Research Cruise

Breakfast

• Pancakes
• Egg scramble
• Yogurt
• Fruit
• Cream of wheat

Lunch

• Tomato beef soup
• Beef ribs
• Cheese ravioli
• Garlic rice
• Salad bar

Dinner

• Lobster
• Grilled sirloin
• Garlic potatoes
• Chinese noodles and sausage
• Salad Bar
• Chocolate cake

Weather

Winds SW at 28 knots, seas 2-4 feet

Position

S 43° 17.97′ E 147° 23.97′

Yesterday, we got a few CTDs in before the wind picked up, at which point we headed in and stayed a very comfortable distance from the shore – to shield us from the winds mostly, but also to dangle the carrot of port before us…

Nevertheless, these past few days have gone fast; despite the weather there has been much to do on board, from sorting the last coral samples to packing everything up and stowing things away.  We’ve been compiling all of our visual data – all of the HD footage and frame grabs – as well as cleaning up our sorting and cleaning stations, taking apart our nets, and generally getting everything ready so we just have to take things off the ship when we get to port.  Most of our coral samples will actually stay on the ship until it comes back to the U.S.; Nithya is taking some samples with her on the plane, but a majority of them will be stowed down in the scientific stores of the Thompson.  Our first stop in Hobart is to switch out Jason containers, and then we’re back to the CSIRO dock to unload and get our land legs back!

Meanwhile, there has been quite a commotion in Hobart as a Dutch Vessel, the Steve Irwin, has been trying to gain permission to dock.  The controversy surrounds the ship’s mission, which is to deter Japanese whaling vessels in the Southern Ocean.  A loophole in Japanese law allows “research” ships to catch a small, but not insignificant, quota of whales every year for the supposed goal of scientific research, but most end up in the Japanese fish markets.  The Steve Irwin has been antagonizing the Japanese whaling fleet for some time, including using some rather drastic tactics – the last captain apparently rammed a Japanese ship on the open ocean!  They have been very successful so far in deterring the whaling fleet, and have chased several ships out of whaling territory.  However, their rather militant tactics have gotten quite a lot of press, and the Japanese government has urged the Australian authorities to deny the Steve Irwin port for refueling and restocking.  The fact is, however, that about half of the crew is Australian, not to mention the ship’s name itself!  The Steve Irwin has finally been granted access to port, and is berthing not too far from the CSIRO docks, so we might see some protesters, hopefully from a comfortable enough distance!

Breakfast

• Egg scramble
• French toast
• Sausage patties
• Cream o’ wheat

Lunch

• Polish Sausage
• German pancakes
• Salad bar

Dinner

• Rack of lamb
• Broiled salmon
• Wild rice pilaf
• Penne pasta
• Salad bar

Weather

Winds from the south at 6.2 knots

Position

Steaming to the Tasman fracture zone

Sadly, our trip up North was for nought…the weather did not improve by nighttime, and didn’t look like it would get any better by our scheduled time of departure of today at noon.  The main problem was that the swell was of a very short period, so the boat was rocking a lot, making a Jason deployment very tricky and dangerous.  On top of that, the time it would take to get down to the required depth – 3600 meters – is around 2 hours, and we had little time as it was, so the dive would have been awfully short.

So much for that – at least we weren’t getting tossed around for five more days South of Tasmania.  We’re heading back South now though, towards our next destination, the Tasman Fracture Zone.  This is a pretty fascinating feature, and results from tectonic action between two plates.  Fracture zones occur perpendicular to plate boundaries, as a result of linear motion over a spherical surface.  Take, for example, a partially inflated balloon, and cover it in clay.  As you inflate the balloon some more, cracks will start occurring in the clay.  Another way to think about it is to consider wrapping a piece of paper around a balloon – you will inevitably get folds in the paper, because it it being wrapped around a spherical object.  The one thing this model neglects is the fact that the crust of the earth is actually made up of multiple plates, all interacting linearly with each other.  But the premise is the same – at the boundary regions, or at the interaction between two plates, the linear motion between them causes these fractures to occur to compensate for the spherical nature of the planet.  The Tasman Fracture Zone accounts for much of this compensation between the Antarctic and Australian plates, and extends from just Southwest of Tasmania all the way down close to Antarctica.  We’re heading to the northernmost tip of this fracture, which consists of a cliff face with more than 3,000 meters of relief!

What’s more, this face is the first the waters coming from the West have seen for a long long time; we’re hoping that it is rich with corals and other life.  We have a relatively small weather window of 36-48 hours, so we’re really going to try to maximize our depth coverage and lengthen the sample collection regimen, maybe up to collections every 200 meters (versus the previous 50 m collections).  Our longest dive was 50 hours, and we were able to cover about 700 vertical meters.  We’re hoping to cover around 1000 meters in the vertical on this dive, starting around 3800 meters – the deepest we’ve gone yet by over 1000 meters!  This should be an exciting dive; there has been little mapping of this area save the bathymetry work of the Southern Surveyor and some other ships; ABE dives were not conducted in this area so we have not much information about the microbathymetry or the flora and fauna.  The idea that these waters might carry many unused nutrients leaves the prospect of a flourishing community, although it might be that our solitaries will be outcompeted by other creatures like sponges.  However, our corals seem to enjoy high current rates, and are found in great quantities on ledges and outcroppings.  So we hopefully will see tons of corals along this steep cliff face!

Menu

Breakfast

• Bacon Scramble
• Grits

Lunch

• Beef barley soup
• Tuna melts
• Salad bar

Dinner

• Baked soy chicken
• Broccoli
• Boiled potatoes
• Seasoned wild rice
• Salad bar

Weather

Seas 17-20 feet, winds around 15 knots.

Position

Steaming to St. Helen’s seamount, 148° 47.17′ by 41° 14.34′

Today was another fairly uneventful day; we got some swath bathymetry of Cascade, and are steaming to St. Helen’s to do some bathymetry there too before our dive tomorrow.  It’s been very interesting to see the change in the weather over the past few days – there are two main types of waves that affect the ship.  One is the swell, which is consistently around 15 feet during the storm.  This is manifested as long periodic waves that are fairly predictable.  The second type are the wind waves, that form from the wind whipping up water off the top of the swell.  These waves are non-periodic, much less predictable, and also increase the overall height of the swell sometimes as much as twofold.  Right now, the wind has all but died down, so there’s nothing to do but heave and roll on the large swells – these swells still make diving with Jason very risky.

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So since none of us were really doing much during the heavy weather, I got some time to interview Akel, the lead navigator of the Jason group for this cruise.  Akel works for the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution as a contractor, and currently lives in England with his wife.  Although Jason is run through WHOI, most of the work is contracted out; of the 10 Jason crew members,  “only 3 or 4 of us are actually employed by WHOI,” Akel says.  Akel grew up in Massachusetts, and later moved to Hawaii.  He got a Bachelor’s in geology and a Master’s in geophysics, completing his thesis under Paul Wessel, the creator of GMT (a very common and powerful mapping program).  After his graduate work, Akel stayed in Hawaii as a sonar specialist, working with data systems – UNIX and Linux processing scripts.  He first started working as a data processor for Jason 2 when it was first was released.

The job of the lead navigator is mainly to serve as a liason between the Jason crew and the chief scientist about where he wants to go.  This includes preparing maps, and, in Akel’s case, do some GMT troubleshooting “if the chief scientist finds out I’ve worked with it before” – as is definitely the case on this cruise. Akel does admit it’s “fun to play with old tools” every once in a while, though.  The Jason crew has several ways of tracking Jason once she’s on the seafloor.  One way, which isn’t used on this cruise, is to lay down a series of transponders before the dive, and set up a “transponder net”.  Once Jason is in the water, the pilot and navigator can triangulate to Jason using this net.  Jason is also equipped with a sonar, which gives the van a picture of the sea floor using doppler techniques.  A second way to get Jason’s exact position is to use the ship itself.  In order to get Jason’s exact bearing, the ship is held on station (in one place), Medea is positioned under the ship, and Jason is positioned under Medea.  Now, any inconsistencies in the doppler sonar are reset with the exact bearing from the ship’s GPS.

The main job of the navigator, during a given dive, however, is to drive the ship.  The Jason crew is given control from the bridge during a dive to make sure that there are no communication errors, which could lead to Jason getting pulled by the tether, which is very dangerous on an uneven seafloor.  Jason, being a *remotely* operated vehicle, is tethered by Medea via a fiber optic cable, and Medea is tethered to the ship via a similar cable that is spooled out of the aft A-frame winch.  All data, be it camera feed, position, depth, etc., is all relayed via this tether, so one could imagine that a sever or kink would be disastrous to Jason’s livelihood.  To control the ship and prevent Jason from getting dragged around by the ship’s movements, the navigator takes advantage of a glitch in the Dynamic Positioning System (DPS) that  the ship uses.  Basically, the control van tricks the ship into thinking its actual position is where the navigator wants the ship to go, say, half a degree to the West (this is a large distance, but we’ll use it for explanatory purposes).  The ship then recorrects its course, and heads to this new spot, all the while thinking it was just trying to stay at its original position.  This way, the navigator uses the DPS to move the ship where he wants it to go, all the while making the ship believe it is constantly correcting its course to stay at the same position – pretty neat!

This is Akel’s third consecutive Christmas at sea, “And definitely my last,” he says.  The Jason dive schedule is already set for next year, and thankfully no dives take place over the holidays.  Jason cruises take up about 5 months, and are generally well-spaced throughout the year.  Some of the most interesting dives Akel has been a part of (other than this one, of course) took place along the Ring of Fire, that is, the Marianna volcanic arc.  They got to dive around active volcanoes, see a lake of bubbling liquid sulfur, and one time, witness volcano actually erupting in front of Jason – surely a sight to behold, and to run away from!   Vents are also up there on Akel’s list, but become a little more mundane “when you’ve been down to them 20 times”.  Akel has also worked on towed sonar systems and commercial Autonomous Underwater Vehicles (AUVs).  

To provide some backstory here for those who don’t know, there are three basic types of underwater exploratory vessels – the autonomous vessels, such as ABE, are completely programmed and unmanned.  This of course sacrifices a lot of flexibility in the vehicle, and these types of vessels are usually restricted to mapping and taking some basic footage.  For example, we used a lot of ABE-generated maps from last year on this trip.  Then come the ROVs, which are used in all sorts of areas, such as working on oil stations or nuclear power plants or deep submergence scientific work.  The nice thing about ROVs is that they are completely controlled, and are very flexible in terms of what they can do and where they can go – Jason is rated to about 6,500 meters depth.  The only downside is that they must be physically connected to the ship; there is no way to transfer all of the data necessary to pilot an ROV wirelessly.

Alvin is a manned submersible commonly used in deep submergence work, and can dive as deep as 4,000 meters or so – which is plenty for the kind of work it does (mostly focused around the hydrothermal vents at midocean ridges).  There is a large debate right now – much farther reaching than just the deep submergence community, too – about the pros and cons of manned exploration vehicles into inhospitable areas.  For one thing, it surely is a thrill to dive down to a hydrothermal vent and see with one’s own eyes the life that surrounds it.  But the scientist is limited to a 10-inch glass porthole through which to see; not to mention the danger of being so far removed from help if something were to go wrong on the seafloor.  Jason, on the other hand, is completely remote, and is equipped with enough sensing equipment – and in our case, even an HD camera – that a science crew can extract just as much information from a Jason dive as an Alvin one.  Also, Jason is capable of being underwater for days at a time, whereas Alvin’s dives are limited to 10 hours.  This debate can also be extended to outer space: is it reasonable, or even feasible, to send a manned mission to Mars?  What benefits are there from such a mission?  There are certainly limitations to the current Mars landers, and I feel that human curiosity will get to the point that a human expedition will be inevitable, but I still wonder if it is necessary to do so.  I would love to hear people’s comments about unmanned/manned exploration vehicles!  When asked about the Alvin-Jason argument, Akel says that, although physically being 3,000 meters under the sea would be ridiculously cool, “Alvin never seemed to be that enticing,” mainly because Alvin dives 8 months out of the year – a long time to be at sea! 

Apart from fooling ships into going where he wants them to and being part of the Jason crew, Akel’s other passion is surfing.  In moving from Hawaii to England, Akel jokingly concedes: “I traded in the North Shore for the North Sea,” and admits that the surfing is just okay across the pond.  But, the perks of being a Jason crew member is that you get to travel all around the world, and a lot of times leave port from some pretty exotic places – Tasmania, Fiji, Tonga, Samoa, the Galapagos – just to name a few; all of which Akel has surfed.  As to the ships that the Jason frequents – the Thompson, Atlantis, Roger Revelle, Ron Brown, and others – the Thompson is definitely his favorite; mainly because of the layout and the great crew on board.  It’s good to hear this is the favorite of some Jason veterans – it certainly takes the heavy seas well!  Look forward to some more interviews of crew from around the boat – I’m sure we’ll get some more down time as the cruise progresses.

Menu:

Breakfast

• Veggie and egg scramble
• Grits
• Bacon and sausage
• Fresh fruit (the melon was primo!)

Lunch

• Grilled cheese
• Potato and leek soup
• Tuna wraps
• French fries
• Salad bar
• Roast beef
• Steamed broccoli

Dinner

• Spaghetti with meat sauce
• Green beans
• Rice pilaf
• Vegetarian lasagna
• Salad bar

Position

Southwest of the Sisters, at a small seamount named the Dory.

Weather

Winds up around 40-50, although a high-pressure front is coming through: hopefully we’ll be able to get in the water by tomorrow morning!

So we spent a good deal of the morning trying to figure out the dredge issue.  Let me present it as a word problem:  The dredge is strung out behind the boat by a length of wire, and since we’re moving on the surface, the dredge is trailing us at an angle, known as the “layback”. What we have to figure out is how long that wire has to be in order for the dredge to drag along the bottom.  In order to determine this, we have a tool called a “pinger”, which sends pulses of sound that bounce off the seafloor and then back up to the ship.  The pinger is attached to the dredge line, about 150 meters up from the dredge.  To muddy the waters, this pinger, if not directly below the ship, bounces its sound waves at an angle off the seafloor back to the ship.

Fortunately, the layback is small enough that this bouncing does not confound our pinger measurements very much.  The layback ratio, or the ratio between the length of wire out to the distance from the dredge to the surface, is around 1.02 – 1.08.  If we do some calculations, we find that a change in this trawl ratio changes the pinger signal by under 10%, which is a small enough error to be able to still accurately determine our position on the seafloor.

Given this information, and a flat seafloor, it should be relatively easy using trigonometry to determine the depth of the dredge.  However, the seafloor is anything but flat, especially when you want to dredge across a seamount.  So how, given the uneven topography of the seafloor, do you pinpoint exactly where the dredge is on the bottom?  Now, it is really a matter of lack of information; given enough iterations we should be able to generate a good intuition about where it is.  If we know the starting position of the boat, and the exact heading, as well as the bathymetry (the topography of the seafloor), we should be able to narrow down our dredge mark.

Unfortunately, with the prevailing 35-knot winds, we’ve had to cancel operations for the rest of the day. However, it seems that a high pressure front is moving in sooner than expected, so with any luck, we’ll have Jason in the water again bright and early tomorrow morning.

To address Justin’s comment to this process of dredging and sampling from the seafloor, I’ve definitely had the same doubts about the costs versus the benefits of doing such sampling.  Compared to the larger fishing trawls, our tiny dredge doesn’t make a huge dent in the reef.  Although I must admit that science does also operate under the “bigger is better” mantra: there is a dredge called the “Sherman” that the group used last year on some seamounts that would no doubt leave a very large mark on whatever seamount it was sampling.  Regardless of sample size, our focus is also primarily on fossil corals; that is, material that is not alive.  There are other science crew aboard that collect live samples – you can get paleoclimate data out of live samples, especially to reconstruct reef position over time on the seamounts, and taxonomists are still discovering and describing species from this area.

I like to think that our sampling is sparse and selective enough to not have much of an impact on the reef community as a whole.  However, in an already impacted zone that’s trying to recover from serious overfishing, our small sampling could seriously retard reef regrowth in this area.  Indeed, this whole area is a Marine Protected zone, which means that no fishing of any kind can happen here, and any live coral taken from the seafloor must be catalogued and reported back to the Australian government.  We had to get special permits to travel here – most Australian vessels are banned from operating in these waters. Moreover, our “sparse” sampling is potentially targeting very long-lived individuals that have been part of the reef community for decades, and maybe even centuries; it is no secret that corals take a very long time to grow, and their presence is an island to many fauna that are closely associated with it and he environment it creates.

The bottom line, though, is that our single cruise takes such small transects of the available ecosystem.  We sample up and down contour lines with a field of vision of about five meters; we really have no idea if what we’re seeing is even indicative of the entire ecosystem on these seamounts.  Even a large dredge like the Sherman, taking up literally a ton of material during a single dredge, impacts an incredibly small area of the Southern Hills.

The real ecological threat here might be the vast amount of carbon dioxide we’re releasing into the atmosphere by steaming in a big boat – the tank of the boat holds 285,000 gallons of diesel fuel (!!!!!) and even when idling in one place, the boat burns 1600 gallons of fuel every day.

Maybe we would be better off taking video of the whole thing and looking it at a screen, but there’s something about discovery that lends itself to dissection and destrucion – Human curiosity isn’t satisfied until we have really “gotten to the bottom of something”.  And now I wax philosophical, which means I’ve spent way too much time thinking and writing about this.  People’s thoughts and comments about this are encouraged, though!  I’d like to hear what people think about the ecological friendliness of our cruise, dredging, sampling, or anything!

Menu:

Breakfast

• Egg scramble
• Pancakes
• Fresh fruit

Lunch

• Grilled beef and mushrooms
• Sweet and sour pork
• Rice
• Carrot and potato soup
• Salad bar

Dinner

• Barbecue beef brisket
• Cheese tortellini
• 3-cheese sauce
• Satueed zucchini
• Salad bar
• Baked pumpkin
• Herbed potatoes
• Almond fudge brownies

Weather

Absolutely beautiful – heavy winds in the forecast

Position

Launch: 44° 14.505′ by 147° 7.630′

On bottom: 44° 14.5747′ by 147° 7.3810′

Now that we’re in 24-hour operations, Jason can basically stay down on the bottom as long as weather permits.  The key to this mode of operation is to use elevators for all of the payload we collect on the seafloor.  An elevator is basically a weighted platform with several large buoyant glass spheres attached at the top – there’s a photo of one in the HD picture gallery.  We can load and secure our gathered samples onto the elevator, release weights, and it will float up to the surface for us to pick up from the boat.  It’s amazing that with some glass and a metal frame, we can drop something down farther than a mile, load it up, and send it back to the surface – if only it were that easy on land!

So we’re starting to the Northeast of a fairly shallow seamount to collect corals from shallower depths – this will allow a greater range of ocean mixing analysis when we date our samples.  We’re hoping to land Jason around 1225 meters, and work around a knoll whose summit is around 1075 meters, collect some samples, and then work our way towards the larger peaks of about 700 meters.  We’re approaching from the Northwest, because most of the fishing trawlers come from the Southeast – this way we’ll maximize our chances of finding non-impacted zones.  Moreover, the Sherman dredge last year came up with literally a ton of material from this side of the ediface, so we know we’ll have some sampling success.  We can also use this dredge mark as a way to sample inside the reef – since the top of the reef will have been removed, we can search for samples deeper down; these samples will hopefully be of an older age and thus more useful for our paleoclimate work.

Also, Ron was able to successfully keep some live corals alive in his tanks in the holding bay!  There are some pictures here of polyps in the tanks, as well as the rather humorous treadmill situation in the workout room…

Menu

Breakfast

• Cheddar and links scramble
• Fruit and yogurt
• Oatmeal

Lunch

• Beef Tacos
• Refried beans
• Rice
• Mexican spoon bread
• Chicken soup
• Salad bar

Dinner

• Beef tenderloin
• Yellowtail steaks
• Garlic mashed potatoes
• Rice
• Steamed broccoli
• Salad bar

Weather

Clear and sunny, clouds in the distance

Position

Dredge: Southern ridge of A1′s summit

We tried dredging today – back to the founding technology of oceanography!  The dredge is an oceanographer’s workhorse, and one of the original “Remotely Operated Vehicles”: it’s basically a large rectangular mouth that feeds into a net – this mouth is dragged across the seafloor, and collects anything that it comes across.  Although not the most ecologically friendly device, if used properly, it can have minimal impact and give a really good sense of the diversity present in a given area, because it gathers up everything it comes across.

Conversely, Jason is a very selective sampler; although we have videos of everything in front of her, Jason can only collect what she can grab and hold in her limited payload.  We used the dredge to help get some coral samples from depths that we haven’t harvested from- pinpointing exact depths weren’t really necessary (the depth error with a dredge can be quite large – up to 50 meters or so), and we were looking for a large bulk of samples.  Unfortunately, our workhorse wasn’t really working too hard…the first dredge came up with nothing save a lone sea star.  The second and third dredges came up with slightly more material, but our net was nowhere near filled.  So we did get some nice solitary corals, but overall, the dredge’s success was limited.

We’re hoping to go into full 24-hour operations with Jason starting bright and early at 6 AM tomorrow morning – this means we have 4 hour shifts and three groups, so 4 hours on and 8 hours off.  This is a much more typical way of running operations, or so I’m told…

The target is a seamount to the West of the Sisters, where the Southern Surveyor did a dredge last year.  This seamount has also been heavily fished, so we’ll approach it from the opposite face that the fishing trawlers typically approach it from, to hopefully find non-impacted sites.  We also want to run across the dredge mark, to see what it sampled, and the depth of the dredge.  That’s it for today; more on the dive tomorrow!

Menu

Breakfast

• Sausage patties, bacon, and spam
• Egg sandwiches and spam
• Coconut pancakes and spam
• Fresh fruit and spam
• Cream of wheat and spam
• Spam, spam, spam, and spam

Lunch

• Barbecued pork
• Roasted chicken
• Rice
• Roasted stuffed peppers
• Chicken soup
• Salad bar

Dinner