August 27, 2024
Today marks our first day at sea, we set off at 8 am from the port of Newport on the R/V Atlantis which will be our home for the next two weeks. I have never been out to sea for research before, so it was a new experience getting onto a vessel of this size and style. The R/V Atlantis is a 274-foot research vessel that houses the facilities to operate two types of submersibles as well as other oceanographic equipment. The two types of submersibles onboard are known as Alvin and Jason. Alvin is free swimming human occupied submersible that has had many iterations over the years with the most modern version located on our vessel. The other type of submersible is known as Jason, which is what we will be using on this cruise. Jason, unlike Alvin, is a remotely operated submersible that is tethered to the ship by a fiber optic cable that provides power and communication. This allows for dives to last much longer since the vehicle does not need to come up for dinner.
Our first stop was to replace a Deep Profiler vehicle located at the Oregon Offshore site about 5 hours offshore of Newport. An instrumented Deep Profiler is a device that travels on a cable up and down the water column multiple times a day collecting all kinds of data that is then reported back to land via a fiber optic cable. I was lucky enough to be on the first watch of the ship, so I got to be in the control room while Jason went in the water for the first time. As a student on board the ship, I am responsible for a 4 hour watch every day when Jason is in the water. While on watch, we are tasked with controlling the video recording and event logging. These tasks are split between two students on the watch. Today I was responsible for the video logging, which had me flip through the video feeds grabbing screen grabs of the feeds when interesting events occur. I also had control over the 4k video feed. Due to the large file size associated with 4k video the 4k camera cannot constantly be recording so instead I am in control of when the feed starts and stops.
Before I discuss the last thing we did today, I have to discuss the food onboard the Atlantis. I was incredibly surprised at the quality of the food we are being served onboard. Tonight, for dinner we were served crab and homemade chicken parm. Both of which were some of the best foods I have had all summer. As someone who has eaten MREs for days while camping I was expecting something more along that vein, but instead our stewards have been preparing 5-star meals for us at every meal. Even for breakfast they made fresh pastries for us.
The last thing we did after dinner was learn to prepare, launch, and recover a CTD. CTD stands for conductivity, temperature, and density and is a package of electronics that allows for real time data as it descends to the bottom and then as it is hoisted to the surface it collects water samples in Niskin bottles. This water collection step is done from the surface and allows for water samples to be acquired at prescribed depths. Once we brought the CTD back to the surface we collected Salinity, Oxygen, and Chlorophyll samples from certain Niskin bottles of interest.
Tomorrow we will be travelling to Axial Seamount for the entire day as the conditions at sea are currently rough so we will be traveling slower. Hopefully I will get a chance to see some interesting wildlife or possibly help do further chemistry on the samples we collected.