Dispatch 11: Day Eleven     Print

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Joey Wenig

October 1, 2014

We returned during the night (after a trip out to station CB-7 for a CTD/rosette cast plus detours for buoys) to station BGOS-A to replace the mooring we had recovered yesterday. The new mooring had a couple of instruments going down with it that I hadn’t seen before, including the TUMSAT device I mentioned yesterday, an RAS-500 (RAS stands for Remote Access Sampler). The RAS-500 is battery-powered and autonomously samples the water at the depth where it is tethered along the mooring array, about 35 meters below the ocean surface. It will collect a total of 48 samples over the course of the next year, which works out to one sample every 8 days. The instrument belongs to Michiyo Yamamoto-Kawai, an oceanographer at TUMSAT. She’ll run a suite of tests on the samples similar to those done on water from rosette casts, giving her a window into water properties during winter months when the rosette casts aren’t possible. The other new instrument, for measuring water pH, comes from Mike Degrandpre of the University of Montana. Data from both will contribute to the broad goal of understanding ocean acidification and its effects in the Arctic.

After the mooring was safely in the water, we headed northwest, stopping at station CB-5 for an evening CTD/rosette cast. My shift ended at midnight, and we were relieved by the night watch just before we’d finished sampling. Time onboard ship is incredibly valuable, and to maximize efficiency, scientific activities occur around the clock. It’s rare for the couch in the boardroom to be without someone sleeping on it. I’ve become used to people wishing me a bleary-eyed “Good morning” no matter what time of day it is. Similarly, I often eat my breakfast at a table next to someone who’s eating their supper, or vice-versa—just another reality of life on a science cruise.