the dive down to the bottom of Slope Base (2900 m), at the edge of the Cascadia subduction zone, was beginning, so me and Emily got back in the Jason control van, and watched as the submersible began its 2.5 hour descent, 10,000 feet down, past numerous surprised squid, who fled in a cloud of ink, to the deepest location of the trip, not far from the Cascadia Subduction Zone, where the Jason crew’s task was turn a junction box..
The bottom of the ocean, as one would expect at this depth, was almost completely barren, filled in with very fine-grained sediment, so that when Jason landed on the bottom it kicked up a cloud which hung in the water for at least 20 minutes afterward, too fine grained to settle out and no ocean currents to carry it away. There, the only sign of life on the barren plain was a couple sea cucumbers, one attached to an extension cable of the seismic station and one slowly, gracefully swimming through the water.
It was an interesting experience to watch the Jason crew plan in real time how they were going to switch out a piece of a seismometer in an attempt to get it back online, and figuring out how to do so in an alien environment miles away, where any movement would create a small dust storm that would obscure all the cameras.
After another delicious dinner, I had a little bit of a break in my schedule, which I have spent writing, playing chess, and watching the sunbeams break through the clouds and hit the ocean.
As the first sentence of this blog may have hinted, the day did end with a CTD as well. This one was the deep profiler, going down almost 10,000 feet right to the bottom, and after we finished setting up the niskin bottles for deployment, we got to see a big shark circling in and out of the lights right next to the boat, which never fails to get me excited.
Then it was just a few hours of writing this blog and working on my project as the CTD collected its samples at the ocean floor and then came straight back up. In the meantime, we helped Joe filter samples for later analysis by PCR to identify the particulate matter from different species throughout the water column, where I got to use a vacuum pump for the first time.
When the CTD reached the surface and was pulled back onto deck at the end of our shift, we got to see the collection of Styrofoam cups, which we had taken down to the bottom and back up, which had shrunken down from a normal drink cup to a miniature shot glass-sized version of their original form in the intense pressure at almost 2 miles below the surface. At this point, it was 4 am already, so we ate a late night/early morning snack and headed straight to sleep.
COOL STUFF COUNT DAY II
Sea cucumbers: 2
Dragonfish(!!): 2
Sharks: 1
Squid: 3
August 8, 2024: The JASON van might be the closest thing to being in the Mission Control Center outside of Houston
The day started off relatively early, breakfast being served between 7:10 and 8:10 in the morning, and unbeknownst to me, would also be my last early morning for the foreseeable future. As we left Newport, we crossed under the massive arches of the town bridge, which spanned the mouth of the river, and felt almost like passing through a gateway out into the endless ocean. As we steamed out of port, sea lions jumped out of the water all around the boat, also getting breakfast, in a much more dramatic way. As soon as we left the breakwater, the first of the ocean swells hit, and soon all of us novice sailors were swaying around, struggling to keep our feet. One of the funniest things to do on a ship in the big rollers is to stand at the end of a long straight hallway and watch someone else try to walk down it straight, watching them sway and bounce off the walls in the unpredictable rocking.
We had a safety drill about an hour after leaving port, I helped with labeling some beakers, and we went to the top deck to see some whales spouting in the distance. Soon, the boat had slowed to a stop, and it was time for me and Emily’s first shift, so we got into the Jason control van, and were anointed by (quoted from one of the other people in the van), a “trial by fire” as we had to learn how to work all the cameras on Jason and how to annotate in real time as the submersible was being lowered into the water, beginning its first maintenance trip of the voyage.
Being in the control van for Jason is probably the closest I’ll ever get to being in the NASA mission control center: the sounds of people communicating over the radios using “roger” and “copy that”, the dark room filled with screens lit up with navigational data and every possible angle from our craft, the Jason, which may not have been a spacecraft, but watching it descend in real time into the icy blackness of the deep, detritus and microorganisms making bright specks like stars as we passed, it wasn’t hard to understand why some people compare the deep ocean to space. As we lowered into the dark blue water, a passing blue shark swam right by the front camera, its left flank briefly taking up the whole view, a super exciting event for a shark fan like me. The maintenance was relatively routine, and we learned our roles quickly, and even got to see two more blue sharks on the way up, one swimming directly at the camera as we rose, which made me only very briefly reconsider whether I still wanted to study geophysics instead of sharks (I had a long obsession with sharks back in my childhood).
After watch, we had an hour of free time before dinner, then 6 hours of free time til our next shift at midnight, which I decided to stay up for. On this shift, we were out on the port deck in the still, quiet, dark night, the distant lights of boats on the horizon the only other sign of humans in the area. Looking down, the water was filled with life, fish schooling alongside the boat, occasionally breaking the surface, and we even saw a shark come up to graze on them, just a few yards from the boat. The real purpose of the shift was to capture samples from the deep with the CTD (device outfitted with niskin bottles an instruments that also measure Conductivity, Temperature and Depth as well as other ocean parameters), so we got to fire some of the niskin bottles at various depths, then transfer the trapped water out and into bottles that would be tested for various measures, such as salinity and chlorophyll. Finally, just when things were seeming to calm down a bit at 3 a.m., someone came down into the lab from above decks and announced they were ready to launch Jason yet again, so we went back up into the dark van and helped with the beginning of the launch, as our shift was taken over at 4 a.m. by Nikolai and Makayla, and we went straight to the galley, ate breakfast at the unpleasant hour of 4:15, then finally went to sleep, after a day that felt like a week.
COOL STUFF COUNT DAY I
Whales: 2
Sea Lions: a lot
Sharks: 4
Squid: 1