oceanography in the Bering Sea

Final Post

2008-08-06T06:10:00.001-08:00

Post written by Charlie:

Well everyone, I am sad to inform you that this will be the final blog that I write, as the trip is over and I'll be finishing my business here in Maryland and shortly be heading back home to Arkansas. I had a great time and saw several things that were quite amazing to behold and I'm sure I probably won't have the chance to see some of them again, but who knows? Maybe I will. Anyway, I hope you all had a blast reading them because I sure did writing them. I also hope that you were able to glean something from my often random ramblings and that they served at least a marginally educational purpose. You've all been a great crowd and I want to thank you all for all your consistent visits to the MOGEL site to read them. As far as I know, the blog will stay up for a while at the same location, so if you'd like, in the future, grab an interested friend and show it to them. My address is still on several of them so feel free to contact me if any of you have any questions about anything I have or have not written. Again, thank you all for your efforts and occasional comments. I wish you all the best and I hope you have a wonderful year.

2008-08-01T04:59:00.001-08:00

Hey everyone, this will probably be the last blog I'll write for a couple days, since I'm going to be traveling pretty much non-stop from Dutch to D.C. for a couple of days and I won't have readily available internet access. I should say that the current plan is to do such a thing. There's a volcano to the east of us that's been erupting for the past month or so and the flights to Anchorage were canceled today due to stuff in the air. I didn't see anything myself but apparently there must have been something out there to necessitate a cancellation of those flights. Naturally this makes me fearful about the status of my one o'clock flight. I really don't want to hang around Dutch Harbor longer than I have to. I really want to get back to Maryland and call it a day, but we'll just have to see how it's going to go.

Today's blog should be pretty short. Since we've already packed everything up, I can't really say anything science-y. We pulled into the harbor around nine this morning and we were finally able to get off the boat around ten. It felt pretty good to be able to walk in a straight line for longer than a few yards or so. I went down to the Alaska Ship Supply store for some stuff to remember the times by, other than pictures and memories. We then later walked into town to go to the WWII museum but they're closed for some reason and will be until the seventh of August. Bummer, so we walked around a poked around the post office and some random grocery store. Yes, we were kind of looking for things to do. I don't usually check out a post office if I can help it. Anyway, we did that for a while and then went to dinner. I had this long roll of sushi from a sushi bar in town. It was really good and quite a difference from the food on the ship. By this time it was getting on in the hours so I rode back to the ship with a few other people and I'm in the middle of packing up my belongings in the hopes that we CAN leave tomorrow. Take it easy everyone and thanks for reading. I hope you got something out of this because I believe that I did.

2008-07-30T18:33:00.000-08:00

I was woken up this morning at two by a room call for the MOCNESS. I left a note on the Board of Lies asking somebody to give me a call when it went out and sure enough, somebody did. I hustled down to the lab from my stateroom as fast as I could and got out on the weather deck. Alexei wanted to do another live cast to see if he could catch some pregnant krill and like last night, there were none. He just wanted to make sure and now he was. We weren't going to catch any pregnant krill. They already ran their cycle or they haven't gotten around to it yet. We also had some rather unpleasant visitors last night. We caught the fringe of it last night but tonight there was a full fledge swarm of jellyfish. In every net collection bucket on the MOCNESS, we caught at least three jellyfish. Their tentacles covered the machine as we pulled it up out of the sea and then got stuck to your gloves and mustang suit. Like last night, we did three casts but only one live one. After the third cast, Jillian, the teacher who's been co-launching the MOCNESS, went to bed. She's really been putting in some long hours and needed some rest so I helped Alexei dismantle the MOCNESS. We really didn't tear it apart all that much but we did take off all the nets for cleaning, all nine of them. Now it's just a frame and it looks a lot different. As you might imagine, the MOCNESS is kind of worthless without nets and there is a good reason we took them off and that's because we're DONE! No more MOCNESS casts! Woohoo! Our last cast was on the third to last station of the cruise and even as I'm typing this, we're finishing up the very last station. After this it is a straight shot back to Dutch Harbor. A straight transit should take about 10 or 11 hours or so. When we get back to port, we have the day to do as we please so we were thinking about maybe going hiking on some mountain paths or perhaps going to the WWII museum. Until then, since we have all our stuff packed up, everyone can take a breath of fresh air and kick back for a little relaxation from all of our frenzied packing and cleaning. Just a few more of these before I head back to Maryland. I hope you stick around until the end. Until then everyone.

2008-07-29T14:31:00.000-08:00

I had quite a bit to do last night and boy did it feel great. I woke up an hour before midrats so I went down to the scientist's lounge and talked with Pat and Tracy for about an hour. This of course made it time for midrats so we went down and ate. I ate some chicken pot pie stuff which was had a WHOLE lot of black pepper but it was pretty good. They also had those french toast sticks again. I've never eaten those before I came on board and I'm really taking a fancy to them. I like the texture better than the real thing.

Anyway, after I finished eating my breakfast I went down to the lab. Tracy told me that Rachel left a note with tasks for me to do while she slept and I was awake. I expected a hastily scrawled note but I found a neatly folded piece of printer paper with my name neatly printed on the outside fastened to the Board of Lies. I opened it and was surprised to see that it was typed in a rather formal prose. The instructions were quite clear but the task was simple: finish acid washing those carboys. That wasn't so bad, there were only seven or so left so I finished in an hour. When I was done, I went to get ready for the MOCNESS casts. We had three of them back to back to back last night and I didn't take off my mustang suit until I was completely done. We started about 1:30 and finished just a quarter after six. It was a long morning, but like I said before, it felt pretty good to be doing something. You might be wondering why we're doing so many MOCNESS casts in one evening. That would be a good question, if you were thinking it. If you weren't, just sit back and let me explain. Alexei was doing multiple casts trying to collect pregnant krill. You can tell that they're pregnant because a significant of their insides are blue. I believe that's because they're full of eggs and they're ready to pop (not literally). Alexei wanted these krill so he could raise them in captivity and part of his experiments with them would form a backbone for our lipofuscin centered krill-aging experiments. He would have krill of precisely known age and he could cut off their eyes and see how much lipofuscin each one has. By doing this to several krill, all of known age, for a span of two years and taking lipofuscin measurements, he can form a standard curve of krill age versus amount of lipofuscin. Roughly speaking, this curve would allow anyone to take a lipofuscin measurement and based on the curve, determine how old that particular krill was. Unfortunately, after three casts we didn't get a single pregnant krill. I asked Alexei about it and he said that a couple of years ago he was getting pregnant krill all the way up until August. He also said that the year in discussion was a warmer year and this is a colder year, so perhaps that factors in somewhere. There are so many other variables that it's hard to pin one down without thoroughly checking the matter out. Last night was supposed to be the last adventures I had with the MOCNESS but Alexei wants to give it one more go just to see whether or not last night was a horrible fluke. I think we'll be just as disappointed this coming night as we were last night, but that remains to be seen.

Well, we're done cleaning so we've been helping other people out as much as we can. We also had a big group photo after lunch with all the science people and the coasties. I hope I wasn't squinting as it was very cloudy and thus very bright, not to mention that they didn't give a customary countdown. Well, I've got a few hours to go until I'll go to sleep, probably around eight or so. I hope everybody is having as splendid a week as I am. Tune in next time as there won't be very many of these left. Get your enjoyment while you can, and remember that if you want to ask me anything about science or living on the Bering for a month, my offer of accepting e-mails directed to cm3620@lyon.edu still stands. Long days and pleasant nights.

2008-07-28T12:35:00.000-08:00

Today was a little different from the last several I've gone through. Again, we didn't have a MOCNESS or a bongo cast, but when I went down to the science lab I found that Rachel and Karen were packing up lots of our stuff. I thought that we were going to dismember krill tonight and stack up the vials for transport back to Maryland but evidently to do so we should have started a few days ago. We were left with too little time so we're just packing and cleaning. Speaking of cleaning, do you all remember from my first blogs where I described the long special filtering we did with the seawater? Each run filled up a 20 liter container called a carboy and we filled up quite a few, not to mention that we have several extras hanging around the lab. Tonight it was my job to clean them. I washed each of them with dish soap, for starters. Their second rinse involved this little soapy mix of super cleaning solution called RBS. The third and last rinse involved using 5% HCl. Thankfully I accidentally brought my chem lab apron with me on the boat so I donned that, a pair of gloves and some safety glasses. I probably didn't need to worry about much but I like my clothes without blemishes or holes if I can help it. I drew lots of comments about my appearance from my other colleagues. I won't go into all the little jokes and quips I received but some of them were pretty funny. Anyway, I ran out of acid about half way through so I'm waiting for more to be made. I talked to Alexei, my MOCNESS boss, about when we're doing another MOCNESS and he said that we'll probably do three or so this coming night. I've been trying to revert back to a regular awake-during-the-day schedule so I've been awake for several afternoons but this uberlong MOCNESS casting is going to take a toll on my efforts. Hopefully it'll be just a day or two as I'd really hate to do this all the way back to Dutch, but what must be done must be done. So it goes.

So, aside from my carboy cleaning capers, I didn't really do much else, since that took quite a bit of time. Have you ever tried to wash out all the suds from a giant plastic container from concentrated dish soap? No? Well, it takes a while, so it took up the entire night and morning. It did feel good to stay busy for such a long time though.

After I ran out of acid it was roughly an hour till lunch, so I picked up my book for a while to wait it out. We had french dip sandwiches and they were really good. Lots of onions and horseradish. Boy, were they tasty. Well, I don't want to start in with food reviews so I'll just go ahead and sign off for now. Talk to you later.

2008-07-27T16:19:00.001-08:00

Today was kind of eventful. I slept through the scientists morale dinner where several of us were supposed to cook for the entire crew. It seems that the day crew took care of it and that all the night crew people I talked to slept right through it. When people who went found out that I missed it, they were all too eager to tell me how good it was and how unfortunate it was that I missed the BEST meal of the whole cruise. Jerks.

Anyway, I slept pretty late to recoup from my long time of wakefulness so when I woke up I went right to midrats. They had nacho fixings with lots of sour cream and big chunks of onions, so naturally I was very satisfied. I spent a while checking e-mail and other stuff and came down around three a.m. to help out with filtering and did that on and off till breakfast. The Sunday breakfast specialty is eggs benedict and they were very good. We really didn't have anything else to do after that so I kind of wandered around for a while. I eventually found my way to a computer and checked the mail. I'm a little out of the loop with the rest of the world so I thought I might catch the tail end of some of the world's dealings but I didn't find anything really interesting. It wasn't too long before Gary, the resident aquatic mammal expert, came in to do his thing and I got to talking with him. It seems that yesterday we sailed right past a dead walrus. He said it was pretty bloated and floating on its back. Also, it has some pretty long tusks. We both found this very interesting but at the time the boat neglected to run this announcement over the P.A. system. Oh well, I'm sure the day sleepers, me included, wouldn't appreciate being woken up to the blaring announcement that we found a bloated walrus carcass.

I didn't feel very sleepy after breakfast so I stayed up for a while reading a book I found in the library. Usually I'm sleeping at this time, and it is Sunday, so I figured I go to the church service they hold upstairs. It was pretty cool and fairly laid back. The ExO was there along with several other members of the crew along with one of our science crew. It was an informal setting so we all had a good time. I came back to my room, watched a little bit of the ship-wide movie channel, read a little bit of my book and then realized I hadn't written my blog yet, so here I am. Tonight should be a little busies that last night. Rachel says that we might cut a bunch of krill eyes off and store them in as many 4ml amber vials we have in methanol, but we also have to take these samples back to Maryland with us. Evidently the airlines have a big to-do about carrying methanol on jetliners so I'm not really sure what we're going to do. Rachel will know what to do. She's our team leader and that title comes with experience, so I'm sure she's been around this bend before. Anyway, I'm going to retire to my rack for a bit so I'll bid you all a fond farewell until tomorrow. Cheers!

2008-07-26T09:51:00.000-08:00

I was lying in bed yesterday morning trying to go to sleep for the longest time but I couldn't, so eventually I got down, took a shower and went to play with the computer. I went to check my e-mail and play a little strategy game I got from Alexei, my MOCNESS boss, but for some reason I ended up with one of my Excel charts open and I was playing with one of the graphs. I then had a revelation of sorts. I knew that I couldn't "break" an axis to relieve overshadowing data points on a bar graph but I found a way to do it without really doing it. I just made the graph look like it had a broken axis instead of actually doing the deed. I was fairly proud of myself. I suppose this rush of happiness and pride didn't help my sleeping situation because I then found that I couldn't go back to sleep. At all. So I stayed up and did some more presentation work. It's almost done now and just needs a few finishing touches and some critics to look it over. Unfortunately there was not a MOCNESS cast today. When I asked Alexei about it he said that he wanted to save a cast for a more favorable depth and probably to save his sample jars for the later half of the 70 meter isobath run back to Dutch Harbor. That's fine with me, it gave me more time to work. The bongo cast was at half after four though so I came down to help out with the filtering which I knew would need to be done, and boy was I right. Of course filtering for water particles isn't that hard and we were done within half an hour. After that I just read a book I found in our library until breakfast. We had breakfast burritos this morning and they were very tasty with a little hot sauce and some salt.

The weather has been very, very favorable for the past 24 hours or so. There was a beautiful sunset last night and I was able to snap several pictures. The water's surface looks so calm and alluring right now. If you weren't guaranteed an immediate case of hypothermia when you hit water and if the boat would stay in place for a couple of hours and if the moon was made of cheese I'd have a good time in the water. So long as I'm wishing, I guess I could go ahead and ask for a magical flying unicorn. You know, at first glance, a magical flying unicorn seems kind of girly but when you really think about it, it begins to sound very appealing, but only if it were war-trained and had an attitude to match. And if it could talk. That'd be really cool and I'm obviously really tired to talk about magical sentient flying unicorns of war in this blog. I think I might stop while I'm ahead and just say good night. Good night.

2008-07-25T08:20:00.000-08:00

So I slept a little late again today, but it wasn't quite my fault. You see, I set my pager alarm to wake me up in a rather timely manner in the early afternoon so I went to sleep. I was awoken by the pager beeping next to my head. I picked it up and tried to use the built in light to see the time. The light was much too faint for me to see the time so I turned on my reading light and saw that the pager was beeping because of a low battery alarm. It was also only one o'clock. I put the pager back down and went back to sleep with the expectation of being awoken at the appropriate time. Unfortunately my pager battery passed away later in my sleep and I was rudely waken up from a dream where I was starring in a spectacular musical by my in-room telephone. Out of sorts for being woken twice before the set time, I trundled out of bed to answer the phone but I was too late. I then checked the time and to my aghast it was a quarter past eleven at night. I hustled down to midrats to eat. You must realize that midrats is very important to the night crew. If we miss it we have to go eight hours until breakfast and that makes for some grumpy scientists. I then learned that my roommate hadn't seen me at midrats and was calling to make sure I woke up for it. He's such a nice guy. This all made for one interesting morning. I went upstairs to perform my usual checking of the e-mail and found that our MOCNESS cast wouldn't be until 3:45, so I pittered around for a while, writing a few messages and working up a couple more slides for my presentation. It seems that we were having some traveling problems or difficulty predicting our arrival time or something because the time to station changed to 4:30 and then we didn't truly arrive and stop until 5:00. We usually do our stuff from 1 to 3 so this was a late day. Luckily we worked until a quarter till seven, just in time to get out of my smelly mustang suit and head down to breakfast.

It was a rather chilly evening last night with a stiff breeze and moderately calm seas. We were casting in roughly 140 meter water so the cast took a while, but thanks to my awesome gloves, which are thin, insulated and completely impermeable to water, I made it just fine. I love my gloves. I decided to try a night without wearing them and I spend the next half hour once I got back inside trying to nurse some feeling back into them. The air might not be but in the 40's F but the water is still pretty flipping cold. I haven't been outside today yet, but I imagine that there's no fog, especially since I haven't heard the fog horn yet. Maybe I can have two days of ear-plug free sleep. One can only hope. Anyway, nothing spectacular tonight so I don't have anything really cool to say just yet. There's only six more days until we pull into Dutch Harbor and some of the Coasties I've talked to have been very excited to tell me so. I think they're ready to get off the boat, what do you think? Ha ha, well, I've got a bit of a headache so I'm going to go to sleep. Good night everybody and check back in tomorrow.

2008-07-24T09:52:00.001-08:00

I woke up this morning in a very bad humor; it seems that I was dreaming that I my hair was on fire so while sleeping I began furiously scratching and smacking my head, thus waking me up. Like I said, it wasn't the best way to wake up and I wasn't in the best mood. Luckily it was still early (for me) so I just stayed in bed for a while and read one of my books and let myself calm down. By this time it was getting on for supper so I sauntered down to the galley to grab some grub. They had some kind of cajun grilled blackened catfish and at was very tasty. Afterwards I went back upstairs to do some aesthetic renovations to a few of my Excel graphs. I'm still at a creative block with my presentation so hopefully I can get past that before I get off the ship.

Well, since Calvin's NAS went over the side in the afternoon, I wasn't able to work on that but the MOCNESS was scheduled for a sampling station at 2:30 so that worked out pretty well. Sorry, no glowing collection tubes although we did have something of a swarm of jellyfish. They're fairly large with a six inch diameter head and more than likely a meter, at least, of tentacles. I don't know if it's the stinging type and none of us were quick to test it out, so that remains a big unknown. They were floating all through the water though and were very easy to pick out, even in the dark. The fog and clouds decided to take a coffee break this evening so we were able to see the sun before it sank below the horizon. The sea was unbelievably calm today as we sailed west, just south of St. Matthew island. We were able to see several prominent peaks of the whole island. Near the end of the day it turned off a little chilly and the breeze picked up a little bit, but with a jacket all you had to endure were a couple cold ears. Not a bad trade off for the great view. Later on in the night when the sun had already set, the moon rose above the water in the east in all its bright orange glory. It was great so we all ran out to the weather deck to check it out before it rose behind the new cloud cover. It was just a really nice day today and to top it off, there's not a spot of fog this morning. This is a twofold blessing. Not only does it offer a great view but now I can sleep without having to use ear plugs to stop out the sound of the foghorn. I hate that stupid horn.

Anyway, to tie this off, I had breakfast and it was delicious, as usual. I'm currently in the blog writing/e-mail checking mode right now so I'll let you all go for now. Take a lesson from our dastardly polar bear "friends" and stay chilly.

2008-07-24T06:32:00.000-08:00

I was supposed to meet Calvin down in the main lab around eight in the evening, but when I woke up, I had the sneaking suspicion that not only was it probably not eight, but it was several hours past it. I had set my pager to chime at eight and couldn't quite figure out why I, once again, slept through the alarm. Even with my earplugs in, I can usually hear it, especially since I put it right by my head before I sleep. The earplugs were a necessity this night since somebody was dismantling a metal cabinet with some kind of electric saw, one of the noisy variety, other people decided to camp out in the hall and hold a loud-but-not-quite-yelling conversation while the stupid fog horn kept on wailing and wailing. So anyway, I pulled the plugs from my ears and checked the pager, only to find that it was a quarter after eleven. "Uh oh!", I thought to myself. "I'm late for midrats." I hustled downstairs to grab some breakfast and met Calvin down there. I apologized for my tardy behavior and he said that the bags were still under heat and the system was still running, so even if I had gone down at eight, I would have had to wait at least four hours before we could do anything. Lucky me. When we finished eating, we headed back to the lab to work out the rest of the kinks in the NAS and get it ready for dumping. Once again, we worked all through the night. I used almost an entire row of electrical tape to button down all the hoses and tubes to make sure the turbulence of the water doesn't rip anything out when it hits. It actually looks very neat and trim. Of course we had to place it in its cage and hook it up with its battery and bags of standards but once all that and the last minute testing were finished, we deemed it ready for deployment. I took a couple of pictures of it when we wrapped up and I'll try to send them on soon. I have to compress them before I can send them and I don't have a means to do that right this minute. I'll get them on, don't worry.

After all that work we went to breakfast and had waffles. It's Wednesday so we have to have something that begins in W, like waffles. "Hey guys, it's waffle Wednesday!" I just went for the potatoes but I snagged a waffle too. It was pretty good. When I had my fill, I wandered on upstairs to tell you all how the evening went. The weather is really nice out right now. There's a stiff breeze and it's a little chilly, which stirs up the waves a bit, but it blew away the fog so you can see quite a ways now. We also sailed just south of St. Matthew island yesterday before sunset and you can see the peaks coming up above the water. I was lucky to snap a few pics of them too. Again, I'll send them on as soon as I can. If you check the site the webmaster posted, I'm sure you can see where we'll be in the next week as we finish up and head back to Dutch Harbor. Keep informed everyone and have a good rest of the day.

Websites for Healy Webcam

2008-07-22T13:26:00.003-08:00

Note from the webmaster:

The Coast Guard has updated the Healy website and now made public the webcam images. There is a camera mounted to the Healy's AloftCon (reconaissance tower) that takes a picture every hour and sends it to a website sponsored by the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory. Check it out! Click on the link below, then when you get to the page, click on the link for Lamont-Doherty. You will then get a list of images for every hour of every day of Charlie's cruise. Click on one to see what its like in the Bering Sea, and use your browser's back button to return to the list to see another image. (It sure does look foggy today).

You can also get a map of where the Healy is located by clicking on the "icefloe" link. Please note that these updates are delayed at least 24hrs.
http://www.uscg.mil/pacarea/cgcHealy/updates/

Lots of Sleep

2008-07-22T13:24:00.001-08:00

Post written by Charlie:

For some reason, I was really, really tired this morning. My morning. It was actually late afternoon. I set my alarm to five and although it woke me up, I reset it to seven and promptly fell back to sleep. I did this two more times and finally woke up shortly before eleven. I did the math, using both sets of fingers, and found that I had slept just over thirteen hours. I'm not sure what I did that tired me so, but whatever it was, you would think that I could remember it. Oh well. I made it down to the galley in time for midrats and had a breakfast of half steamed broccoli and squash along with blackened marinated chicken and tater tots. It was pretty good, no complaints. From the galley I went straight to the lab to find that my whereabouts had been inquired into. Do you all remember Calvin, the funny guy whom I helped with the Nutrient Analyzer System (NAS)? Well, it seems that they're tossing it out into the sea tomorrow and he needs to get it ready to go and needs my help. He already had some of the reagent bags already strapped to the NAS and we just needed to test them out. It was a good thing we did since the bags of his NO2 and NO3 standards were dead, meaning that they didn't have any of the nitrogen compounds in them. We're still not quite sure what happened back at his lab when they were prepared, but this put us up a particular creek, leaving us with precious few paddles. Luckily he had a few extra bags with him so we were able to prepare a couple replacement nutrient bags. We're improvising to a great degree here but they should work after they've been sterilized. Anyway, he asked me to come back down at eight this evening to aid him in finishing it all up for deployment the next morning, an offer I happily agreed to. I've spread myself around in the science lab, so much so that I've become an almost necessary helper in various projects. Due to the fact that I was helping Calvin out tonight, I wasn't able to participate in the MOCNESS cast. Later in the night, some of the MOCNESS people came and told me how much more difficult it was without my assistance in guiding the net in and out. Just for those of you who don't know, the frame to the MOCNESS is all steel, and there's a lot of it. Just imagine how heavy it is and we have to shove and heave on it in order to get it in and out of its bracket. After I ran a few sample runs on the NAS to check it out with its current load of chemicals, I was working on and off with Rachel and Karen while every now and again heading over to help Calvin. It seems that I've become a necessary installment to the crew.

After the NAS work, it became time for breakfast. I had worked all through the night and hadn't hardly realized it until the clock hit seven, or in our case, 1500 GMT. So I headed down to the mess deck to snag some chow, but when I got back, I had some more filtering to do. It wasn't so bad. Just put the pipe in the cylinder of water and step back. Fold the filter when through and make sure the container is marked appropriately. After that, I headed up to write this thing, but I had a few e-mails to take care of, which took a couple of hours and now it's lunch time, so now I'll eat a little lunch and head to bed. I hope you all have a great day today and I will talk to you all again soon. I wasn't kidding about asking questions or leaving comments. Please don't hesitate or anything, I'm not going to bite. Anyway, goodnight everyone.

2008-07-21T09:17:00.000-08:00

We had another monster station again this early morning, which was around 2:30. Luckily, the bongo and the MOCNESS were able to go first so we were able to get out of the way early. There was something really cool that happened last night though. Do you all remember how I told you that krill and other zooplankton are capable of blue bioluminescence? Well, as the MOCNESS was being towed up to the surfact, while it was still underwater, we were able to see a bright blue sheen come up from under the waves. It seemed that we had caught so many animals in the one bucket and they were all agitated so they all began to glow at the same time and it was breathtaking. I've seen the krill glow in a cooler and resemble the night sky, but this was like a blue reflection of the moon, bright and mysterious, on the face of the water. Unfortunately we weren't expecting it at all so we didn't have cameras ready, but I'll keep a look out next time for all of you. If it happens again, I'll do my best to snap a pic. Aside from that, the evening was pretty much cut and dry. I did get quite a bit of work done on my presentation though, at least five slides, resulting in a grand total of fourteen so far. I'm sure I might edit a few when I'm through, but that's fourteen less than I have to do from now on.

It is a startling 10 more days until we roll back into Dutch Harbor. It's truly hard to believe that we've burned through nearly twenty days already but when looking back, it did go pretty fast. Anyway, I stayed up later than I should have yesterday morning so I'm going to go to bed. Before I go, I just want to repeat my offer of answering any questions. Just write a comment or e-mail me at cm320@lyon.edu and I'll get back to you either in the next blog or in an e-mail. Alright everyone, stay cool and take it easy.

2008-07-20T19:42:00.000-08:00

I awoke at ten after five this afternoon and promptly went back to sleep. Knowing that I was hungry and I needed to get up to eat, I immediately woke up again and trunged out of bead to head towards the shower. After a nice easy paced morning of waking up and getting ready, I walked down a couple of decks to participate in the weekly "morale dinner". This is one meal of the week where certain groups get together in the kitchen and make the meal. Tonight was burgers, but I got down a little late so the only warm toppings they had left was bacon and rings of pineapple. Guess what I had put on my burger? Yep, bacon and pineapple rings. Some of the cold toppings was missing too so I had to settle for guacamole dip smeared on a bun with some pepperjack cheese and onions. I just wanted to say that it was one delicious burger. You should try it, you'll be hooked.

Anyway, enough of the food reviews. We recently sailed back to St. Paul island to switch out one of the crew members, who was pregnant, for another one who wasn't and at the same time, we took aboard a new optics machine. I don't know if the optics people are happy or not, I haven't asked them, but I would imagine that they are. Their old unit still sits on the sea floor, but perhaps this one will suffice. We had one monster of a station this morning at 2:30. Basically every instrument we had was being deployed one after the other over the course of about three to four hours. Luckily the bongo nets and the MOCNESS were done within the first three instrument casts so there wasn't much waiting. I spent a couple of hours before then working on my presentation going nowhere. You all know how that feeling is. I need some consultation and I'll get it tomorrow so I get this train moving again. We pulled up the same old, same old, including the seafood gumbo-gruel. It was a bit warmer out this morning than it had been with a little more wind around 3:30. I think this helped blow away the fog because, surprise, surprise, there was none when the sun rose. We actually saw that elusive glowing ball in the sky along with the moon, which looks a little rotated from my customary view back home. All in all, it was a busy night, because right when I finished with the MOCNESS and went inside, there was filtering to be done for the krill growth experiments! Hoo-ray. That took a little bit of time, almost right up til breakfast so there was only a little waiting around while we waited to eat. Since I'm a trifle pooped, I'm going to relax back in my quarters now so peace out, you groovy, blog reading cats. Check in next time for more exciting Bering Sea adventures.

2008-07-19T19:59:00.000-08:00

You've all heard me talk about krill. How they swim various distances in swarms through the ocean and how they are a very important intermediary food source between the primary producers and the larger animals in the sea, but do you know what they taste like? I didn't, but I wondered. They look an awful lot like shrimp, but they swim instead of walking on the sea floor. I was interested to the point of action, so when the bongo net came up with a bumpercrop of krill the other night, I snagged a couple and had a little treat. They were a slight bit chewy from their exoskeleton but their flavor was very delicious. It was a stronger flavor than shrimp but it was along that same line. You can't get it fresher than that.

Aside from downing a couple of krill, I reported for MOCNESS duty tonight, same as any other, but we saw a rare sight tonight out there in the few hours of dark we have. There were a couple of ships out tonight and we could see them, since they had their lights on. One looked so close so we radioed the bridge to get a distance measurement and we were a scant 1400 yards away, roughly eight tenths of a mile. No wonder they looked so close, but they were headed back to St. Paul island so they passed us up. We were sampling in some 150 meter water tonight and got a good haul of copepod porridge again. The krill people were able to get a sufficient number of krill for their experiments. This is a little known fact about krill, but did you know that they glow with a chemical reaction very similar to that of a firefly? It seems that when we take the krill out of the water and dump them into a cooler, they get agitated and wink their bright blue lights at us. It's almost like watching a tiny light show, or seeing fast-forwarded footage of a moonless night sky with the random black cloud passing over it's face. It was very beautiful and I wish you all could see it too.

As you would expect, it is again very, very foggy here this morning. It wouldn't surprise me to find out that it's bright and sunny with chirping birds everywhere except this little aura of perpetual fog around the ship. It gets kind of depressing after a while. You're already fanticizing about grass and dirt but now you're left longing for the odd ray of light from the sun. Not to be but maybe this layer of fog will break before too terribly long. Breakfast was good, as usual. I forwent the eggs for some Cocoa Puffs. I love those things. I should come a little later to breakfast so that I might get a slightly larger helping of potatos. I know that they're skimpy with serving size at first so that they'll be sure to have some left for the latecomers so I might give that a try. I'm very tired right now and in no mood to continue. I've been up quite a long time right now so I'm going to hit the hay. Later everyone and stay crispy.

2008-07-18T19:45:00.001-08:00

Hello again, blog readers. We had our personnel transfer and our educational outreach yesterday, right after each other. We sailed up to St. Paul island and ran a few people to shore and came back with even less. My bird watching roommate was among those leaving but since he's gone, there has been no replacement in my quarters, so I was able to snag that giant poofy pillow he found somewhere. Sleeping is so much more relaxing now that my pillow doesn't deflate whenever I lay my head down.

After the crew switch, we sailed on down to St. George island for that educational outreach deal we had going on. I hadn't seen the islands before so I thought to go up and check them out, but the fog cover was so thick that I couldn't hardly see anything at all. In fact, I heard from one of the people who went ashore that they had to stop their little boat in between the Healy and St. George and wait for the sound of the fog horn so they could find out which way they were supposed to be going. In essence, the fog was so thick that they lost their way in between the ship and the island. It wasn't that far at all, but the fog seemed to get worse as the day rolled on. To think that I wanted to snap a picture of the island. Anyway, as part of the deal, some select members of our scientific crew were able to go to the island and give a little educational presentation while some of their high school kids were able to come out to the Healy for pillage and adventure on the high seas...wait, that's not right. My mistake. That's our job. The kids came out for an afternoon of learning exactly what we do day in and day out, sans pillage and plunder. I was sleeping by this time because I'd been up all night, but from what I can gather, the weather turned south and both groups had to go back to their respective original places ahead of schedule. Our shorebound scientists had their presentations cut short and the high schoolers had their tour end prematurely. They didn't even get to play with the liquid nitrogen so we took the brunt of that responsibility upon ourselves and dipped assorted foodstuffs in it. From the pictures I saw, the corn dogs shattered like glass. It was pretty "cool".

This evening was like any other. I slept in really late, like to eleven in the night, so I got up to check when our nets were going out. It turned out to be around three in the morning but since there were iron sampling CTD runs, which take a long time because they have to equilibrate to iron levels in the water, we had to wait nearly two hours before we could suit up and head out. The MOCNESS was about the same as it has always been, except instead of sampling in 40 meters of water, we were going down to 120 meters. We got plenty of samples in our sampling net catcher buckets, with some of it looking like zooplankton porridge. Very thick and kind of gross looking. Kind of like the vomit of someone who just got back from an all-you-can-eat seafood buffet. It was very cold outside and by the time we were finished and all wet, the wind started picking up. Thankfully we were finished so we headed back inside. It was only an hour before breakfast so we took a break, and by taking a break, I mean I listened to a few tunes of mine before I hit the chow. I came up here right afterwards and since I'm finished for today I'm going back to bed for another afternoon of blissful slumber only made better by my awesome new pillow. Take it easy blog readers and tune in next time.

Fin Whales and More

2008-07-17T13:05:00.000-08:00

In my carelessness I neglected to mention the fact that we ran across a pod of fin whales yesterday. I was not awake for any of this but from what I hear, they were 100 yards away from the ship and we even diverted our course to chase them for a bit. I don't know how many or if there were any calves or anything like that, but it was pretty cool. Our marine mammal specialists says that they're pretty common and not as rare as a right whale, for instance. Anyway, I just thought I'd throw that out there.

I just found out that our spare parts for the HPLC will not be delivered to us, making the machine inoperable for the remainder of the cruise. Do not panic! We will still filter plenty of water but we've also loaned ourselves out to the other groups who need our help. We're like mercenaries. Of science. Nothing is scarier than a renegade scientist on a ship so we're working to remedy that. I've already made my rounds and developed the necessary connections amongst the others so I'll be just fine.

I was able to help out with the MOCNESS again tonight. We're doing a personnel transfer at St. Paul island right now, in fact, and among the 12 people leaving, three or four of those were on the MOCNESS squad, so I'm filling in for the remaining two weeks of the cruise. I'm sure I'll be participating on some of the Bongo net casts as well. Fun stuff up ahead! Crazy science activities are to behold when you enter. Until then, blog readers.

Something Exciting

2008-07-17T04:54:00.000-08:00

Post written by Charlie:

Okay, so there was something interesting that happened tonight. We happened to be doing a deep water station, where the sea floor was around 2800 meters below the surface, and had deployed our multi-core unit, which sinks to the sea floor and takes several sediment core samples. This was the second deployment of the unit as the operators must have wanted to get as much mud as possible, but on its way up, just 180 meters from the surface, somehow the cable attached to it slipped off its winch wheel, or drum or whatever you call it. This resulted in a complete loss of upward movement of the multi-core, so it was dangling in the water 180 meters below the surface with a load of mud. It took quite a while and in the wee hours of the morning, it was repaired and the cables realigned back into their original placement. As you can imagine, we're on something of a tight schedule here and can't afford to dally around, and this inconvenience cost us the samplings from three other stations which were supposed to come after the deep water one. The night was completely thrown off for everyone as they all had to put their nets and CTD's on hold until the winch was repaired and thoroughly checked out to make sure whatever happened that allowed the cable to slip would not occur again. Since I had all this free time I played a really fun card game called Blackjack, which isn't related to the classic casino version where you have to get 21 points. This game is like a hybrid of Uno and crazy 8's. It was pretty crazy and we burned up a couple of hours playing it. After that I still had several hours to myself so I worked a bit on my presentation, which is coming along nicely. Anyway, since the other group finished with one of their krill growth experiments, we were able to, you'll never guess, filter some water! When we were through, it was time for breakfast so we headed down there for some tasty vittles. Upon finishing my meal, I decided to write my blog and go to bed, which I'm going to do right now. Later everyone and stay frosty.

Movie Night and More Fun...

2008-07-15T11:57:00.001-08:00

Post written by Charlie:

Hey everyone, I'm really sorry to keep repeating myself so I'll somewhat spare you by giving a heads up. The HPLC is still down and will be until Friday. Until then I will still be filtering sea water for phytoplankton in the krill growth experiments so we can tell what the krill have been eating. I'm using the time I have to kill by working on my presentation at the end of my REU internship in August. The food is still wonderful and I have no complaints, although the regulars throw theirs around freely. I still can't understand why and I probably won't. Whatever, their loss.

We have movie night every night, during which one of the coasties brings in a movie to watch and so far he's had remarkably good taste in a wide variety of genres. Kudos to Hans. I am also using the time to read a series of books recommended to me by a friend back in Maryland. These are the Dune books, and supposedly well known in the following of science fiction enthusiasts. I've finished the first book and it was very satisfying. I can't wait to start the second. The weather is very calm this morning with the usual thick bank of fog which causes that accursed fog horn to sound. The fog is common, or at least we've experienced its presence nearly every morning we've been out here. The winds usually die down at night, resulting in a calm covering of gray water which is then tumbled about upon the return of the winds in the afternoon. The temperature has been very favorable, letting me strut about on the deck without a jacket, clad only in jeans and a t-shirt. Very beautiful, although the sun has decided to hide itself, peeking through every once and again, seemingly to tease us with a few far off rays before retreating behind its screen of clouds which seem a good match with the water. I hate to give you weather reports and food reviews as the main portion of the blog, but until our equipment is up an running again, I'm afraid it will all be the same old, same old. You never know though, something really interesting could happen in the space of the remainder of the week and if it does, I'll relay it to all of you. I would recommend keeping checked in until friday, just to see if something cool happens. Til then and take it easy blog readers.

No luck for the optics...

2008-07-14T11:31:00.000-08:00

Hey everyone, I'm glad you stopped by again. I'm sorry to inform everyone but the plan to get the optics machine back on board failed. It was not found and will be left for someone else to pick up, as soon as possible I'm sure. Until then it will sit on the bottom of the Bering. Anyway, we have a planned stop at St. Paul island on the 17th for a little school special presentation there. Unfortunately I won't be able to get off the boat but some of the lucky ones will be able to. They will talk about krill, thorium collection and other assorted things to the k-12 school there on the island. I've taken a look at the ships course and the current heading will take us just past the island while we visit the remaining collection stations on our tour. When we're done with this particular transit, we'll head back to the island for a little schooling.

As for the headlines tonight, we were able to net quite a few krill with the Bongo so we were able to do some major sea water filtering! Perhaps I exaggerate, but you'll never know, now will you? Anyway, I was able to sample some more music from the ship's vast store of electronic audible media vaults while I worked. After a hard night's night, we were able to retire to the mess deck for the much-looked-forward-to corned beef hash and pancake breakfast. It was delish, especially with all the pineapple on the side. Other than that, I heard we had some winds pick up around one AM or so and they were around 20-25mph, but I suppose I've become so used to the rocking of the ship that I can't really tell how much it's moving unless I try to look for it. No storms so far, but I'm secretly hoping for one, just to see what the Bering can offer and what this ship can do. I'll probably not get my wish and that's just as well. No need to get everyone worked up when there's work to be done. Well, it's far into the AM here and you know what that means? Bedtime! Take it easy blog readers and have a nice day.

Long Transit

2008-07-13T10:20:00.001-08:00

Post written by Charlie:

Before I begin, I would like to bring to attention an error I made in the previous blog. The ISIS device I told you about is misspelled. It should be ISUS. Sorry for the mix up.

Now, the chronicling of my evening. The grand unfolding of a wondrous story. Now that I have your hopes up, allow me to dash them utterly. Nothing happened tonight. We were in transit for the entire night heading back to where we lost the optics machine. Keep in mind that we lost the optics south-west of Nunivak Island and at the beginning of this evening we were just southeast of St. Matthew Island. That's quite a distance, something close to 140 nautical miles, as the crow flies, and it took somewhere around nine or so hours to get there and even as I'm writing this, we're still an hour out. One of the krill people did get the ship to stop for a quick Bongo netting but we only fished up one krill. One krill. We can't work with just "one krill". We didn't even need to filter seawater for phytoplankton. Like I said, there was nothing to do this evening. Being the opportunistic man that I am, I took advantage of this lull in activity to do a much needed chore: laundry. It seems that I have build quite a collection of dirty clothing since the beginning of our cruise and it needed to be washed. Plus I was out of pants, so washing my clothes was very important and needed to be done in a rather timely manner. After the time spent with the washer and dryer I got a snack, caught up a little on my reading, got some speaking tips from Dr. Shull and then went to breakfast. Since I would like to make it to dinner tonight (we're having steamed crab legs), I need to get a decent amount of sleep today so as soon as I wrap this up, such as right now, I'll head on that way. Take it easy blog readers.

Long Days and Pleasant Nights

2008-07-13T04:14:00.001-08:00

Post written by Charlie:

This morning started out rather nicely. I awoke around time for supper and after eating retired for a few hours to the science lounge and worked on my final presentation that I have to give in August after I get back from the cruise. It's not pleasant but it must be done, otherwise something bad will happen to me, I'm sure of it. Anyway, some of the guys put on a movie so I joined them. It's kind of nice getting into a little schedule where you find that you don't have to spend every waking hour down in the lab. Eventually you have to though so one might as well make the best of it. The situation is roughly the same as yesterday, with our HPLC still down so no krill work.

I did get some activity this evening though. I was able to process some of the data that we get from our big lab ISIS machine. Again with the acronyms, and like so many others, I don't know what this means, or even if it is one. Regardless, this machine, among other things, is mainly used to measure nitrates in the water and takes constant measurements all day long for days on end. It was my job to go through all this data and sift out the garbage and retain all the good stuff. Cal, you guys remember Calvin, right? He showed me all these cool little tricks on Excel to help me do all this. Without his assistance and guidance, it would have taken a stupid crazy amount of time to look over all these lines of data. Perhaps I can do some Excel magic tricks when I get back to land. "Hey everybody, watch me split all this data in this one column into several different columns!" Not too interesting, is it? I suppose not; it doesn't have that same charm and allure as the old rabbit in the hat schtick. Oh well, I thought it was pretty neat.

Well, I spent a few hours at this job and keeping myself busy learning new things was satisfying for a time. Unfortunately I finished my work and went back into the wet lab to help out with a little sea water filtration. Nothing like I described in some of those first blogs, but just regular filtrating where we don't care about the water, just the stuff in it. We filtered several liters onto a round piece of filter paper and collected all those little phytoplanktons that were swimming around in it. It wasn't too bad to learn how to do so it went fairly quickly. There wasn't much to do the rest of the night so I went up a couple of decks and looked through the ship's library, just for fun. That kind of signified the end of the night for me, so I went to eat my supper of breakfast, wrote this thing and then hit the hay. I'm going to try a greeting/farewell I heard in a really good series of books, so if you don't like it, blame someone else. Take it easy everyone. Long days and pleasant nights.

Instrumental Difficulties

2008-07-11T09:50:00.000-08:00

I'm sorry to inform you all that there simply wasn't much activity on my end tonight. I awoke in the early evening with word from some of the others that we had done some moorings during the day while I slept. Moorings are where we place instruments that record data out at sea for extended periods of time, much like the NAS I told you about in an earlier blog. Well, come to find out, the first one they placed still had some sort of protective covering on it which wouldn't allow it to do it's job. I suppose an analogy to explain it would be to say it's like leaving the lens cap on a camera. It protects the lens but if you don't take it off, there's no point to using the machine. We can't leave a machine out on the sea that won't work so we had turned around to go get and repair it. Due to this interruption in the schedule, our work was put off a bit. I still labeled several amber vials for our later experiments for krill eyes, but then found out that our HPLC, which is crucial to our work and project here with lipofuscin, is inoperable at the time. It can be fixed, but of course with parts we don't have with us, so that work was put to a standstill. While sitting in the lab I talked to a fellow scientist named David who is testing ocean water and sediment for radon. It seems that radon is spawned from the deterioration of radium but has a much shorter half life. By his work of testing for levels of radon, he can go on and use the data he collects to do all sorts of things, such as gas diffusion measurements and predictions. We then cracked a few jokes and went back to work. I haven't been outside yet today but I hear the weather yesterday was pretty nice so maybe it will be this morning to. Farewell and have a pleasant day.

Late Night

2008-07-10T07:57:00.003-08:00

Post written by Charlie:

So it seems that my previous blog was a bit premature. At the time I was writing it I was under the impression that my night was over a little early. As you can infer from the first sentence of this entry, it wasn't. Shortly after I wrote it, the call came in that we had netted several krill and that we were to right then and there cut off their eyes. There were 38 krill to do this to and while I had a little practice under my belt, it is still a delicate procedure and caution must be taken. I did half of the batch while my lab-mate did the other half. Still, with about 20 krill, the job took a little over an hour.

With those krill eyes, we were able to do quite a bit of work tonight. The eyes were dunked in a little bit of solvent and blasted with sound waves in a machine called a sonicator. It basically uses sound to beat up whatever sample you put into it, in our case it bashed around those eyes and helped get some of the lipids out of them. The compound we were looking for is, as you probably know from the last few blogs, lipofuscin. After we sonicated them, we did a few more steps to prepare the biochemical compounds for analyzing in our HPLC, or High Performance Liquid Chromatography. This machine, in a very simple explanation, detects and quantifies compounds in the sample that you feed into it, so with our lipid sample that we fed into the HPLC, the machine will tell us what is in it and give us an estimate about how much of it there is. It's rather complicated and I'm afraid I still don't know everything about it yet, so I'm sorry that I can't give you a super in-depth explanation about it, not that I would anyway.** I wouldn't want to bore you with a bunch of technical facts, so this simple example of the functions of the HPLC will have to suffice. Anyway, after working on all that krill stuff, which took just about the entire evening, we decided to eat some breakfast and call it a night. We're all really tired so I'm headed off to bed. Keep in touch. Morgan out.

**The webmaster will bore you with the details of HPLC, so for those that are interested, read on:

In general, chromatography refers to techniques that are used to separate complex mixtures into individual chemical compounds for purification or measurement. Here's a handy example: let's say you want to know how much cholesterol is in one Arctic krill. You would take the krill and extract its fat. But now you've got a huge mix of all its lipids, including fatty acids and alcohols, waxes, and sterols. Chromatography provides a way to separate these lipids so you can measure the amount of each individual lipid, including cholesterol.

There are many different types of chromatography that can be used, depending on the samples you are interested in and what chemicals you want to isolate or measure. Some common types are gas, liquid, thin-layer, ion exchange, etc. No matter the type, all chromatography has a stationary phase (a fixed substance that your sample moves through so that individual chemicals can be resolved) and a mobile phase (what you use to move your sample through the stationary phase).

HPLC, or high performance liquid chromatography, uses a liquid as the mobile phase, typically organic solvents or water. The stationary phase is usually a column packed with a type of solid material (often silica or aluminum oxide particles, or chains of carbon atoms bonded together). You inject your sample (a mix of chemicals) into the column. A pump is used to push the liquid mobile phase through the column, sweeping your sample along with it. As your sample moves through the column, some chemicals in the mix react with the column particles and stick or only move very slowly. Other compounds don't react with the stationary phase at all, and move right through. A detector at the outlet of the column allows you to measure the individual compounds exiting the column. You can adjust both the mobile phase and the stationary phase to optimize separation of your compound of interest. I hope this helps explain chromatography a little bit. If you have questions, feel free to post a comment and we will try our best to answer it.

Walking Through Jello

2008-07-09T04:54:00.001-08:00

Post written by Charlie:

We had some inclement weather today, resulting in rougher seas than we've been having for the past few days. The ship has been rolling more that I'm accustomed to, which isn't much, but it's still a lot all the same. Walking has been made difficult since I can walk across the room and it feels like I'm walking up an incline but then the ship rolls and I speed up, since I'm trying to walk up a hill, and must arrest my momentum lest I run headlong into a station or somebody else. Not a good thing. I even described it to a few other people in such a way that they found it pretty funny. To me, it felt like walking through Jello; sometimes it wiggles with you, sometimes it wiggles against you.

This afternoon one of our pieces of equipment was lost overboard when the cable attached to it broke while it was being towed behind the ship. It was a piece of optics equipment used by a group of scientists who were studying phytoplankton. Apparently it helped in some way to detect levels of chlorophyll in the water. From what I've heard, it was a $200,000 piece of machinery and while we went in circles trying to fish it out, we were not able to recover it. We did plot its location with coordinates so hopefully we'll stop by later to try to get it again or we'll let someone know it's out there and let them come find it. It caused quite a stir around here, while we went 'round and 'round trying to snag it with our grappling hooks. They have monitors down in the lab to plot the ship's course and it was really funny to look at it when they were through trying to find it. It was just a bunch of red loops around one point marked "Optics" and was kind of neat to think that the ship could maneuver around a spot that's so tiny like that.

For all you people our there who really like maps and would like to look up where we currently are, we're about 30 or so nautical miles dead west of Nunivak island. If you need help finding it, just go to some image search engine and pin it down. Now that you know where the island is, you can roughly find out where we are.

There have been sightings of blue whales and fin whales along with sea lions swimming off from the boat. We were even lucky enough to snap a picture of the sea lion and you can even see his whiskers. There really hasn't been much action tonight, since we were doing several moorings and weren't able to do much stuff with krill. We should get some activity in here tomorrow. I sure hope so, since I've already taken a nap in the lab only to become camera fodder. Falling asleep in the lab is something of a common occurance and when it happens, everyone else is ready to snap a picture of you with your head cocked to the side and your mouth wide open. Anyway, like I said, not much traffic through our sector so what little work was required tonight has already been done. All I need to do in the meantime is wait for tomorrow night and I think I'll do that by sleeping. Have a good day,night, morning, afternoon or evening, depending on when you're reading this. Keep in touch and you'll hear some interesting stuff, I'm sure.

Blog Text Problem

2008-07-09T03:56:00.002-08:00

Post written by the webmaster:

Good morning. It appears that some of you were having problems with Charlie's blog text not wrapping, causing a very irritating long line of text. The problem seemed to be with certain versions of internet explorer. I hope I have fixed this problem, but since the blog displayed fine on my computer (of course!), I am not sure. Please email me (Laura) to let me know if you are still having problems. mogel@cbl.umces.edu

Pictures and more krill

2008-07-08T05:37:00.007-08:00

[Picture attached of MOGEL members on this expedition: left to right, Karen Taylor, Charlie Morgan, and Rachel Pleuthner].

Post written by Charlie:

This evening was short but oh so sweet. Like I explained in the previous blog, we're using krill eyes to determine their age due to the special lipids that they store in their neural tissues. This evening I actually got to remove eyes from krill. They were already dead, mind you. I didn't actually kill any, not that it would have bothered me if I had, but using the aid of a microscope along with a pair of tweezers and a scalpel, I cut their eyes from their teeny bodies and placed them into a small vial filled with a 1:1 solution of dichloromethane and methanol for storage. It was a very tedious procedure, as it was all to easy to mess up. We removed the eyes from two different species of krill, the two being Thysanoessa raschii and T. inermis italics for the taxanomic names would be great here). The inermis krill had more fragile eyes than the raschii did, since even a small amount of pressure on the orbs would cause them to rupture. The raschii, however, had much more durable eyes that allowed for intact removals every time I attempted it, which was somewhere in the neighborhood of twenty. We were scheduled for another bongo trawl tonight, but when it was performed, there were no krill in the collection nets. Unfortunately the krill didn't show up tonight. [Picture of T. raschii in a petri dish, ready for dissection].

In case you're wondering, The bongo net is composed of two large metal circles separated by a short cross arm and attached to each of these circles is a tapered net which leads down to a collection tube. It looks similar to a couple of windsocks that someone attached together. [Picture of USCG personnel and scientists deploying a bongo net off the rear of the Healy]. All together there are two collection tubes that can fill up with all sorts of animals, krill if we're lucky, but tonight we only got smaller zooplankton and a few juvenile fish. This is the last collection station we will be at tonight. The next one we're moving to is around 140 nautical miles away and at our current speed of 14.5 knots, we'll reach it in about nine and a half hours. That's well on into the afternoon when I'll be sleeping so I won't be articipating in anything then, but we should be sampling at another cluster of stations where hopefully we'll catch some more krill.

After that excitement wound down I was back to doing little jobs for later krill experiments. I was in the middle of one of these when one of the other scientists popped her head in the door and told us about the spectacular sunset. When we got outside the sun had already departed below the level of the horizon but left us with a remarkably beautiful scene of color and clouds spread out all over the sky. (I've had Rachel send a picture that you can use to put in the blog, I hope you get it as it's very pretty--[attached below left]) From the horizon the color started at red and swept through the entire spectrum up into the dark blue and purple of the upper glow on into the blackness of night. It was truly something to behold, especially with the wind and waves being as calm as they were.

Aside from that, tonight was, as I said before, short but sweet. I have to attend a meeting at eight, after breakfast, on some of the course changes we're going to take and I need to be there for that. I'm planning on fitting in a little nap before breakfast so I won't be too tired at the meeting. Until later.

Krill Project

2008-07-07T09:47:00.005-08:00

Post written by Charlie:

Tonight was not as eventful as other nights, but I did get to do a few things of note. Like yesterday I woke up in time to eat dinner. Again, like yesterday, after dinner I went up to the bridge deck to take in the nice day, only unlike yesterday, the weather was not so nice. In fact, it was downright chilly, so I didn't stay up there for very long at all. I then came down to the science labs and helped out Calvin a little more with the NAS, but there wasn't much to do so we finished up rather early. I was able to help out doing little odd tasks for my lab director, but nothing spectacular.

There were, however, a couple of cool things that I did get to do. It seems that the bird watcher guys found a real gem of a bird: the short tailed albatross. From hearing them excitedly talk about it, it is apparent that there are only a couple thousand left and to be able to see one at all is very fortunate. I got to see one. It pretty much flew in behind the ship and landed on the water and there it sat until we pulled too far away to see it anymore. I did get a decent look at it through some binoculars though and it was a fairly large darker colored bird. The bird watcher guys said that it was still a juvenile due to the darker colorings on it but they were very excited about the sighting since neither of them have ever seen one in all their years of bird watching. I was also able to watch the sunset out here. Sunset comes around one in the morning up here and I was able to take a couple of photos. It was very beautiful and slow, but didn't seem to be accompanied by very many colors like reds, purples or other ones, such as I would see back home. The waves are a little larger than yesterday though and looking down from the bridge deck it almost looked like the water had an almost leathery appearance to its surface. It was all very beautiful to witness. [Webmaster note: We haven't received any pictures from Charlie yet, so I have attached a picture that I took of a sunset in the Bering Sea aboard the Healy from June 2007 for you to get an idea of how beautiful it is. Hopefully the Healy 2008 cruisers will be able to send pictures soon.]

Other than that, we filtered some more sea water and did a few more odd things for the rest of the night. Near the end we were preparing to cut the eyes off some of the krill captured in our bongo net run the same evening. Perhaps I should explain just exactly why we're cutting the eyes from these krill. It's a little long winded but I'll try to summarize. Aging animals, such as crabs or krill, can be difficult as there are really no physical parts to their body to determine their age. The old way of aging them was to measure their shell, but that is often inaccurate because these animals often grow at different rates from each other. For example, you could have a runt of a crab and a huge crab and while they are the same age as each other, they grew differently, so we cannot accurately find their age by measuring their carapace (shell) length. Knowing the age structure of a krill population is very important for understanding how they live and grow, and how climate change might affect krill populations. As a dominant food source for higher trophic levels like whales, seals, etc., krill are small but important! Fortunately all of these animals make these chemicals called lipofucsins as a by-product of oxidative metabolism, by dissolving free radicals in the lysosomes of cells. These products accumulate in a roughly linear fashion per time, so by measuring how much of this lipofucsin has been produced and stored, we can figure out how old the krill was. Krill store these lipofucsins in the neural tissues of their eyestalks so we are able to pull out these lipids by cutting out their eyes and going in there to get them. Unfortunately the krill were still alive and were just not ready so we'll get to practice our cutting tomorrow night right after supper. As for me, it's been a long night and I'm pretty tired so I'll sign off for now. Stay tuned.

Some pretty sights and Nutrient Analyzers!

2008-07-06T20:17:00.004-08:00

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.

Sometimes work is not fun...

2008-07-05T16:49:00.002-08:00

Today started out at around four in the morning, and it hasn't ended yet. We began by filtering several, several liters of seawater into large containers called carboys through vacuum filtration. The problem was, due to the setup, the carboy would collapse very easily due to the strong force of the vacuum, so frequent venting was necessary but every time the carboy was vented, it lost suction and had to build it up again, resulting in the loss of seawater filtration for a few moments. It took a very long time and we eventually finished up around nine or ten in the evening. Luckily we were able to take shifts and while two of us manned the pumps, one of us was able to go catch a few winks. As I'm sure so many of you are familiar with, work isn't always fun and games and sometimes you just have to roll up your sleeves and do what must be done. Thankfully the day was filled with little side happenings that served as a distraction from the work we were doing. The crew of the Healy threw a 4th of July cookout on the flight deck and we all had burgers and hot dogs. Later in the day, they did what they could to have a few fireworks. They called it the best in the Bering Sea, and I'm willing to agree with them. It was only about a dozen expired flares of a couple colors but the fact that they would go out of their way to use up emergency flairs for our enjoyment was very touching. I've talked with a few of the crew members and they've been very friendly and seem to be glad that we're able to be out here doing our thing.

After the filtering was finished with and a nap was taken, I came down to the science labs to do a little work out on the back deck. One of the scientists here runs a machine called a MOCNESS, which I'm sure is an acronym but I'm not sure what it stands for. [Note from webmaster: MOCNESS stands for Multiple Opening and Closing Nets with Environmental Sampling System. The MOCNESS is several plankton nets that can be opened and closed at different depths. It has multiple sensors attached, which measure things like salinity, depth, oxygen, etc.] I've run across so many acronyms in the past few days that it becomes very difficult to remember them all. Anyway, this MOCNESS is comprised of a metal frame with several trailing nets. The cool thing is that it is run from a remote computer and while it is being dragged behind the ship, the person running the remote can open individual nets at whatever depth they wish, giving them a very specific sampling of any layer in the water column. We sent the MOCNESS down to a depth of about 80 meters or so and while hauling it back up, opened a net every ascending 20 meters. It is very interesting to see what lives at which level in the sea, especially the large jellyfish that took up most of the room in the collecting tube for the top 20 meter sample. I was able to help launch and retrieve the contraption, as well as collecting the specimens we pulled out, and I get to help out again. The thing is, since I'm out on the deck helping launch equipment, I have to wear this big, puffy orange suit called a mustang suit. Supposedly if you're knocked off of the ship, this will help you float and keep you a little bit warmer, and thus keep you alive longer, than if you had fallen in with no protective layers on. While I don't have any pictures of this yet, I'll get some so you only have to wait a little bit longer. Also, if you have any questions at all, please feel free to contact me via my e-mail address at cm3620@lyon.edu.

Setting Sail and First Science Sampling

2008-07-04T04:44:00.006-08:00

Post written by Charlie:

Greetings blog readers! It was an exciting day today, what with us shipping out into the Bering Sea and all. This morning started out at seven with some breakfast and then a crisp hike up a mountain via an old WWII trail that never seemed to end. [From webmaster: here is a picture of a war memorial in Dutch Harbor with the beach and volcanoes visible in the background]. It stretched up far enough that we eventually encountered snow, and since it was July, we decided to take a picture of ourselves with it. After a couple hours, with us on board, the ship was pushed out of the dock and we moved out into the Sea under our own power, and I was on the second highest deck watching it all. We had some bird and marine mammal spotters out with us as we chugged out of the harbor and they spotted, among other things, Harbor Porpoises, Horned Puffins and Tufted Puffins. It was rather chilly in the afternoon, especially with the wind whipping to and fro but it was exciting just to be able to be part of it all. As we watched the island pull away from us, we turned our eyes seaward only to see past the dark cloud cover to the far out water, bright with sunlight.

When all that excitement wore down, I retreated below decks to the science labs. We still had gear to get ready and giant water bottles to clean, so that's what we worked on for the remainder of the day. Sometime during the afternoon, we reached our first sampling station. We dropped down our CTD, which is a large instrument that measures the depth of the water, the phytoplankton density, the water temperature, etc. This information was relayed to us in the science lab on a monitor and several of us were gathered around it, watching it as it dropped to the sea floor, recording data all the way.

We were also able to participate in a couple of emergency drills, in the case of what else than an emergency. The first was a "man overboard" drill, where the alarm sounded and the voice over the P.A. system told us to go to the scientists lounge for roll call to determine if any of us took a chilly tumble. After roll was called and the crew dragged in the dummy, we were subjected to over an hour of speakers over various topics like ship safety, tech services, galley issues, etc. Afterwards we were able to do an "abandon ship" drill, where we marched out to the helipad/flight deck and assembled into our little life raft groups, so if something absolutely horrific happens to the ship to make us abandon it, we will know what to do. Hopefully nothing like that will happen but it's always nice to know that it can. Anyway, while I wait for the next trawl after dark, which should be around one in the morning, I'm going to get a little rest. I hope you will join me next time and have a great fourth of July.

Travel and Unloading the Gear

2008-07-02T17:36:00.004-08:00

Posting written by Charlie:

The ride from Maryland to Dutch Harbor was something of a long one, especially from Minneapolis to Anchorage, however each of the three flights was smooth and there were no problems. There were a few spots where the clouds decided to part for amazing views of the mountains and even a few glaciers. While I had a window seat, I was right in the middle of the wing so my view was a bit confined to what I could see over the engine and behind the wing. Anchorage was a very beautiful city to be in and the weather was wonderful, being around 60 or so degrees.

[Here is a picture of the Healy, docked in Dutch Harbor.] I am now moved on board the Healy and have started moving all of our research gear out of the holds and up to our benches. The holds are very crammed with everyone's gear and ours just happens to be in the very back of the mass, necessitating a climb over the other gear to get to ours. Eventually, after swinging around on the ceiling supports to get what I needed, we set up most of our gear and took a small break. It's cold enough here to make your breath fog up but when you get to moving on here, you can work up a sweat very easily. Anyway, we sail out of Dutch Harbor tomorrow and the adventures should begin then. Keep checking in on here, as I'm sure that when things start happening, there'll be more interesting things to speak about. Have a good evening and thanks for reading.

Additional Cruise Perspectives

2008-07-02T06:13:00.001-08:00

Posting by the MOGEL webmaster:

In addition to Charlie's blog, another online journal for the cruise will be made by Ms. Jillian Worssam. Ms. Worssam is a teacher in Flagstaff, Arizona. She is participating in the cruise as part of the POLAR TREC (Teachers & Researchers Exploring & Collaborating) Program. POLAR TREC was created as a project of the International Polar Year (IPY--read more here) through the Arctic Research Consortium of the U.S. (ARCUS) and the National Science Foundation (NSF). In this program, a K-12 teacher participates in polar field work and research as a means to enhance science education. The teacher connects with their classroom and community while in the field through internet journals and podcasts/webinars, then spreads their polar research knowledge into the classroom upon their return. You can read Ms. Worssam's journal and find out more about the POLAR TREC program here.

And They're Off!

2008-07-01T05:49:00.003-08:00

Another post from the MOGEL webmaster:

I happen to know that Charlie likes maps as much as I do, so I'm sure he won't mind me posting this nice view of the Bering Sea that I got from Google Earth. [Google Earth is amazing, by the way, so if you like maps I strongly encourage you to download the program.] The area where Charlie and the others will be sailing is outlined in the white square.

The MOGEL sailors are now making their way to Dutch Harbor, Alaska (see lower place-marker on map for location), and they should arrive sometime today. The ship should also arrive today or tomorrow, and we will check in with Charlie once he's on board with an internet connection.

Logistics and Travel

2008-06-28T10:02:00.004-08:00

You may be wondering just how big of an undertaking a polar oceanographic cruise is?? Well, it's a very large one. We must transport all of our sampling gear and laboratory supplies to the ship while it is in homeport in Seattle, Washington. This usually takes place several months in advance, before the ship departs for the summer research season. This year, the ship left port in early March for the first round of cruises, so our gear was packed and sent by freight shipment in late February. Our laboratory alone sent over 900 lbs of equipment to the vessel, including sampling jars, microscopes, analytical instruments, cold weather gear, and chemicals!!

Our cruise participants will begin their journey early this week. The first leg of their trip is from Washington, D.C. to Anchorage, Alaska, with a layover in Minneapolis. This should take approximately 12 hours. Once in Anchorage, they must switch to a much smaller plane for the remaining 3 hour flight to Dutch Harbor, Alaska. Dutch Harbor is on the Aleutian Island of Unalaska. You may be familiar with "Dutch", as it is referred to in the polar research community, because it was popularized by the Discovery Channel's exciting documentary of the Alaskan King Crab fishery, "Deadliest Catch". Here, in Dutch Harbor, they will meet the ship, and sail north into the Bering Sea.

Meet Charlie

2008-06-28T07:06:00.003-08:00

My name is Charlie Morgan and I am an REU fellow at the Chesapeake Biological Laboratory in Maryland for the summer of ’08. I was raised in Arkansas for the majority of my life and have never been to the ocean, much less a large boat. Imagine my surprise when NSF [The National Science Foundation, our funding source for the Bering Ecosystem Study] gave me the opportunity to ship off to the Bering Sea. This is something of a summer of new experiences for me and this is among the most exciting.

I will post several blog entries during my time at sea. These can be used for teaching purposes or just to show inexperienced people, like I am now, what something like this can be like. I will be participating in as many activities as possible to give me a wide perspective of oceanography, and hopefully heighten the experience not only for myself, but for anybody interested in the subject well enough to read my blog. I hope that all who read this are given a good idea of what this kind of work is actually like, given straight from the mind of someone who is as green as they get when it comes to oceanography. If I can help someone at all with a decision for a particular career through my experiences and consequent journal entries, I will do my best to do so.

Introduction

2008-06-28T06:53:00.005-08:00

A note from the MOGEL webmaster:

Welcome to our blog! MOGEL is an acronym for "Maryland Organic Geochemistry and Ecology Laboratory". We are located at the Chesapeake Biological Laboratory in Solomons, Maryland, part of the University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science. Under the direction of professor Rodger Harvey, we study a wide range of topics on the biogeochemistry of aquatic environments. Please feel free to check out our website, which has examples of our research in a variety of locations, from the Arctic Ocean to the Chesapeake Bay.

MOGEL is lucky to have Charlie Morgan working with us for the summer. Charlie is an undergraduate student at Lyon College, in Batesville, Arkansas, majoring in biology and chemistry. He is visiting us as part of the Maryland Sea Grant Research Experience for Undergraduates (REU) Program. For his summer research project, Charlie will be working with two other MOGELites, Karen Taylor and Rachel Pleuthner, on a study of the effects of climate change on the Bering Sea. MOGEL's segment of this large, multi-disciplinary study is focused on how changing sea-ice conditions are affecting euphausiid (or krill) populations and how these changes propagate through polar food chains. Krill are small crustacean zooplankton that are important food species for whales, seals, and even some sea-birds.

Charlie, Karen, and Rachel will be sailing in the Bering Sea aboard the U.S. Coast Guard Icebreaker Healy. This blog will detail Charlie's experiences on his first oceanographic cruise. We will try to have regular updates, so check back often. Please be patient, though, as occasionally weather or science may interfere with our ability to make postings. If you have any questions, you can contact the MOGEL webmaster (mogel@cbl.umces.edu). Thanks, and enjoy.