Dispatches from Sea >>
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| March 2007 |  Laura Preston, educator, UNH/Salem High School, Salem, NH. |
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| April 2007 | |||||||
April 4, 2007
Murphy’s Law – contributed by Karen Neely an excerpt of one letter home
Scientific instrumentation is limited only by the inventiveness of the scientist who needs it.
Some of it is old fashioned. For the last few hours, we’ve been dropping a big chunk of metal with attached balls of wax down to the bottom to pick up whatever sand, rock, or lava might be down there. Just like sailors have been doing for thousands of years.
Some of it is finding new uses for everyday objects. Our coffee pot has doubled as a boiler to make the hot water we need to melt the wax and get the rocks out of it.
And some of it is just plain complicated. We have, arguably, two of the most sophisticated scientific instruments that exist on board this ship. Jason II is a remotely operated submersible that is capable of diving to the bottom of the deepest oceans, taking video, picking up something as delicate as an egg, or breaking off and sending 250 pounds of rock to the surface. All of this through a tether attached to a pitching ship 4000 meters above and a very talented pilot.
Our other piece of complicated equipment is the side-scan sonar, which also withstands all the rigors of the deep-sea environment, sends out and receives perfectly coordinated pulses of sound which, through the magic of software and fairy dust, shows a picture of the bottom.
This all works great. Unless it doesn’t.
Any trip to sea will have problems. Murphy ordained it. Sometimes it’s dodging hurricanes, sometimes it’s outbreaks of the flu, but most of the time it’s just equipment not working. Our first issue started before we even left the dock. Our side-scan sonar wasn’t working properly. I overheard the decision to depart anyways: “We’ve got a spare of every part, and the most qualified people to fix it are onboard.” Sure enough, it splashed into the water working fine, and only eight hours behind schedule.
Ship time is extraordinarily expensive. Something on the order of $35,000 a day. This is why science usually runs 24/7. And making up that eight hours was important. We came close. We ran transects a little faster than planned and cut out a few areas we didn’t need scanned. Then we hauled the sonar back on board, headed south to the next site, and started all over again.
The sonar went back in the water and sent back beautiful pictures. Until it didn’t.
After about 12 hours, something went awry and the data stopped coming through. Time to fix the sonar. Now, if your television stops giving you a picture, you can walk the six steps over to it and fiddle with the dials, unplug and replug it, and even bang on it a little. When your television is 2 miles underneath you, it takes a couple of hours to even get it onboard so you can work on it. But we did. And now they’re trying to figure out how to fix it. Good thing we have spare parts and the most qualified people.
Not to let expensive sea time go to waste, we fell to Plan B. We got out the big chunk of metal with the wax attached to it (a rock corer). This very heavy concoction was rigged up and about to be lifted overboard. Then the metal wire holding it to the ship snapped. Murphy cut us a break this time, because if it had been 2 minutes later, the corer would have plummeted unattached to the bottom of the sea, never to be seen again. Instead, it dropped mightily onto the deck, scaring the heck out of everybody, narrowly missing a few toes, leaving a nice dent in the deck, and taking some really beautiful cores of the paint and steel making up the ship. We’re bagging them and sending them to a scientist at the University of Florida who couldn’t make the cruise, as a joke.
In a trusting display of the remaining wire, the corer was re-rigged and dropped overboard. Up came some really beautiful rocks. You know that pretty black shiny obsidian? That’s what the bottom here is like. As the oceanic ridge erupts and sends lava rolling down the landscape, it hardens into what is essentially black glass. When the heavy corer hits bottom, it shatters it and brings up the shards.
I’ve been told that by using even tiny bits of this glass and testing its elemental composition, we can get a better understanding of the earth’s mantle. It’s pretty amazing that we don’t even know what the stuff a few miles underneath us is really made of.
And so I say to Murphy: “We know your tricks. We know that you’ll try to break the crane on the Jason II...but we came prepared.”
Just please, please, don’t break the coffee pot!!?
 The Bridge coffeepot. |
 Espresso! |
 The coffeepot in the main lab. |
 The monster machine in the mess! |
 Karen Neely relaxes in the library. |
 Ed Grossman studies. |
 Larry Jackson, steward, cooking up some awesome eats! |
 Paul Vinitsky, Third Engineer, takes a break. |
 The fluid “Major” Samplers are ready to be attached to the Jason II |
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