Not the end of the world, but the middle of nowhere

Are we there yet?

Yesterday (US tonight) was 11-11-11. Full moon... Friday... and we’ve crossed the equator for the second time already! There might be a ceremony involved. I’ve heard rumors circulating. I asked the Chief Engineer what his plans were for the weekend and he said he was going out on the town. Everyone does the same exact thing every day so it was funny to still be excited by the idea of Friday. You can only really tell what day it is by our proximity to Sunday – steak night.

Two nights ago we watched our first really great sunset. The sun finally set into a super orange sky while the huge moon was rising on the other side of the boat, white and even brighter than the sun with clearly visible craters like I’ve never been able to make out before. The next morning we woke up and the situation was the same! We were going north instead of south because we turned around in the middle of the night after checking up on a buoy. So the morning moon/sun set/rose on the same side that it rose/set the night before. This doesn’t normally happen in your home does it? Must have been a crazy night if it did...

We made it to our actual destination yesterday, if you can call it that. So we’ve stopped moving and the ship motion is actually a little more intense. Instead of going head first into the waves, making them feel kind of choppy, we are now just rolling slowly as the waves pass underneath our ship. The wavelength of the wave is much longer and therefore more noticeable. I heard one person got a little queasy last night, but everyone else has been fine. The breeze is also lighter now that we are stationary. Scientific excitement immediately started bubbling on the ship once we stopped because now all the ocean measurements can begin. They constantly lower and raise up probes which collect data about the ocean temperature, density, amount of light that gets absorbed or scattered vs. depth, salinity, and turbulent kinetic energy. Some instruments go down 1000 m into the sea. Lots expensive stuff hanging off all the sides of the boat basically.

Let me explain a little about what the water looks like out here – completely blue and empty. Think nautical navy blue. Apparently, we are so far from land and vegetation that there are very few organisms in the water for fish to eat. I knew the water and air would be very pristine out here, but I didn’t expect to find what they call  “dead water” - not supportive of life. Normally when I imagine pristine nature untouched by man or other outside influences I think of lush vegetation teaming with wildlife. It’s the exact opposite out here. You need the coral reefs and the land to support the ocean ecosystem. However, now that we are stationary we are starting to serve as the new, hip ocean hangout spot. Some material will start to collect on the bottom of the boat and fish will learn our ship can protect them. These must be nerdy fish because they get really excited about our instruments. We saw fish jumping around last night when they put down some of the ocean probes. This is true around our deep ocean moorings too. We drove by a couple of these moorings on the way to our station to make sure fishermen weren’t taking advantage of our instruments. It’s common for people to fish around moorings and buoys because they are known to attract fish. However, we want to be left alone out here because of the P word.

Speaking of which, we had our first pirate scare yesterday around 4 pm! All drills on the boat are announced ahead of time, so they warned us that if an alarm went off unannounced, it would not be a drill. So the bell rang constantly for about 7 seconds (different bells mean different things, for instance the fire alarm is a pulsed alarm). Then an announcement came on from the 2nd mate, Melissa – “This is not a drill, this is a pirate alarm, everyone should head to his or her pirate safety room immediately.” We mustered and did roll call. I could tell this was the real deal when our Resident Marine Technician (our team leader, more on this person below) announced, “Alright, I know you don’t necessarily know what to do right now because normally we have a pirate drill before we have a real pirate encounter. So listen up...” My coworker Owen had to rush out of bed for all of this because he was still sleeping before his night shift started again around 6 pm. Turns out that even though we are out in the middle of nowhere, a small fishing boat with no communications systems had found us. The mates and captain had been watching them approach us for a long time from up on the bridge. We think they were just a curious fishing boat intending no harm, which is the same situation that happened on the last DYNAMO cruise. They kept coming closer to us though until the captain rang an impressively loud whistle at them. This apparently gave them the right idea that they needed to leave because they acted accordingly after this warning signal. We were all sent back to work without having to enact the full-blown pirate hide-and-seek protocol.

This is the way the Res Tech position was described to me: (Resident Marine Technician)

“I am the mediator between the scientists and the ship crew. I’m here to make sure you guys can do your job and that no one gets hurt. I am also the person you should talk to if you need something from the ship crew. If you come to me asking for a small metal rod with a thingy on the end and grooves all around, I’ll tell a crew member that you need a screw.” This reminded me of the time I asked my dad for a screwdriver with the single flat pointy edge. The Res Tech knows how all the science operations work on the ship and will be there to oversee and help conduct them. He was there for the initial loading process at the very beginning of the experiment when they brought all our science toys on board, helping decide where everything would go. Sandbox over here, swing set to the left, slides on the back of the ship, swimming pool on the west lower level... So if you are near the water lowering some instrument overboard by a cord, which could wrap around you and pull you in the water or knock you over, you have to wear a life jacket and be with the Res Tech who can radio for help immediately. The bridge is notified via radio of every single operation we perform, always making sure we are clear to proceed and that no one was hurt. You don’t do anything on this ship without someone watching you.

More Revelle Revelations:

(Our boat is named after Roger Revelle)

There is a smelly person on board. His stench follows him in a 3-foot radius. I am wondering how long it will take for me to suggest they shower! I brought this up to another non-smelly person and we laughed because it’s not like we are out on a storm chasing field project like VORTEX where you might not have the time or access to a shower... but here you can just go down one flight of stairs at any time of the day to clean off. I’ll just try not to breathe through my nose.

The ship was restocked with food, supplies, fuel, etc when we were docked in Thailand. Apparently all the plastic bags in entire country are in Bangkok right now though because of the flooding emergency. So we will probably run out of trash bags on this cruise! We throw all non-plastic (biodegradable) material and waste over board periodically. Don’t worry; it’s not in plastic bags when we send it into the sea. All plastics are separated from the rest of the trash before hand to be incinerated.

There are different codes about what you can throw overboard depending on what part of the world you are sailing in. The laws get REALLY strict when you go north of 60 deg for instance, Valdez, AK anyone? The chief engineer told us that the laws are relatively lax near Antarctica though... an environmental hazard waiting to happen?

Our ship is a busy beehive. The science team works around the clock to either launch weather balloons every three hours, lower probes in and out of the ocean constantly, or operate instruments via the computer - this describes my desk job with the radar: no manual labor, life vest, or hard hat required. Meanwhile, the ship crew is constantly fixing, cleaning, or maintaining our vessel and all its nooks and crannies. Something always needs to be taken apart, taken care of, and then put back together again. The Chief said their entire job is to make sure the scientists can do their job and that we all stay safe. Otherwise there is a lot of paperwork to be done. Plus, IT COSTS $42,000 PER DAY TO OPERATE THIS SHIP. So you don’t want a little overlooked issue on the boat to cause a big delay in the science operations.

I’ll reiterate how interesting the people on this ship are. There's something about a person who spends most of their year in this exciting, somewhat dangerous, very efficient environment. It’s different from everyday TV, Internet, shopping, text messaging, distracting US culture life. The people on board are all very REAL, genuine, and down to earth. Everyone is here for a reason: they are motivated and very good at what they do, so we are all making the most of our time out here together. The science on the ship is really booming too. I’ve learned so much more by talking with other scientists in person and helping them with their instruments than I ever would have by reading a textbook or sitting through a 15-minute presentation at a conference.

Whet your appetite

The first swim lesson you ever took was probably just learning how to blow bubbles in the water, unless your parents decided to just throw you in the pool or you accidentally fell in. Since this is my first aquatic adventure beyond competitive sports, I feel like I'm blowing bubbles again!

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As to why I am here?

As you may or may not know, I am currently on a weather/ocean research boat, the R/V Roger Revelle ~ 220 ft long, 50 ft wide, about 9 stories tall including the uppermost look-out deck. I've loved being at sea so far! We left from Phuket, Thailand on Nov 6 and won't return to land until Dec 10. I am just one of many scientists on the ship who are part of a 6 month field campaign to study what we call the Madden Julian Oscillation (MJO), a subtle weather pattern of thunderstorms that propagates slowly around the world along the equator. Since this weather phenomena initiates off the east coast of Africa and begins its trek across the globe in the Indian Ocean, we know it is uniquely linked to the ocean. This multidisciplinary field campaign was planned to try to understand how this air-sea disturbance begins, and why. There are over 15 universities involved, 13 countries, and at least 4 national science laboratories. Our current understanding of the MJO is mainly observational - we can see it, watch it move, watch it affect the weather and climate all around the globe - this includes El Nino, rainfall patterns in the Americas and Europe, monsoon systems, you name it. However, we haven't been so successful at forecasting the MJO, and current climate models don't perform very well because the MJO is very important part of the global climate system, but it is also one of the weakest links - goodbye! No, we can't just forget about it, we need to learn more about it. Our project is called DYNAMO - DYNAmics of the MjO.

I am one of two weather radar scientists on the third of four research cruises on this boat, which is the NE observation station in a square-ish research observation array. We've got another boat to our south and then two island observation stations making up the NW and SW stations. Lots of people and instruments looking at the same darn thing - hopefully we can make some sense of it in the years to come. For instance, I will use some of this data for my PhD project at Colorado State University. I have a coworker on board (another grad student from the Univ. of Hawaii) and we work 24/7 with alternating 12 hour shifts. I have the day shift :) We also have a NASA radar engineer on board who knows this particular radar very well.

Life Aquatic with Liz

We had our first major work hiccup today, our external hard drive malfunctioned and we had to deal with a bunch of error messages on our radar computers. But we managed to resolve all these issues within the first 24 hours of the job, both of our first 12 hour shifts. As our radar engineer said, "It's like Apollo 13. we made it through our first hiccup, now we just need to make it around the moon and back to earth." The radar got turned on two nights ago around 12 AM. We will keep cranking away until they tell us to turn it off again on our way back to Thailand. We can't scan close to land, so we had to wait about 31 hours after we left port to turn the radar on. We are headed to the middle of the Indian Ocean, which will take almost 4 days total. We can't tell anyone or post where we actually are on the internet because our location is top secret! Can't tip off the pirates... more on that later. Seriously, not a joke to anyone around here. We have been moving at about 15 kt since we left port. Other large boats can be seen around us, less and less as time goes on though. They say most of these ships are transporting cargo or fuel (crude or finished product).

We did man-overboard, abandon-ship, and fire drills yesterday. This involves life jackets, gumbi scuba suits, SOS calls for help to Coast Guard around the world, hats, alarms, and launching inflatable life rafts overboard. The man-overboard situation specifically requires you to keep an eye on the bobbing person in the water the entire time, you must not take your eyes off of them otherwise you may never spot them again, then you have to yell for help from someone else. For abandon ship and/or fire, the crew might be busy controlling a situation or putting out the fire, so the scientists might need to be in charge of inflating those life rafts and throwing them over board! If we had to abandon ship, our alarms would immediately signal our distress in many different ways across the world, and we wouldn't have to wait probably more than an hour until someone came to save us by plane or boat, most likely from Diego Garcia. However, there are food/water supplies on the life boats to last you almost a week with careful rationing. Think Life of Pi.

I've slept very, very well since being on the boat. The waves make you feel like you are being rocked to sleep in a cradle. When we are staying in one position (not in transit), the bow thrusters will go on and off to push us into the right place. These apparently sound a lot like a very loud vacuum cleaner moving up and down the hallway right outside your room. Especially my room because we are right next to the bow. I can also hear the waves smashing against the side of the boat in my room. No one has gotten sea sick - including me! The food is AMAZING. Lots of variety, delicious baked goods, vegetarian and meat items, tropical fruit. Walking on the ship and working out (balancing yoga poses) are somewhat difficult. You have to step tentatively because the rolling of the sea and the ship hitting the waves while we are in transit jostles you around. The seas have gotten rougher in the past 12 hours because we passed beyond the last set of islands, meaning we are in the open ocean. Everyone could feel a difference fairly quickly. We've been told stories about a very rough seas incident in the dining hall with a runaway economy size jar of jelly beans and a poor crew member ending up in the corner with lots of chairs piled on top of him. All doors must either be latched open or closed because there is a definite possibility for swinging doors to smash your fingers at any time. When in a room with lots of other people, it looks and feels kind of like everyone is in a whirl pool or lazy river together because you are standing around, talking, or eating just like you normally would, but everyone's head and torso will bobble from side to side at the same time and in the same way. Or you'll all instinctively throw out an arm or stumble while walking down the hall. It's synchronized entertainment. The younger contingent on the ship has planned a salt water hot tub on the main deck, which is being filled today. The air outside is always breezy, warm, and humid. It rains often, and at times very heavily, but immediately before and after these showers its incredibly sunny! There is absolutely no indication that it is November.

My schedule for the next 32 days:

3:45 AM - wake up

4-5:15 AM - workout using P90X dvds with the cook (woman named Asha) and another NOAA scientist (male named Derek) in the break room, then Asha quickly makes eggs for the three of us since we are all starving and then she goes to work in the kitchen for the full ship breakfast preparations, I get ready for work.

5:45 AM - go to computer lab to meet Owen a little before his shift ends, catch up on what's happened over the last 12 hours, any issues that I need to be aware of or work on during my shift

6 AM - start my shift, send out the 00 UTC radar summary from the previous 24 hours to the DYNAMO operations catalog (everyone in the entire field campaign reads this, plus it's publicly available I think.)

7:30 - 8:15 AM - walk up one floor to dining area to get some coffee, fresh baked muffins/breakfast breads, fresh tropical fruit. Enjoy these goodies in the dining hall with everyone else quickly or on the stern (backside) of the ship while watching the amazing sunrise over the Indian Ocean (think bright blue and yellow, soft whites and pinks, big bellowing clouds near and far)

What to do in between meal times while I am also working:

walk outside to see clouds and for fresh air periodically during my 10-15 minute long breaks, unless busy with computer stuff. I am either writing in the science log, resolving or troubleshooting some issue, or setting up the next radar scan. I can also walk over to other science lab rooms to learn about their instruments, data, research, etc .There are 7 different science focus teams on the ship: ocean mixing/currents, weather balloons, air/sea fluxes, weather radar, lidar, aerosols, and ocean optics/imagery. It's the first time I've been on a science project not completely made up of weather people, in fact we are just one of the groups, so we get to do more explaining, interpreting, and learning. Fun for the whole family! The ping pong table is also always open for a challenge.

11:30 AM  - 12:15 PM - lunch in dining hall

4:30 PM - daily ship science meeting in the library ~ walk in and out as necessary since I need to change radar scans at the :09, :19, :39, :49 minutes of the hour. We go over the DYNAMO daily report, which we download from our main website. It contains all the small- and large- scale current conditions in the atmosphere and ocean, plus forecasts. We also talk about the research we are currently working on, anything exciting that we found in the past couple days, any projects we want to collaborate on.

5 - 6 PM - dinner in dining hall

6 PM - done with work! Write a summary of the 12 hour shift, brief Owen on the highlights of the day.

6 - 8 PM - ping pong, cards, movies, reading, other work, emails, WATCH SUNSET = incredible, talk with others, star gazing.

7:30 PM on Wednesdays - Skype conference call with all major observing sites in DYNAMO array plus principle science investigators in the US. Apparently the connection is pretty poor, but it works.

Pirates, not another sequel please!

We do the pirate drill next week. Major incentives for pirates to bother us include:

1) constant feud between pirates and Americans, they will either kill us on site or take us hostage. To date, Somali pirates have killed 14 people and taken over 300 hostage. After the NAVY killed a bunch of pirates, they vowed to take revenge if they caught any of us.

2) we are in a NAVY boat, which would be a huge prize for them

3) we are federal scientists so they could ask for billions of dollars instead of millions in ransom

4) they aren't really that interested in our scientific equipment, even though all of it is EXTREMELY expensive and valuable, but they would probably sell it on some market or for scrap metal

5) they may or may not know that we are unarmed, but we are able to maneuver 360 degrees very easily and quickly, we are much larger than most pirate ships, and we have water cannons.

There have been suspicious pirate encounters on these research boats in the past, one of which was on the previous research cruise last month. The ships either positioned themselves so that we were constantly facing them - letting them know we were ready for them and poised to take action, or we circled around them quickly many times and almost sunk their smaller ship in a whirl pool. There was another situation in 1996 where some pirates on a small, inconspicuous fishing boat were asking for water over the radio, holding up empty water jugs, asking for food, etc. Our ship told them to go away, we didn't want to help. They wouldn't go away, so our ship sailed around them really fast to see the back of their ship, which revealed more men waiting with weapons. Since their plan was foiled, they went away and everything was fine. But in the next couple weeks, some pirates played the same trick on another boat and ended up getting on board their ship, killing everyone, and taking over the boat. Good thing that wasn't us! In the event of a real pirate attack on this boat... we perform our secret pirate drill which I'll have to tell you about in person because pirates are searching the internet for this kind of insider information! For instance, normally the SCRIPPS research boats publish our exact location and live images of what we are up to on the internet. However, we are in pirate territory so everything is being kept on the down low. We don't know how much English pirates speak/read but we must err on the safe side.

Oh the people you'll meet...

One of the greatest things about the ship experience is the people. Many people on the boat (57 total out of the 65 max occupancy) are SCRIPPS / Univ. Calif San Diego employees who rotate a couple months working and then a month or so on vacation between the R/V Revelle and R/V Melville, which are both SCRIPPS science research ships. Most scientists on board are in ocean related research careers which brings them to sea on field projects much of the time. Basically, way more often than most of us desk-job scientists get to spend time near the water. The chief scientist that I will be working with a lot for my PhD project has already spent 3.5 total years at sea during his research career. He says the ocean time feels more like the real world to him. The research comes alive and you get your hands dirty... or in this case, get your hands wet. Everyone on the boat has traveled a lot, experienced many walks of life, and is generally very excited and good at what they do. I'm accumulating ideas about more traveling/trips/activities I'd like to pursue or plan in the future. The ship's crew who mainly fix and maintain things around the ship (very important!) are great too because they all seem to have big personalities. Reminds me of working for the forest service and being around the fire crew.

The captain, 1st, 2nd, 3rd mate, and chief engineer literally run the ship, no matter what the chief scientist says, even though he is also a VIP. All of these people on the top of the totem pole get larger and better bunk rooms on top of the ship above the main deck where you can't hear the bow thrusters at night. The chief engineer and the captain helped design this very boat (finished in 1996 by the NAVY). They said they had to take it apart after the NAVY was finished though and then put it back together their own way so that it would actually work. Either way they have been with it since its very first planning meeting. They command respect, but are also very laid back and funny. Conversations are enlightening, revealing a completely different way of life. Every aspect of ship life and work has a reason and a rhyme, unlike other jobs where you are constantly frustrated with feelings of "Why do I have to do it this way? Who thought this up? What were they thinking when they planned it this way?" At sea, there is no room for error or inefficiency, and everyone is so close that issues get hashed out pretty quickly one way or another. I went up to the bridge where all the mates and chiefs work yesterday morning and yesterday night to see what it was like up there - very important ship watching, navigation, communication business. They work 4 hours on this top level deck/look out area call the bridge, 8 hours off, 4 hours on back at the bridge, and then 8 more hours off so they don't get too bored or tired while on watch. They fulfill other duties on the decks below during some of their 8 hour "shifts." The black box in the bridge records the last 24 hours of every conversation up there. Everything goes into super dark night-mode once the sun goes down so they can watch for any rogue ships in the moonlight (which is really bright!). Pirate ships probably won't have lights on, and neither will a random wooden fishing boat. Every ship is supposed to have a few lights on though, one lower in the back of the ship and one higher up in the front of the ship so that you can tell where the ship is headed simply by looking at it. The sonar system on board also tells you what the ship name, origin, type, heading, etc. Then you can look up that ship number online in a ship database to see actual pictures of the ship and more information. Fancy schmancy. I asked some of the mates/chiefs/captain about the stereotypes that have developed about working with scientists all the time - they wouldn't tell me what they were but they assured me that I've already fulfilled some of them. Something about walking around and being curious about everything and everyone. But they all agreed that they like the energy of the younger scientists, as opposed to some science groups who either keep to themselves or are sort of "over it," as if they've seen it all.

The only time on the ship that I've felt uneasy or anxious was the first afternoon when I was below deck in my room by myself unpacking. But being with everyone else, working, and being outside is a complete blast. I really am enjoying my time out here. It's nice not to have to go shopping, cook, clean, plan activities, or commute (even though I do miss my bicycle rides around Fort Collins). It really lets you do your job well and more efficiently. The schedule is repetitive, but can be relaxing in this way. A welcome relief after the hectic preparations for this trip.

More about DYNAMO:

http://www.eol.ucar.edu/projects/dynamo/

I've posted some pictures on facebook of her majesty the R/V Revelle and of time spent enjoying Thailand before we got on the boat. When we get back to Thailand I’m going to do a sea kayaking trip to some other islands nearby, enjoy some Thai massages, eat more spicy food, and maybe go on an elephant trek.

I'll send another update at some point!