Seaward Bound Scientist

I’m heading out to sea once again! This time I’ll be sailing the Northeast Pacific on a transect from Alaska to Hawaii. The research cruise is part of the U.S. GEOTRACES efforts to characterize elements and their isotopes in the world’s oceans. See: http://www.geotraces.org/news-50/news for a more in depth teaser about the cruise.  I’ll use this blog to share photos and brief progress updates. However, we’re very excited to have Alex Fox  (http://www.alexfoxscience.com/) joining us aboard the ship. He will be relaying our activities and scientific efforts through the cruise blog and social media. 

You can follow us using your favorite options from below: 

Cruise web site and blog: https://geotraces-gp15.com/

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/followGP15/

We are steaming to land! (Almost). After some unfortunate delays regarding Chilean clearance we have elected to skip our last few stations and steam to Easter Island, getting us there a day early. While it is a bummer to unexpectedly lose those stations, we have an extremely high resolution and comprehensive data set and I don’t think anyone is terribly bothered. I say we are steaming “almost” to land because there is no port in Easter Island. This means the boat will anchor off shore and we’ll use a floating dock the deck crew built to unload and load the boat. We’ll pile into small boats from there and jet over to land.

I’ve spent the last week in San Diego, CA eagerly awaiting departure for the next research expedition. While the ship underwent repairs, I took a break and enjoyed what San Diego has do offer - including a wealth of food! Soon we’ll set sail on GO-SHIP P18, which extends from southern California to Easter Island, Chile (also known as Rapa Nui). While on the ship I will be collecting seawater samples to measure CFCs, which are chlorofluorocarbons and humans used to pollute the atmosphere with them when we frequently discarded refrigerants without knowledge of the hazards. Many people may be familiar with Freon, which is a brand name, but the chemical is a CFC: like Kleenex to tissues. We realized that CFCs impact the atmosphere a great deal, especially in the atmosphere where they contribute to depletion of the ozone layer (which protects us from the suns UV rays).  In oceanography, we like to use CFCs as a tracer of ocean circulation. The atmosphere interacts with the surface ocean, exchanging gases. So seawater at the surface picks up CFCs by mixing and exchange at the air-sea interface. Surface seawater circulates throughout the ocean, and gets transported into the ocean interior. By measuring CFCs, we can get a grasp at rates of ocean circulation processes. 

I’ll be writing periodically for this blog, but also some of my entries will be posted at goshipp182016.blogspot.com, which is our official cruise blog. 

Well, to begin, I’m home. My expedition ended on October 12, 2015. In the final few days of the trip, I spent most of my time tearing down my scientific equipment and packing up my belongings. I flew from Dutch Harbor to Anchorage on the evening of the 12th. It was excellent to be back on land, and my first act of celebration on the night of the 11th (when we pulled into port) was to go to Safeway and get some fruit. An apple was all I needed, but boy was it nice. I was all packed by the time we arrived in port, so on Monday morning (Oct 12.) I enjoyed a hike to the old bunkers on Dutch Harbor. The bunkers are a remnant from world war two, and while not much more than stone, they provide an eerie insight into the island’s past. My last two weeks on the ship was chaotic. As began slope and shelf stations, our cast time and transit time was cut significantly. Very often I just finished processing my samples in time to collect another station’s worth. It was tiring, and at one point I hadn’t slept more than an hour (several naps) for about three days. That being said, it was worth it.  I am now in the process of analyzing all of my data. Since I got back on land I’ve been participating in several regional outreach opportunities, primarily to promote scientific learning through the Department of Marine Science here at USM. I’ve been developing hands on learning kits for several scientific concepts that relate to oceanography including ocean acidification and solubility. I’ve also been spending a significant amount of time organizing data and generating preliminary figures of methane distribution in the Arctic. This last week, I spent most of my time learning and helping run samples for barium. Barium is a trace element that the Shiller lab studies. It is an indicator of river inputs into the ocean. This week we used our new ICP-MS to run all of the samples from the expedition for barium. We’ll repeat the procedure, with a few modifications, for gallium and vanadium. Each of these trace elements can be indicators of various oceanic processes such as water mass mixing or shelf interaction. Water mass mixing is when waters from two different conditions begin to mix – in the Arctic water masses are commonly described as “Pacific-derived” and “Atlantic-derived.”

I’m delving deeper into my data every day, and will be presenting a poster at the 2016 Ocean Sciences Conference in New Orleans. I look forward to sharing my preliminary interpretations at a conference to gain insight from oceanographers around the globe.

October 7, 2015 Fall weather has been giving us a run for our money. We had to suspend science operations for almost three days (Oct 1-3). We waited on one station for about 2 days, with winds up to 40 kts, with the hope that the storm would pass or lessen. But, the weather radar and the look outside showed no sign of stopping for several more days. Instead of waiting, and having to cut stations later, we drove southward until we had made our way outside of the storm. The break was great for sleep, but the downside was lots of ship rolling. The combination of lingering sleep and Dramamine had me in a groggy state for the two days of the storm. But, I appreciated all the time because soon as we got on station out of the storm I was put to work.

After we made our way out of the storm we had a 24+ hour station with a bottom depth of 3800 m. Then we began making our way up the continental slope to shallower depths. Across the slope we had about 8 stations – this effort was exhausting. Typically there was an hour or two between each station in which I was able to run my samples and prepare for the next station. Ultimately, this meant close to no sleep for 2 days with naps serving as fuel. The results of this will be an exciting shelf-to-basin transect across the slope with high resolution data. This data will be useful to polar science for many years to come. I’m excited to share more with you once I get my data processed! Today, we were expecting a station in the morning and a VIP to fly in by helicopter in the afternoon. Ultimately, everything was suspended due to 30 knt winds. I welcomed the delay and took the opportunity to catch up on much needed rest. Currently, we are experiencing winds less than 10 kts – hopefully we’ll be operational within a couple hours. We have 6 days left aboard ship and I hope to make the best of them. Although the stormy autumn weather of the Bering Sea may make for a choppy ride.

We’ve had a couple northern lights shows recently. With the cloud cover and the large moon they have been subdued, but still very beautiful. We’ve even had moments of very colorful lights, but they are so quick to come and go you have to catch the moment carefully. I can only hope to see more.