24HRS OF SCIENCE
I'm going to give you on-the-hour updates for 24 hours! Yes- I'm staying up (with naps) for 24 hours. If anyone feels that I deserve an extra chocolate for my service, I agree but you should know I'm not allowed to accept gifts on a government-funded cruise 🫡 You could just send me an encouraging message instead- I'm so ethical 🥲
I'm 7 hours in, so I'll catch you up real quick on what's been happening so far. Then: 17 more updates omg
6pm: I’ve just finished dinner. The ship is slowing for arrival at station 22 after an afternoon of transit.
7pm: I’m headed out on deck to film the seafloor camera going into the water. We just finished our detailed mapping of the seafloor at this station, which we do first at any potential sampling spot. The green lines on the top screen are flat- we like flat sites because it means everything happens at our target depth and our equipment is less likely to get stuck underwater.
8pm: The chief scientist and the science crew are in aft control (just off-screen to the right in this picture), watching and directing the seafloor camera (on-screen here) and talking about how to sample this site.
9pm: I’ve just filmed the camera coming out of the water and I'm above the back deck, waiting to film the sled going in the water. The ship is transiting back to the beginning of our science runway.
10pm: The ship is slowly moving forward and paying out the cable for the sled, to lay it out on the seafloor before coming to a stop and pulling in the wire. See the sunset stripe in the middle left of this picture? It felt like sunset in the 6pm picture!
11pm: The sled team is processing the samples that just came up on deck (small, delicate, alive things). The ship is headed back to the top of the science runway so they can put the net in the water to see what bigger things are hanging out on the seafloor.
12am: It’s shift change time, just after the midnight meal, and many people are awake. They’re all waiting for the sample work to start- it will be an hour until the trawl net comes up and needs to be processed.
1am: The trawl is up! Sponges and sea stars and worms slosh into this giant box and the team sorts as fast as they can as detailed as they can. The "A" bucket in the bottom left has big spiky worms in it and the bucket in the bottom center is full of sea stars. There are about 20 other buckets off-screen to the left.
2am: The trawl team has brought all their buckets inside so the ship can reset again, this time in an ice-free-ish area. We're staying still now to put down the giant circle of gray bottles in the center left of this picture, behind the silver bars. That machine opens the gray bottles one-by-one at different depths in the water column, so we get really good background information on the water at this site.
3am: It's happy chaos in the trawl team's lab- they have great speakers set up in there. Their sorting becomes more detailed, down to species if they can get there, using glossy posters and 3-ring-binder guides they've made from pictures of stuff they found on earlier expeditions.
4am: They're getting ready to put down the "megacore" (not to be confused with the "multicore", which has a smaller number of smaller tubes). It's another sit-still situation for the ship, because this thing has to go straight down and neatly jam its tubes into the seafloor. Cylinders of muddy bottom stick inside the tubes exactly as they were organized in the ocean, so we can look at the difference between the top of the mud v. inches into the seafloor.
5am: We didn't get cores! How long do we keep trying before we give up? That depends on the why: do we think cores didn't come up because something went wrong with the machine, because it's difficult for the tubes to jam into the seafloor, because the seafloor leaked out of the tubes once they were jammed, or something else? Today we decided to move to another station while someone looks at the camera footage to figure out the why. We don't think it's machine failure since that hasn't ever happened before, so it's not likely that trying again to get mud would work any better. Holly's team collected a few lumps of seafloor that came up, because some sample is better than nothing for them.
6am: We're moving full-speed now to the next station. The trawlers finished their sorting sometime in the last hour and their lab is totally cleaned and deserted. It took about 5 h for their team to deal with the trawl from start to finish, and they had about 6 h of on duty time (when they needed to be ready to jump into action). They're still on-shift and technically on duty, but this is why the 12 h shift works well for our teams. Even when we have stations close together, it's unlikely that any one team will have to do intense work for more hours than are in a typical workday. And somebody's awake all the time so we can start science any hour of the day and do as much science as possible.
7am: We just wrapped up finding out how much we don't know about our next location (conclusion: we could start doing science at any time, as soon as we run across a spot with our target depth). We spend a lot of time staring at this screen, which live-updates the time to our next approximate station based on our current speed and direction. But we also ask around to see when the last time was that the captain and chief scientist talked. There's real tension now between avoiding storms, staying in a safe bit of ice, and maximizing our remaining science time.
8am: Now that we're in transit, everyone has split up. We get the NYT crossword on a multiple-day delay- this one is a Sunday puzzle and is taking us longer to finish than normal. Other folks are writing, analyzing data, or taking a break- I've seen a Harry Styles coloring book out recently.
(Note that all these updates are for scientists only- I don't want to invade the crew spaces because they have different schedules than us and live on the boat in a full and different way)
9am: I'm working on a photo project now. Some of the scattered folks are playing games in the 03 lounge.
We have about 18 h until a storm hits us, so we're looking for a good spot to get some cores for the mud teams before we have to do storm safety things. We thought we were headed to a spot with good depth, but then the continental shelf dropped out from under us. ETA is now ???
10am: Sunrise! Another disgustingly gorgeous day. It's so, so nice to see the sun after a few days of clouds. And every ice landscape is new and full of details to love like I haven't loved from any other so far.
11am: The ship has split into 2 groups: those of us who function normally when we don't know the plan, and those of us who MUST KNOW THE PLAN TO FUNCTION (🙋). I assume the calm people are in the 02 lounge watching a movie. I'm walking too fast between looking at the ice (why are we stopped??) and listening to the ship's radio from my desk (why did they just call her to the bridge??)
12pm: IT'S HAPPENING- surprise science!!!! We stopped a few times today during our transit and this time they said they think we can get mud. So we're sending down the megacore! But the gears and other mechanical parts are frozen because the windchill is -30. The techs usually have some lead time to warm it up, but not today! Right now they have a heater and hair dryer on the back deck trying to get the instrument into the water without it all freezing together.
1pm: They're still heating up the megacore : ) We just held a graduation ceremony for someone who's missing theirs back home this weekend. I don't have explicit permission to share their private moment with you, so you'll have to imagine it based on this doodle, which somebody used to prep for making them a lovely card.
2pm: Still a beautiful day, still waiting for the megacore to heat up. I heard from someone who overheard part of a conversation that maybe we're going to try and ride out a storm here, so maybe we're not supposed to feel like we're in a hurry? One of the science crew is having a very warm and confident talk with a scientist about how being humbled by the elements sometimes is just part of working out here.
3pm: Change of plans- we're preparing for rough seas now (including busting out the crane on the back deck). I don't envy the Captain, pilots, or anyone else doing the tough work of keeping us all safe out here, and I sure do appreciate how well they're doing it!
4pm (late because hey, it's a miracle we even have internet!): I was out taking head shots on the bow. SO many scientists have old pictures of them on websites, but not Holly's group! (starting when we can upload these after we get back LOL)
5pm: We're on the move, but we're not sure where. Folks have started taking seasick medication so it's in their system whenever we might hit some waves. We're all still scattered, doing our own waiting activities, so I'm sharing our loved ones collage with you- I've been waiting for an excuse to show you this door ❤
6pm: I did it- 24 hours of hourly posts! It is so energizing and so exhausting to have a once-in-a-lifetime experience this intensely ALL THE TIME.
A bunch of us went out to the bow for sunset. Since we don't know where we're going yet, we don't know how much ice we'll wake up to. I got sad wondering if it's our last day in the ice, but dinnertime was a nice consolation 😊
Good evening and goodnight, everyone! I may take the weekend off to recover. I'll get you some videos next week.
🥱 Virginia