Some pretty sights and Nutrient Analyzers!

Post written by Charlie:

Good evening everyone, I hope you're all anxiously awaiting another Bering Blog because I've got one for you. I've begun the process of getting into a nighttime working schedule, and while it is difficult, I believe I'm making some headway. I went to bed after breakfast around 7:30 am and woke up shortly before supper at 5:00 pm. Thankfully I was refreshed and ready to go to work, however I took a slight detour to the bridge instead. For all of you who aren't familiar with layouts of ships, the bridge is basically the control room of a ship. That's where the captain drives it, steers it and controls its speed and direction. It is also very large and the crew members are very accommodating in showing you around. [From webmaster: picture of Healy bridge (inside) attached].

The weather here in the late afternoon was spectacular and much different than you are used to seeing on television. There was a wide open sky filled with the soft glow of a waning sun accompanied by a gentle springtime breeze that was neither too cold nor warm. The sunlight shimmered off the relatively calm waters on into the horizon. All in all, it was a very beautiful day and from what I gather from talking to the various crew members, it was a rare one as well. Hopefully we'll have a few more days like that before I get off the ship.

After my sightseeing tour was done, I delved back down into the bowels of the ship, commonly referred to around here as the science labs. My 60 year old roommate even went so far as to call it a dungeon and I'm disinclined to disagree with him. Anyway, I went to help my lab mate get some sediment samples from the sea floor that we pulled up a few hours previous. It's a nasty business which is almost sure to get you wet and muddy. That didn't take too terribly long, especially since we practiced on an empty container the night before. After that was finished, I decided to take a look around and ask a few people what they were up to. I asked a guy named Calvin that I had met a few days ago what he was doing. Cal's a funny guy and nice to hang around so I figured that he'd tell me what it was he was working on, crack a few jokes and I'd leave all the more educated. Not so. It seems I found him in need of help and eventually, sleep, so being the nice and curious guy that I am, I helped.

It seems that he was trying to get a machine called an NAS, which stands for Nutrient Analyzing System, or something along those lines, to work. Apparently this machine had an on-board colorimeter, complete with all necessary chemicals to operate it and a computer to run it. For those of you who don't know, these chemicals are added to sea water to test for different things. For instance, if it was testing for nitrates in the sea water, it would add different chemicals to the sea water than it would for something else. When these chemicals meet the water, a chemical reaction takes place that turns the sample of sea water colors. This colored sea water is then injected into the colorimeter and the more colorful the sample of water is, the more nitrates are in the water, for example. All of this is mounted onto a single device and this machine is meant to be deployed out to sea for from 2 to 12 months at a time, all the while performing its programed duties over and over until the scientists come back to retrieve their machine, now full of recorded data from all of its automatic experiments. It's a fairly complex device and still has a bit of work left to be done to it, but that can wait for tomorrow. Working with Cal on that took most of the night and now I'm out of work to do for now. Tomorrow there will be krill to experiment on, or to practice experimenting on, so the fun begins then! Stay tuned in and I'll let you know how it goes.