Bering Sea Research Trip Blog
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World Cup Final (and Pat's Birthday)
Posted by Donna Seelbach on 7/11/2010 8:00:00 AM58 02.83 N
169 39.00 W
World Cup Final (and Pat's Birthday)
Pat woke me at 02:00 in time for the last bongo net tow of the cruise. The krill team of Megan, Jessica, and Tracy after a long drought finally caught enough krill to run their experiments. They stopped at the end of the tow to sing happy birthday to Pat. I stayed up to catch up on my blog entries, watch the sun rise, and eventually help Matt with his spatial sampling from the Prod CTD. We have a routine fairly well established so it did not take very long for the work to be completed. The filtrations were finished up by about 09:30 and made our way from the stable isotope van back down to the main lab.
Brian Hoover- If for some reason you are reading this – STOP!
Brian, one of the two sea observers on board, is going to attempt to avoid knowledge of the World Cup Final result until he returns home on Thursday night to watch the game in its entirety. Good luck with that.
Since there is no TV reception on the Thompson, a number of us have been following the games of the 2010 World Cup via internet when we can. Unfortunately the download speed does not allow for live streaming video so we have been dependent on the ESPN Gamecast to follow some of the matches in real time. At 10:30 our time, the play-by-play commentary for the World Cup Final between Spain and the Netherlands was displayed on the computer in the main lab. People kept checking in to see if either team was able to break the 0-0 deadlock. As the game progressed, the frequency of visits increased until by overtime there were seven scientists (including myself) gathered around the screen. We all thought for sure that the game would proceed to penalty kicks when Spain scored to clinch the world championship. Unfortunately, it is not that exciting reading it on a computer screen and we all looked at each other like “That's it? It's over?”
The sediment trap tubes were cleaned after lunch and set out to dry. The work day was done by 15:00 so I took the time to finish Love in the Time of Cholera and watch a DVD on my computer that I borrowed from the ship's collection. The Last King of Scotland is the story of Ugandan dictator, Idi Amin, who rose to power as a “president of the people” only to become a ruthless ruler who in the end killed roughly 300,000 of his countrymen in a mad attempt to hold onto power.
It's shortly after dinner now and I am really tired. Tomorrow promises to be much busier so I think it's time for bed. Only three more days till Dutch.
INTERNAL LINK Comments (0)Four More Days
Posted by Donna Seelbach on 7/10/2010 7:00:00 AM59° 49.83 N
171° 45.92 W
Four More Days
In the lab by 06:00 with a cup of coffee and two chocolate chip cookies, I helped Matt to sample from the morning prod cast of the CTD and run the filtrations in the forward van. Back in the main lab, Matt worked on some more figures from the 2009 cruises while Pat began to type up our portion of the final TN-250 cruise report.
Since I could not help either one of them with their endeavors, I did what I do best. I wandered around the ship talking to people, absorbing everything I could, and taking a few pictures along the way. When sorting through my photos yesterday I realized that I have large variety of pictures of the ocean, volcanic islands, CTDs, multi-corers, sediment traps, filtration set-ups, and the like. All will be very useful when I try to explain to my family, friends, and students what was accomplished this summer. What I was lacking, however, were photos of the scientists themselves, the people with whom I have shared over 4 weeks of my life. With that in mind, I set out to capture the faces behind the science of TN-250.
Tonight will be early night for me. I intend to get up and see one more “night shift” later this evening. The main lab has become a ghost town in the late afternoon and early evening. So much of the science is focused around the prod cast of the CTD in the early morning that by dinner time much of the day's work has been completed. Only 4 more days till Dutch.
INTERNAL LINK Comments (0)Puffins are Camera Shy
Posted by Donna Seelbach on 7/9/2010 9:00:00 AM61° 14.71 N
173° 42.91 W
Puffins Are Camera Shy
I woke up at 05:30 just in case we had to sample from the morning CTD cast at station 155-70M51. We didn't but since I was up I helped Matt conduct his spatial sampling and filtering for pigments that he needed to do for Mike Lomas of BIOS. It did not take long for the two of us to complete the filtrations in the stable isotope lab and a day's work was done well before lunch.
There is not much else to be done right now. We still have two more production stations to sample at, on Saturday and Monday mornings, so we can't start packing up yet. For most of the science teams the vast majority of the equipment will stay on board the Thompson till she reaches her homeport of Seattle several days after departing Dutch. There everything will be packaged onto pallets, offloaded by cranes, and transferred to trailers that will be driven to their final destinations.
St. Matthew's Island was now coming into full view, about 15 nautical miles off our port side. David Shull had brought his Canon digital SLR equipment with him for the trip as well so we swapped lenses for the afternoon. I borrowed his 7-200 f4L telephoto lens and set out to capture some of the bird life that inhabits the northern Bering Sea and David took my wide angle 17-40 f4L.
Most of the birds were extremely cooperative. Murres, fulmars, and kittiwakes all flew by close enough to capture a decent photo, except for the puffin. These chubby little birds, frantically flapping their wings to stay aloft, consistently stayed just out of the range of my lens. There are two types of puffins, tufted and horned, both equally uncooperative with getting their pictures taken. The Horned Puffins are black with white bellies and heads. The Tufted Puffins have bodies that are entirely black and some white on their heads along with some extra colorful feathers. Both species have the characteristic bright beaks and orange feet. The best picture I was able to get was the rear end of a horned puffin as it turned away from my camera. Oh, well.
INTERNAL LINK Comments (0)One More Line
Posted by Donna Seelbach on 7/8/2010 9:00:00 AM62 40.03 N
173 23.00 W
One More Line
Slow day for the Moran group. Small volume thorium and pigment profiles were sampled in the morning from station 145-BN3. This will be correlated with coring data taken by David Shull's team and primary production numbers obtained from Jonathan Whitefield for Mike Lomas of BIOS. We were done by shortly after lunch. Matt spent the rest of the day on his computer manipulating data and constructing plots of last year's BEST data while Pat went to bed on his usual schedule. I read the first half of Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel Garcia Marquez which is both enchanting and depressing at the same time.
Sampling is winding down for Pat, Matt, and I but for some other groups on board the R/V Thompson the end is not in sight yet. At about 18:00 the CTD was lowered into the water at station 148-70M58, the first station of the 70-meter line and the start of our slow journey back south to Dutch Harbor. The 70-meter line is a sampling marathon for the nutrients team, consisting of 58 stations. This line will take roughly four days to complete. The 70-meter depth along the Bering Shelf happens to provide a place to see the interactions between the northern and southern Bering Sea, between the waters of the continental shelf and those of the deep sea.
It is hard to imagine that I will be on the Thompson for only six more days. After 22 days at sea you can't help but settle into a routine and the time has passed faster than I thought it would. I know the last few days of this research cruise will fly by and I will be on the way back east before I know it. I need to take this opportunity to slow down and appreciate where I am before I no longer have the chance.
INTERNAL LINK Comments (0)Where Do We Go From Here?
Posted by Donna Seelbach on 7/7/2010 9:00:00 AM62° 11.99 N
174° 45.01 W
Where do we go from here?
Yesterday was a normal sampling day. I was up well before the morning CTD cast at 07:30 because I had gone to bed so early last night. At station 122-ML3 we sampled 5 depths for thorium, 2 for POC, the normal 7 for pigments, and ran the accompanying filtrations.
We were heading towards the mainland into shallower waters that were frozen over only weeks ago. Hoping the fresh water layer created by the ice melt had not yet mixed with the saltier water below, Pat told me after lunch to keep an eye on the salinity level. I was to take surface samples if the salinity dropped below 30.5 ‰. Unfortunately it never did (31.4 was the lowest I observed) and no samples were taken. I used my time to finish off Lake Wobegon, Summer 1956 and went to bed soon after dinner.
No sampling today for me so I spent part of this morning trying to finalize the girls' soccer schedule for this fall. This would be a much easier task if I was not 4000 miles away from my school and had my calendar in front of me. I'm sure my athletic director's patience will soon wear thin with my e-mailed questions and requests and I will get what I get. I probably plan too much anyway.
We are closing in on the end of the SL line which runs in an east/west direction about 60 miles south of St. Lawrence Island. The Thompson is roughly one day ahead of schedule at this point so a science meeting was convened at 12:30 in the main lab to discuss our options. We are at the northernmost point in our cruise and the yet to be completed 70-meter line will bring us southeast along the continental shelf back towards the Aleutian Island chain and closer to Dutch Harbor. With this in mind, three options existed. We can delay the start of the 70-meter line by one day and sail farther north to sample, take a quick detour in the middle of the 70-meter line to sample someplace new, or add a sampling station or two at the end of the 70-meter line on our way back to Dutch.
The last suggestion of sampling in closer to Dutch was quickly dismissed. This would not allow the scientists ample time to run their experiments after they sampled and before they disembarked in Dutch. The second reason was also dismissed for an equally practical reason. There is a fairly large storm (with 20-ft seas and 50 kt. winds) skirting the Southern Bering Sea and the longer we put off going South, the less likely we were to be affected by it. So by default we will head north.
At the end of the SL line, we were only two nautical miles from Russian waters. The ship turned Northeast on a heading of 43°, skirting the international border, and beginning the newly created BN line. The BN line stands for “Benthic Nirvana” and is comprised of 8 stations along a 120-mile tract in the area of the Bering just southwest of Saint Lawrence Island. This region has a historically high concentration of benthic organisms due its proximity to the St. Lawrence Polynya.
A polynya is a region of polar water that is ice-free year round and can result from one of two things, ocean currents and/or wind patterns or an upwelling of warmer water from below. The St. Lawrence Polynya is the latter type. Ice piles up on the northern side if the island but on the southern side the winds prevent the sea ice from accumulating by driving any ice that forms away from the island. As a result, the area around the polynya experiences an ice melt much earlier in the year than the rest of the Northern Bering Sea. Colder waters mean no zooplankton to graze on the blooming phytoplankton. Thus, when the phytoplankton die they fall to the bottom feeding the benthic community.
As soon as I finish typing this entry I am going to head back to my stateroom for the night. It is now 21:00 and we are scheduled to sample at 145-BN3 early tomorrow morning. I will set the alarm for 05:30.
INTERNAL LINK Comments (0)The Joys of Teaching
Posted by Donna Seelbach on 7/5/2010 9:00:00 AM60° 44.32 N
175° 50.39 W
The Joys of Teaching
I enjoyed a conversation with David Shull, a professor from Western Washington University and chief scientist on the TN-250 cruise, this morning over breakfast. David, like me, comes from a family of teachers. His mom and sister taught at the elementary level and his dad at a local college. Teaching came naturally. I can tell he takes great pride in making sure that his students are pointed in the right direction when they leave his care. He says that the science is incredibly interesting but it is the teaching and sharing of science that he truly enjoys. It shows. Three of his former students have joined him on this summer cruise, their quest for more knowledge due in no small part to David's influence.
TN-250 is his first assignment as a chief scientist. The chief scientist has the unenviable task of coordinating, planning, and overseeing the research groups on the Thompson in addition to finding time to conduct his own sampling and processing. Dave takes his job seriously but no too seriously. He regularly drops by to see what the latest results were and has a laugh that is audible throughout the halls of the ship.
Since there was no sampling to be done this morning, I went out to the after deck to watch the coring team gather their samples. The multi-core has to be first moved into place with a crane before it can be hooked to the large a-frame on the stern. Four to five people are required to steady the 1-ton multi-core as it is lifted from the deck and swung over the back of the ship. At a rate of 20 meters/minute the corer only takes about 2.5 minutes to reach the bottom here. Once it reaches the bottom, it is allowed to sit for one minute to ensure that the pistons have driven the sampling tubes into the sediment. Then it is raised back to the surface where the team is waiting to bring it back on deck.
The coring team on the R/V Thompson consists of 5 members and is headed by David Shull. He is joined by Greg Brusseau and Rachel Allison, former students of David's at Western Washington, and Colin Smith from the University of Washington. Maziet Cheseby accompanies the team as the designated multi-corer tech from Oregon State University.
Both trips to the bottom today were successful, gathering a total of 12 samples of mud. The cores will each be processed in one of five ways. Three cores will be kept intact with the water layer above them and be brought to the cold lab. Here the gas flux both into and out of the sediment will be determined over a three day incubation period. Then the cores are frozen, stored, and brought back to dry land for a CAT scan. The CAT scan will reveal the length and diameter of any burrows created by benthic creatures inside of the core.
A fourth core will be analyzed for oxygen profiles. A fifth and sixth core are sliced at predetermined intervals for porosity and pore water analysis. The change in nutrient concentration can then be determined as a function of distance into the core sample. A seventh core is sectioned in a similar fashion (though not as deep) and is used for pigment and thorium analysis. The last two remaining cores are sieved for benthic organisms which are then preserved in a 10% formalin solution. The nine cores provide a great deal of data but for what purpose?
David's objective in this project is the functional role of macroscopic benthos in nutrient cycling. More specifically, he is interested in the burrows that are created by the benthos. These burrows add not only more surface area to the ocean floor but may also serve as conduits, allowing nutrients deepinthe mud to be released into overlying water. Since the sediment's chemical composition changes with depth, the burrows would permit alternative pathways for the nutrients to either be removed from or recycled back into the water column.
The passion with which Prof. Shull must teach was in full display while he explained the reasoning behind his experiments. The fact that I was a captive audience who desired to gain the knowledge he possessed did not temper his enthusiasm one bit. I can only hope that the 100 or so students that file into my classroom this September will see the same passion in the front of the room.
INTERNAL LINK Comments (0)Grilled Steaks and Flares
Posted by Donna Seelbach on 7/4/2010 10:00:00 AM59° 54.00 N
179° 23.98 W
Grilled Steaks and Flares
I arrived down in the main lab at 06:30 to find posed Beaker in an inappropriate manner which I cannot share here. Matt was quite amused with himself but Beaker I could tell was mortified, he just had this look on his face. The Muppets are supposed to be G-rated. Jim Henson must be rolling over in his grave.
I moved Beaker to a more dignified position and we set about the morning’s activities. The pigment profiles off the Prod CTD finished quickly so I headed up two decks and forward to the stable isotope lab to help Matt. Strapped to the deck of the R/V Thompson are several portable lab trailers that allow the ship to be customized to the needs of a particular cruise and provide extra workspace. If you look at the Thompson’s picture that I posted in the gallery you can see some of these labs just in front of the bridge. The two trailers in the middle are the stable isotope lab and radio-isotope lab while the outside two are simply for storage. There are three more located on the port side of the aft deck, a cold lab for processing the sediment cores, a lab for chlorophyll processing, and a third for storage.
The traps were recovered for the fourth and final time shortly after lunch. Tranquil seas and three deployments worth of experience have refined the sequence into a finely coordinated and efficient process. The brine was allowed to settle and the separations began.
At 17:15 the Thompson celebrated the holiday with Fourth of July barbecue. Dan, one of the Thompson’s cooks, had been out on deck for the past hour or so preparing steaks, hot dogs, and salmon. One of the closed-circuit cameras that was previously trained on the CTD was now focused on the grill. About five scientists had gathered in our corner of the main lab to watch the meal unfold on the monitor. They treated it like the food network, cheering when the hot dogs went on the grill, critiquing his distribution technique, and heaping praise on him when he was able to flip two steaks with one deft move of the tongs. I don’t think Dan had any idea of the starring role he played today.
Logistics prevented us from feasting on deck, so the food was moved into the galley and by the chief scientist’s decree, the science would come to a halt for a while. At 18:00 the captain invited us to the fantail for a pyrotechnic display of epic proportions. Well, not really but it was the best he could do under the circumstances. He instructed us on the use of flares and fired off several parachute flares high into the sky much to the delight of the crowd. Don’t worry the Coast Guard was notified ahead of time.
When the smoke subsided it was back to the lab. Pat retired back to the stateroom to rest up for his 02:00 bongo deployment, leaving Matt and I to finish up. After the initial sediment trap samples of two weeks prior took 72 hours to filter these filtrations seemed to fly by in only a matter of hours. It is now 21:00 and all 20 of the tubes have been filtered, processed, and packaged up. It is time for bed and I’m too tired to read.
Promoted to the Majors
Posted by Donna Seelbach on 7/3/2010 10:00:00 AM59° 54.01 N
177° 00.03 W
Promoted to the Majors
I was down in the lab by 06:30 for the 06:45 standard CTD cast into 136 meters of water. Nine depths were selected from the CTD profile for small-volume thorium testing and 4 depths for POC. The thoriums were spiked at 07:48 and filtering began at 08:48. The POCs were run and soon it was time for lunch. The fish tacos put an end to my 4 day streak of eating nothing but salad and a small bowl of soup for lunch. Resistance is futile. It wasn’t totally my fault though as soup was not on the menu today. That will be another 3 miles on the treadmill when I get back.
Right after lunch Matt and Pat decided to get some sleep and left me in charge. I didn’t know whether or not to take this as a vote of confidence in my sampling and filtering skills or whether they are just burned out completely and really needed some sleep. They would be back by 16:00 to ready the traps for their fourth and final deployment and left me with some work. I stopped the remaining thorium filtrations that had not finished at 12:48 and recorded the volume remaining in the ledger. The filters were removed, packaged, labeled, and set in the drying oven. Then I began the POCs from 98-MN17. Two hundred milliliters fractions of each bottle are run through a pre-combusted glass fiber filter until the filtration slows down to a trickle. The filter is then rinsed with filtered seawater, packaged, labeled, and dried overnight. The four depths selected took about 80 minutes to filter.
By the time I finished, I had just enough time to clean all of the bottles and filters before we arrived at the next station, 99-MN18. I went back to the CTD garage to sample 4 more depths for POC and the above process was repeated a second time. I cleaned the bottles again and brought them to the CTD garage because we would have a third round of sampling after dinner. Matt and Pat arrived back in the lab and we set about preparing the traps. The 10% HCl solution was drained from the tubes, then they were rinsed three times with deionized water, and finally filled to the brim with brine. We carried them out to the back deck and headed to the galley for dinner.
After a nice spicy bowl of gumbo it was back to work. The CTD had just returned from its voyage to the bottom and we had 17 bottles to fill, 11 for small-volume thorium and 6 for POC. Halfway through, Pat and Matt went to deploy the traps off the fantail and I finished up gathering the samples with the help of a few gracious friends. I spiked the thorium bottles and set them in the filtration housing just as Matt and Pat returned. Since there were 6 tedious POC filtrations yet to be done (and we all hate doing them) we agreed to do 2 apiece. Matt went first, then Pat so he could go to sleep, and finally me. I used the 40 minutes before my turn to start catching up on my journal entries. I had to finish up July 1st, and write my entries for the 2nd and 3rd. Thankfully I carry around a little notebook to write things down in as they occur so it was not too hard to recall what happened on those days.
It is now just short of midnight and tomorrow might be another long day. I need to be up by 06:30 for a 07:00 CTD cast so I will be heading to bed soon… maybe after a quick chapter or two from Lake Wobegon.
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Where's the Sun?
Posted by Donna Seelbach on 7/2/2010 10:00:00 AM59° 54.00 N
173° 23.99 W
Where's the Sun?
Pat, Matt, and I were at breakfast by 07:15 so we could finish in time to sample the 08:00 CTD. 10 bottles for small-volume thorium and 3 more for POC and we were back in the lab. After “spiking” the small-volume samples with the necessary reagents, they were set aside for one hour while the POC filtrations were started.
Just before we turned on the vacuum pump for the thorium bottles, bad news was delivered by the coring team. David Shull came into the main lab and informed us that they were unable to extract cores from this site and they would try again at the next station, 91-MN10. This was unfortunate because whenever possible Pat and Matt like to correlate their data with that collected by the sediment core team. Since we would not be able to finish our filtrations in enough time to repeat the process at the next station, we dumped our bottles, cleaned them out, and prepared them for another go around.
Thankfully the coring team came through at 91-MN10. The POC and small-volume thorium samples were finished by 17:00 and it was time for dinner. I was back in the lab 45 minutes later, cleaning and preparing for the next round of samples.
Then I hit the proverbial wall. The weather is starting to take its toll on everyone, myself included. Pat told me when I first got here that the Bering Sea is just a million shades of gray, nothing more. He was dead on. I last saw the sun about two weeks ago and should have appreciated it more. My new definition of a nice day is when I can actually see the horizon through the fog. At least when I was in the Arctic and I did not see the sun for a month I could at least gaze up at the countless stars and waving green ribbon of the northern lights. Here I get no such satisfaction. The 20 hours of daylight serves no purpose when you can't see a thing. Moral would improve immensely if, even for just an hour or two, we could all go outside and soak up a few rays of sun. I already have a chair picked out in the lab that will be going outside with me.
I went to bed early. No Lake Wobegon yet.
INTERNAL LINK Comments (0)A Day with John Steinbeck and Bill Murray
Posted by Donna Seelbach on 7/1/2010 10:00:00 AM 59° 54.316 N
168° 21.938 W
A Day with John Steinbeck and Bill Murray
The alarm came quickly at 05:40. I stayed up later than I should have last night unsuccessfully trying to finish Into Thin Air. I am two chapters shy of the end and hope to have them read by the end of the day. The NM line commenced at 06:15 with a standard CTD cast. We have been experiencing some problems with the CTD recently. Some bottles carrying samples to the surface are leaking when they arrive on deck and others are not firing (closing) when directed by the operator to do so, lowering the carrying capacity of the rosette. The techs have tried to remedy the situation by replacing the o rings on all of the bottles in an attempt to stop the leak and rewiring the connections to ensure that corrosion of the wires is not at fault. The bottles have also become increasingly difficult to reset after cast so I have been called on to lend some muscle. Anyway I can help out if fine with me.
The water is very shallow this close to Nunavak Island, only 23 meters deep. As a result, only three samples were taken off the standard CTD cast for small-volume thorium filtrations. Somehow, Jonathan was able to come up with seven different depths for the phytoplankton survey so I ran my usual filtrations. They were completed and the filters packaged and frozen by 10:30. Because of the low salinity (29.6) I took another surface sample from the CTD cast at 83-MN2, labeled, bagged it, and headed upstairs for lunch.
Not that I was in great shape before this trip but it will take me weeks if not months undo these four weeks. Gaining weight on a cruise is a given. There is an endless supply of good food and the options for exercise are somewhat limited. The ship does have a small fitness room but those of us 5’8” or taller would find it difficult to run on the treadmill without encountering the ceiling on every stride. I am hoping the weather is nice when we get back to Dutch for I intend to walk right down the gangway and to the top of Mount Ballyhoo (the 1800-foot high mountain that overlooks the entrance to Dutch Harbor). It will be nice to get out and stretch the legs a bit.
After lunch it was cleaning time. Every piece of plastic Nalgene lab ware (nobody uses glass at sea) including sample bottles, graduated cylinders, filter holders, frits, tubes, caps, and funnels has to be rinsed three times thoroughly with deionized water before it can be used again- on busy days up to three times a day. Once completed, my only other duty was to watch the salinity reading on the computer and see if it was worthwhile to grab another surface sample for uranium levels.
I quickly finished Into Thin Air and went upstairs to the library. I needed something a little more light-hearted so I decided on John Steinbeck’s Tortilla Flat. This story was much more uplifting than its predecessor but now all I think about is how nice it would be to just relax under a tree on a warm day with a freshly baked baguette and a good bottle of red wine. I finished that book shortly after dinner and grabbed Lake Wobegon Summer 1956 by Garrison Keillor off the shelf.
But Lake Wobegon would have to wait until tomorrow as it was movie night in the lounge at 20:00. Apparently I am one of the select few on board that has not seen the oceanographic staple, The Life Aquatic with Bill Murray. It was weird. A bunch of guys dressed in powder blue wetsuits and red knit caps searching the ocean for the elusive jaguar shark. This is done while fending off Southeast Asian pirates and their rival oceanographers who are much better funded. They tell me that it this is one of those movies that you appreciate the more you watch it. I don’t know about that one. It might be a while before I put that to the test.
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