Hi friends,
We've officially finished drilling at our final site! The drilling ended a bit prematurely due to a mechanical issue that will take a few days to fix, but we still managed to recover most of the sediments that we were hoping to drill at this site. Just another 12 hours of bringing the drill pipe back onto the ship and we'll be bound for Guam! The thought of tropical beverages alone has me excited at this point.
Two months is a long time to be away, but it has been a joy to meet scientists from all over the world and make many new friends in the process of doing science on board the ship. It's amazing to think about how much we've accomplished in such a short period, and even more so to imagine the research that will happen in the years to come using the samples we've collected. I'm looking forward to sailing again - but hopefully not for a few years and for a shorter amount of time 😊.
I'll be sure to post some photos here or on Facebook once I'm back in the land of fast Internet, but please check out some of the fantastic photos uploaded by the shipboard photographer (organized by week of the expedition) at this page.
I'll see many of you within a couple weeks, but for the rest - until next time!
Best,
Dan
Sunday, December 4, 2016
Saturday, November 26, 2016
It's the Beginning of the End...of the Expedition
Greetings, everyone!
Hope you all (in America) are enjoying a nice Thanksgiving weekend. Out here in the Pacific Ocean, we're currently drilling what is most likely the second to last of the planned sites for the expedition. The seafloor at this site is about 3400 m (just over 2 miles) below the sea surface, so the cores are taking much longer to get brought up to the ship. It has been a nice respite from the rapid pace we had a couple weeks ago.
One of the good things about drilling in deeper water (beyond the slower pace of the cores) is that it is typically much easier to drill farther back in time. This is because the sedimentation rate at a given site generally correlates with the water depth of the site. Shallower sites tend to be closer to continents (which erode to provide a source of sediment) and have relatively high sedimentation rates. Deeper sites tend to be far away from continents and have very low sedimentation rates, as most of the sediment that erodes from the continents settles out of the water before reaching deeper water. So while the sediments 200 meters below the seafloor at some of the shallow sites we drilled earlier were less than half a million years old, they are much older (several million years old!) here.
While we don't get any days off during the expedition, we had a delicious Thanksgiving dinner a few days ago here complete with turkey, stuffing, and even some apple pie. The fruit and salad bars are slowly getting a little more barren (it has now been ~6 weeks since we left port and things are starting to go bad), but overall, the meals are still impressively good.
We had an aptly named "beginning of the end of the expedition" meeting earlier today. Our port call in Guam is now less than two weeks away. Looking forward to getting my land legs back!
Cheers,
Dan
Hope you all (in America) are enjoying a nice Thanksgiving weekend. Out here in the Pacific Ocean, we're currently drilling what is most likely the second to last of the planned sites for the expedition. The seafloor at this site is about 3400 m (just over 2 miles) below the sea surface, so the cores are taking much longer to get brought up to the ship. It has been a nice respite from the rapid pace we had a couple weeks ago.
One of the good things about drilling in deeper water (beyond the slower pace of the cores) is that it is typically much easier to drill farther back in time. This is because the sedimentation rate at a given site generally correlates with the water depth of the site. Shallower sites tend to be closer to continents (which erode to provide a source of sediment) and have relatively high sedimentation rates. Deeper sites tend to be far away from continents and have very low sedimentation rates, as most of the sediment that erodes from the continents settles out of the water before reaching deeper water. So while the sediments 200 meters below the seafloor at some of the shallow sites we drilled earlier were less than half a million years old, they are much older (several million years old!) here.
While we don't get any days off during the expedition, we had a delicious Thanksgiving dinner a few days ago here complete with turkey, stuffing, and even some apple pie. The fruit and salad bars are slowly getting a little more barren (it has now been ~6 weeks since we left port and things are starting to go bad), but overall, the meals are still impressively good.
We had an aptly named "beginning of the end of the expedition" meeting earlier today. Our port call in Guam is now less than two weeks away. Looking forward to getting my land legs back!
Cheers,
Dan
Saturday, November 19, 2016
Party Trick #565: Making an Ice Age Out of Pore Water
Greetings, friends!
We are presently in transit from our last couple sites to the west of Manus Island to our first of three planned sites along an area of the seafloor known as the Euaripik (rhymes with "terrific") Rise. This is a ridge along the seafloor that acts as a local high in topography; that is, it's sort of like an underwater mountain range. Still, its highest point is well over a mile beneath the sea surface!
Part of what I'll be doing at these next few sites is collecting pore water from the sediments to try to learn about how salty ocean was during the last ice age, or glacial period. How exactly does this work? First, think about all of the water that exists at Earth's surface: the water in the ocean's, underground, in rivers and lakes, and in the air around you. That's a lot of water, right? True, and it's also true that things like evaporation and precipitation can move this water around on Earth's surface. Most of water that falls out of the sky as precipitation actually evaporated from the ocean, but evaporation removes only the water from the ocean; the salts are left behind. This will become extremely important in a minute.
Twenty thousand years ago, parts of North America (including Canada, Wisconsin, and northern Illinois) and Europe were covered by a sheet of ice over a mile in thickness. Yeah, and you thought Midwest winters are brutal today! Anyways, the water in these ice sheets came from precipitation, most of which came from the ocean. But if a bunch of water that is in the ocean now was on land then, and the amount of water at Earth's surface was about the same, that means that there must have been less water in the ocean. And if there was less water in the ocean, that means the ocean must have been - you guessed it - saltier.
Now, we know from the above argument that the ocean as a whole must have been saltier at the end of the last ice age twenty thousand years ago; research by geologists suggests that sea level was actually over 300 feet lower then than it is today because so much water was taken out of the ocean and put on land as ice!* But exactly how much saltier is still unknown, and figuring out how much saltier different parts of the ocean were is really important for us to understand how the ocean and atmosphere may have transported heat differently during the Ice Age. This is in turn crucial for us to understand how and why ice ages start and end in the first place.
It turns out that looking at pore water from ocean sediments can help us tell how salty a given part of the ocean was during the last ice age. All water in ocean sediments ultimately starts as ocean water, meaning that if the ocean was saltier at a given time, the pore water in the shallowest sediments would also initially be saltier. This pore water and its salts get buried under more and more sediment over time. Although many of the salts in pore water participate in reactions in the sediment that change their concentration (or abundance), chloride (one of the ions that forms table salt, the most abundant salt in the ocean) does not. This means that as long as the pore water itself does not react with the sediment, pore water that starts off being saltier remains saltier as it is buried. And if we know how fast the sediment is being buried (that is, the sedimentation rate) and can measure the concentration of chloride (plus a few other things in order to make some minor corrections related to water temperature) - Presto! - we can tell how salty the ocean was during the last ice age!
Whew! Hopefully you've made it to this point and are still awake. Now you can impress your friends and win over your enemies with your impressive knowledge of the salty glacial ocean** at cocktail parties.
More cool party tricks next time!
- Dan
*This sea level drop was high enough to expose a strip of land that connected Alaska to Russia and would have allowed one to walk to Russia from Alaska and back....but shhh, let's not give Putin any ideas...
** "Salty Glacial Ocean" may or may not get confused for the name of a cocktail. Use with care.
We are presently in transit from our last couple sites to the west of Manus Island to our first of three planned sites along an area of the seafloor known as the Euaripik (rhymes with "terrific") Rise. This is a ridge along the seafloor that acts as a local high in topography; that is, it's sort of like an underwater mountain range. Still, its highest point is well over a mile beneath the sea surface!
Part of what I'll be doing at these next few sites is collecting pore water from the sediments to try to learn about how salty ocean was during the last ice age, or glacial period. How exactly does this work? First, think about all of the water that exists at Earth's surface: the water in the ocean's, underground, in rivers and lakes, and in the air around you. That's a lot of water, right? True, and it's also true that things like evaporation and precipitation can move this water around on Earth's surface. Most of water that falls out of the sky as precipitation actually evaporated from the ocean, but evaporation removes only the water from the ocean; the salts are left behind. This will become extremely important in a minute.
Twenty thousand years ago, parts of North America (including Canada, Wisconsin, and northern Illinois) and Europe were covered by a sheet of ice over a mile in thickness. Yeah, and you thought Midwest winters are brutal today! Anyways, the water in these ice sheets came from precipitation, most of which came from the ocean. But if a bunch of water that is in the ocean now was on land then, and the amount of water at Earth's surface was about the same, that means that there must have been less water in the ocean. And if there was less water in the ocean, that means the ocean must have been - you guessed it - saltier.
Now, we know from the above argument that the ocean as a whole must have been saltier at the end of the last ice age twenty thousand years ago; research by geologists suggests that sea level was actually over 300 feet lower then than it is today because so much water was taken out of the ocean and put on land as ice!* But exactly how much saltier is still unknown, and figuring out how much saltier different parts of the ocean were is really important for us to understand how the ocean and atmosphere may have transported heat differently during the Ice Age. This is in turn crucial for us to understand how and why ice ages start and end in the first place.
It turns out that looking at pore water from ocean sediments can help us tell how salty a given part of the ocean was during the last ice age. All water in ocean sediments ultimately starts as ocean water, meaning that if the ocean was saltier at a given time, the pore water in the shallowest sediments would also initially be saltier. This pore water and its salts get buried under more and more sediment over time. Although many of the salts in pore water participate in reactions in the sediment that change their concentration (or abundance), chloride (one of the ions that forms table salt, the most abundant salt in the ocean) does not. This means that as long as the pore water itself does not react with the sediment, pore water that starts off being saltier remains saltier as it is buried. And if we know how fast the sediment is being buried (that is, the sedimentation rate) and can measure the concentration of chloride (plus a few other things in order to make some minor corrections related to water temperature) - Presto! - we can tell how salty the ocean was during the last ice age!
Whew! Hopefully you've made it to this point and are still awake. Now you can impress your friends and win over your enemies with your impressive knowledge of the salty glacial ocean** at cocktail parties.
More cool party tricks next time!
- Dan
*This sea level drop was high enough to expose a strip of land that connected Alaska to Russia and would have allowed one to walk to Russia from Alaska and back....but shhh, let's not give Putin any ideas...
** "Salty Glacial Ocean" may or may not get confused for the name of a cocktail. Use with care.
Thursday, November 17, 2016
Stay Tuned!
Hi friends,
Life on the ship has been a bit crazy lately! We left the coast of Papua New Guinea a few days ago and are currently working on our fourth site in the past two weeks. For comparison, we completed two sites in the first four weeks of the expedition, so the pace at which we've been bringing up new sediments to look at and analyze has been quite quick.
We are presently some tens of miles to the west of Manus Island (an island north of Papua New Guinea) and will be heading further north within the next day or two to complete drilling at a couple more sites on our way toward Guam. It should be fun!
Gotta get back to work now, but I'll be back with the promised info on pore water and the last ice age soon. Also, hello to Mrs. Lennon's class! I had a wonderful time showing you around the ship last week and answering your great questions.
Cheers,
Dan
P.S. Check out my colleague Dr. Catherine Rose's geoscience education blog, On The Rocks, for a guest post with some photos later this week plus a smorgasbord of other interesting pieces that have already been posted: http://ontherocks.ie/.
Thursday, November 3, 2016
Don't Drink the Pore Water & Other Musings
Hi everyone,
We are still a couple days away from arriving at our next site off the northern coast of Papua New Guinea, which means more time for me to write. Woohoo! Things have been pretty nice for the past couple days. The paleontologists on the ship held an open house of sorts a couple evenings ago during which everyone else on the ship could come view some of the foraminfera and other tiny fossils that they have been looking at in the samples we've been bringing up to help determine the age of the sediments. It was great to have a chance to look at these fossils after having heard so much about them! Alas, my job on the expedition is not to look at fossils, but instead to squeeze water out of some sediment samples and analyze the chemistry of the water.
Wait a second, squeezing water out of sediments? Where does that water come from and why is it interesting? Imagine you are walking around on the seafloor and are able to pick up some sediment from the seafloor. It turns out that no matter what size of grains are in that sediment (e.g., sand or clay), the majority of what you would pick up would actually be just water - up to 70 or 80 percent water by volume! When sediment grains settle out on the seafloor, they do not do so in a very ordered manner, so there actually ends up being a lot of empty space between grains that gets occupied by water. This water is known as "pore water", as it occupies the "pore space" between grains in the sediment. The amount of pore space decreases as a given layer of sediment gets buried deeper and deeper by more sediments above, since the increased pressure added by the weight of the above sediments forces the grains to fit more closely together***. However, even sediments buried thousands of feet below the seafloor can be more than 20 or 30 percent water by volume, so there's always a bit of water that can be squeezed out.
To squeeze water out of sediment samples, we use a machine called a hydraulic press. When we place a sediment sample inside a squeezer assembly (basically, a metal cylinder with a hole at the bottom through which water can exit and a piston on top that presses down on the sediment), we use the force applied by this press to compact the sediments even more than they were beforehand and collect the pore water than exits as the amount of pore space decreases. The press can apply up to 30,000 ft lbs of force, or roughly 10,000 psi of pressure in our case. For comparison, the air pressure applied to keep a tire on your car inflated is typically ~30 psi. It's sort of like using a giant juicer where the sediment is your fruit and the water is your juice. Just don't drink the pore water, it's salty and not very nutritious for any living things larger than bacteria.
It probably seems a little silly to apply so much force and energy just to squeeze a bit of water out of some sediments. After all, there's a whole ocean of water above the sediments that we could sample without squeezing, right? However, the concentrations of various dissolved salts and nutrients within the sediments can tell us a lot about things that are going on within the sediments themselves. For example, there are a lot of microorganisms below the seafloor that live by eating the remains of dead organisms in the sediments and "breathing" with things like iron, nitrate, and sulfate instead of oxygen. Some of these chemical reactions in the sediments can affect the fossil material we're interested in using to tell us about climate change in Earth's past, so we gain a lot of important information on how much change the chemistry of the fossils has undergone by looking at the chemistry of the pore water.
Pore water can also tell us about the ice sheets that existed in North America and Europe around 20,000 years ago and why they may have disappeared. But more on that next time!
Staying afloat,
Dan
***You can actually demonstrate this the next time you go to the beach. If you step on wet sand, notice how a bit of water comes out of the sand as you put your weight on the sand to make a footprint. This water used to occupy empty space between the sand grains, and the compaction of the grains is what allows your footprint to remain intact once you step away!
We are still a couple days away from arriving at our next site off the northern coast of Papua New Guinea, which means more time for me to write. Woohoo! Things have been pretty nice for the past couple days. The paleontologists on the ship held an open house of sorts a couple evenings ago during which everyone else on the ship could come view some of the foraminfera and other tiny fossils that they have been looking at in the samples we've been bringing up to help determine the age of the sediments. It was great to have a chance to look at these fossils after having heard so much about them! Alas, my job on the expedition is not to look at fossils, but instead to squeeze water out of some sediment samples and analyze the chemistry of the water.
Wait a second, squeezing water out of sediments? Where does that water come from and why is it interesting? Imagine you are walking around on the seafloor and are able to pick up some sediment from the seafloor. It turns out that no matter what size of grains are in that sediment (e.g., sand or clay), the majority of what you would pick up would actually be just water - up to 70 or 80 percent water by volume! When sediment grains settle out on the seafloor, they do not do so in a very ordered manner, so there actually ends up being a lot of empty space between grains that gets occupied by water. This water is known as "pore water", as it occupies the "pore space" between grains in the sediment. The amount of pore space decreases as a given layer of sediment gets buried deeper and deeper by more sediments above, since the increased pressure added by the weight of the above sediments forces the grains to fit more closely together***. However, even sediments buried thousands of feet below the seafloor can be more than 20 or 30 percent water by volume, so there's always a bit of water that can be squeezed out.
To squeeze water out of sediment samples, we use a machine called a hydraulic press. When we place a sediment sample inside a squeezer assembly (basically, a metal cylinder with a hole at the bottom through which water can exit and a piston on top that presses down on the sediment), we use the force applied by this press to compact the sediments even more than they were beforehand and collect the pore water than exits as the amount of pore space decreases. The press can apply up to 30,000 ft lbs of force, or roughly 10,000 psi of pressure in our case. For comparison, the air pressure applied to keep a tire on your car inflated is typically ~30 psi. It's sort of like using a giant juicer where the sediment is your fruit and the water is your juice. Just don't drink the pore water, it's salty and not very nutritious for any living things larger than bacteria.
It probably seems a little silly to apply so much force and energy just to squeeze a bit of water out of some sediments. After all, there's a whole ocean of water above the sediments that we could sample without squeezing, right? However, the concentrations of various dissolved salts and nutrients within the sediments can tell us a lot about things that are going on within the sediments themselves. For example, there are a lot of microorganisms below the seafloor that live by eating the remains of dead organisms in the sediments and "breathing" with things like iron, nitrate, and sulfate instead of oxygen. Some of these chemical reactions in the sediments can affect the fossil material we're interested in using to tell us about climate change in Earth's past, so we gain a lot of important information on how much change the chemistry of the fossils has undergone by looking at the chemistry of the pore water.
Pore water can also tell us about the ice sheets that existed in North America and Europe around 20,000 years ago and why they may have disappeared. But more on that next time!
Staying afloat,
Dan
***You can actually demonstrate this the next time you go to the beach. If you step on wet sand, notice how a bit of water comes out of the sand as you put your weight on the sand to make a footprint. This water used to occupy empty space between the sand grains, and the compaction of the grains is what allows your footprint to remain intact once you step away!
Tuesday, November 1, 2016
Life on the Ship
Greetings, friends!
It has been a quiet few days on the ship, as we finished our second site a couple days ago and will be in transit for the next few days to our next site off the northern coast of Papua New Guinea. In contrast to where we've cored thus far off (off the coast of NW Australia), Papua New Guinea is chock full of incredibly active volcanoes. The sediments we bring up will likely contain a lot of ash and look different from what we've seen so far, so we're all looking forward to seeing something new.
Since things are pretty relaxed at the moment, I thought I'd take the time to tell you more about what life on a ship is actually like. After all, the first questions that come to mind for many folks are not about the science that we're doing, but about the more biologically necessary and day-to-day sorts of things: What do you eat? Do you have your own room on board? What are the bathrooms like? Etc. So, here we go.
The food on the ship is actually quite good. Since all of the scientists and drillers are divided into 12 hour shifts such that the boat can operate 24-hours a day, 4 meals per day are served on the ship. These happen at 5-7 am, 11am-1pm, 5-7pm and 11pm-1am, although most folks are theoretically asleep for at least one of the meals (the 5am-7am one for moi). We typically have our choice of three main dishes plus 4 or so veggies and side dishes at each meal, and a fruit bar and salad bar are also available. The fruit and salad bars will remain operational for another week or so (the kitchen has a special ozone refrigerator that keeps perishables fresh much longer than your typical one), but I'm told that eventually they disappear. To top it all off, there are always cookies, soft-serve ice cream, and other assorted desserts. Everything is basically all you can eat, so you can either think of it as heaven or an impending crime scene where your body fat % is the victim. I'm definitely eating a lot more here than I typically do at home (#gradstudentlife), so I've been having to exercise to compensate. But that's more of a compliment to the kitchen than a complaint, as it certainly could be much worse.
Almost every person on the ship shares a room with another person, as there are two bunks in each room. Every two rooms also shares a single shower and toilet, so you might imagine that things could get a little crowded. However, the organizers of each expedition make sure that your roommate works the opposite shift as you, so you are rarely or never in the room at the same time as your roommate and are generally only sharing a shower and toilet with one other person. I'm told that before the ship was renovated in 2008, there were actually four people to a room and still a single shared restroom for every two rooms. The ship apparently had some unsavory nicknames during that time, but things are cushy now in comparison.
The toilet system on the ship is a vacuum system much like that used on an airplane. Since carrying a two months worth of fresh water on board would be very heavy and a bit unfeasible, the boat is also equipped with a distillation and filtration system to make freshwater from seawater. The water tastes great, but it's so salt-depleted that many actually need to take vitamins or drink Gatorade once a day or so to compensate for the lack of electrolytes. Still, it's a bit funny to think that I'm drinking water so clean that I would normally have to pay for it back home.
Although the days are long and filled with collecting samples, running analyses in the lab, and writing, we still find time to step outside and enjoy some fantastic views of the sunset (or, every once in a while, of land) and stars from the ship's deck. Life is good!
Gotta get back to work, but until next time!
Cheers,
Dan
It has been a quiet few days on the ship, as we finished our second site a couple days ago and will be in transit for the next few days to our next site off the northern coast of Papua New Guinea. In contrast to where we've cored thus far off (off the coast of NW Australia), Papua New Guinea is chock full of incredibly active volcanoes. The sediments we bring up will likely contain a lot of ash and look different from what we've seen so far, so we're all looking forward to seeing something new.
Since things are pretty relaxed at the moment, I thought I'd take the time to tell you more about what life on a ship is actually like. After all, the first questions that come to mind for many folks are not about the science that we're doing, but about the more biologically necessary and day-to-day sorts of things: What do you eat? Do you have your own room on board? What are the bathrooms like? Etc. So, here we go.
The food on the ship is actually quite good. Since all of the scientists and drillers are divided into 12 hour shifts such that the boat can operate 24-hours a day, 4 meals per day are served on the ship. These happen at 5-7 am, 11am-1pm, 5-7pm and 11pm-1am, although most folks are theoretically asleep for at least one of the meals (the 5am-7am one for moi). We typically have our choice of three main dishes plus 4 or so veggies and side dishes at each meal, and a fruit bar and salad bar are also available. The fruit and salad bars will remain operational for another week or so (the kitchen has a special ozone refrigerator that keeps perishables fresh much longer than your typical one), but I'm told that eventually they disappear. To top it all off, there are always cookies, soft-serve ice cream, and other assorted desserts. Everything is basically all you can eat, so you can either think of it as heaven or an impending crime scene where your body fat % is the victim. I'm definitely eating a lot more here than I typically do at home (#gradstudentlife), so I've been having to exercise to compensate. But that's more of a compliment to the kitchen than a complaint, as it certainly could be much worse.
Almost every person on the ship shares a room with another person, as there are two bunks in each room. Every two rooms also shares a single shower and toilet, so you might imagine that things could get a little crowded. However, the organizers of each expedition make sure that your roommate works the opposite shift as you, so you are rarely or never in the room at the same time as your roommate and are generally only sharing a shower and toilet with one other person. I'm told that before the ship was renovated in 2008, there were actually four people to a room and still a single shared restroom for every two rooms. The ship apparently had some unsavory nicknames during that time, but things are cushy now in comparison.
The toilet system on the ship is a vacuum system much like that used on an airplane. Since carrying a two months worth of fresh water on board would be very heavy and a bit unfeasible, the boat is also equipped with a distillation and filtration system to make freshwater from seawater. The water tastes great, but it's so salt-depleted that many actually need to take vitamins or drink Gatorade once a day or so to compensate for the lack of electrolytes. Still, it's a bit funny to think that I'm drinking water so clean that I would normally have to pay for it back home.
Although the days are long and filled with collecting samples, running analyses in the lab, and writing, we still find time to step outside and enjoy some fantastic views of the sunset (or, every once in a while, of land) and stars from the ship's deck. Life is good!
Gotta get back to work, but until next time!
Cheers,
Dan
Tuesday, October 25, 2016
Anchors Away!
Hi friends,
We're just finishing up drilling operations at our first site and should be setting course for our next site up the Australian coast later today. While the ship has a dynamic positioning system that keeps our position remarkably stable while we're on site (see this Wikipedia article for more on that), we'll soon have to turn it off for our transit, so the ship is about to start rockin' again. It should take us about 12 hours to reach the new site.
Our drilling at this first site (now known as IODP Site U1482) was quite successful in terms of providing sediments useful for research on the history of the Western Pacific Warm Pool. Tiny protists called foraminifera (or "forams") have been found throughout the samples the paleontologists have looked at so far, so we're all pretty excited. Forams can be found in all but the coldest parts of the world's oceans and often secrete a "test", or shell, made of calcium carbonate from carbonate and calcium ions in seawater. Calcium carbonate is the same chemical compound you would as the main component in find in limestone, marble countertops, or even cement. Most of the species documented thus far live in sediment on the surface of the seafloor, but a few also live within the water column at different depths. Just make sure you bring your microscope if you want to look for them - most forams are < 1 mm in diameter, so your chances of spotting one with your naked eye are pretty slim.
Why is a ship full of scientists so excited about a bunch of tiny forams? Well, it turns out that many of our most fruitful methods for learning about changes in climate and ocean circulation that happened millions of years ago involve measuring the concentrations of elements present as minor or trace components within calcium carbonate. These elements include magnesium (Mg), strontium (Sr), barium (Ba), boron (B), and cadmium (Cd). While calcium and carbonate form the dominant components of a foram's test, small amounts of each of these elements (as ions dissolved in seawater) will substitute for either calcium or carbonate as the test is formed. Past research has shown that the amount of each of these elements that substitutes into the foram test depends on variables such as water temperature, salinity, the element's concentration in seawater, or - more commonly - some combination of these variables. Thus, measuring the concentrations of these components within foram tests can give yield valuable information about how these variables have changed through time (and how they might change in the future with anthropogenic climate change). This is what many of the scientists on this expedition plan to do with the samples collected once we're back on shore. I'll actually be doing something completely different by looking at the chemistry of water samples collected during the expedition, but more on that to come.
That's all for now, but until next time - Go, Cubs, Go!
- Dan
We're just finishing up drilling operations at our first site and should be setting course for our next site up the Australian coast later today. While the ship has a dynamic positioning system that keeps our position remarkably stable while we're on site (see this Wikipedia article for more on that), we'll soon have to turn it off for our transit, so the ship is about to start rockin' again. It should take us about 12 hours to reach the new site.
Our drilling at this first site (now known as IODP Site U1482) was quite successful in terms of providing sediments useful for research on the history of the Western Pacific Warm Pool. Tiny protists called foraminifera (or "forams") have been found throughout the samples the paleontologists have looked at so far, so we're all pretty excited. Forams can be found in all but the coldest parts of the world's oceans and often secrete a "test", or shell, made of calcium carbonate from carbonate and calcium ions in seawater. Calcium carbonate is the same chemical compound you would as the main component in find in limestone, marble countertops, or even cement. Most of the species documented thus far live in sediment on the surface of the seafloor, but a few also live within the water column at different depths. Just make sure you bring your microscope if you want to look for them - most forams are < 1 mm in diameter, so your chances of spotting one with your naked eye are pretty slim.
Why is a ship full of scientists so excited about a bunch of tiny forams? Well, it turns out that many of our most fruitful methods for learning about changes in climate and ocean circulation that happened millions of years ago involve measuring the concentrations of elements present as minor or trace components within calcium carbonate. These elements include magnesium (Mg), strontium (Sr), barium (Ba), boron (B), and cadmium (Cd). While calcium and carbonate form the dominant components of a foram's test, small amounts of each of these elements (as ions dissolved in seawater) will substitute for either calcium or carbonate as the test is formed. Past research has shown that the amount of each of these elements that substitutes into the foram test depends on variables such as water temperature, salinity, the element's concentration in seawater, or - more commonly - some combination of these variables. Thus, measuring the concentrations of these components within foram tests can give yield valuable information about how these variables have changed through time (and how they might change in the future with anthropogenic climate change). This is what many of the scientists on this expedition plan to do with the samples collected once we're back on shore. I'll actually be doing something completely different by looking at the chemistry of water samples collected during the expedition, but more on that to come.
That's all for now, but until next time - Go, Cubs, Go!
- Dan
Wednesday, October 19, 2016
Core on Deck! Pair with a Milkshake (or Two) for Added Effect.
Ahoy, everyone!
It's been a busy few days, as we finally have some new sediment cores to study on the deck of the boat. We arrived at the first site at about 3pm local time on Sunday. It takes a few hours to lay down 1400 meters worth of drill pipe, so we didn't receive the first sediment core on the deck of the ship until about 12:30am on Monday. We subsequently had about 30 ~9.5 meter long cores come up in the span of 24 hours. I've been working with the other inorganic geochemists to squeeze water out of small slices from each of these cores and to measure the concentrations of several solutes within the water. More on that to come later!
The cores themselves can be taken in several different ways. There is a drill bit at the end of the string of pipes that does the actual drilling; this bit typically has three or four "rollers" arranged in a circle with a hole in the middle through which the core is taken. While very hard rocks or sediments require us to simultaneously drill and collect the core, most of our cores are actually being taken with a system known as an Advanced Piston Corer (APC). Rather than drilling through the sediments and chewing up the outside of the core, the APC uses pressurized seawater to shoot a thin, hollow metal cylinder called a core barrel 9.5 meters into the sediments ahead of the drill bit. Only after taking the core does the drill advance through the sediments. It's sort of like sticking a straw through to the bottom of a really thick milkshake and holding it in place while you use a spoon or another straw to drink the rest of the milkshake around it. While the surrounding sediments (milkshake) get a bit chewed up (consumed) by the drilling, the stuff inside the core (straw) remains intact and extremely well preserved. The core barrel with the core is then pulled up to the deck, the core inside extracted, and the barrel lowered again to the level of the bit take the next core.
Things have slowed down a lot for the past 36 hours (it takes longer to collect cores from deeper within the sediment), but we're just about done drilling the first hole at the site. We should get busy again once we start drilling a new hole (i.e., moving the boat a bit and drilling through the same sediments from the seafloor down a second time). This might seem a bit silly (Why would you drill the exact same thing more than once?), but because slices of the core are taken away for measurements and the drilling process itself doesn't always recover 100% of the sediments each time, we have to do this in order to acquire a complete "stratigraphy" without any layers or time missing. In the milkshake analogy, this is the part in which you buy another milkshake and consume it in the same way as the first because a little bit of the first one melted or otherwise escaped from your straw. Do so at your own risk.
That's all I have time to write at the moment, but I'll be back with more on the science happening on board the ship.
Avoiding brain freezes for now,
Dan
It's been a busy few days, as we finally have some new sediment cores to study on the deck of the boat. We arrived at the first site at about 3pm local time on Sunday. It takes a few hours to lay down 1400 meters worth of drill pipe, so we didn't receive the first sediment core on the deck of the ship until about 12:30am on Monday. We subsequently had about 30 ~9.5 meter long cores come up in the span of 24 hours. I've been working with the other inorganic geochemists to squeeze water out of small slices from each of these cores and to measure the concentrations of several solutes within the water. More on that to come later!
The cores themselves can be taken in several different ways. There is a drill bit at the end of the string of pipes that does the actual drilling; this bit typically has three or four "rollers" arranged in a circle with a hole in the middle through which the core is taken. While very hard rocks or sediments require us to simultaneously drill and collect the core, most of our cores are actually being taken with a system known as an Advanced Piston Corer (APC). Rather than drilling through the sediments and chewing up the outside of the core, the APC uses pressurized seawater to shoot a thin, hollow metal cylinder called a core barrel 9.5 meters into the sediments ahead of the drill bit. Only after taking the core does the drill advance through the sediments. It's sort of like sticking a straw through to the bottom of a really thick milkshake and holding it in place while you use a spoon or another straw to drink the rest of the milkshake around it. While the surrounding sediments (milkshake) get a bit chewed up (consumed) by the drilling, the stuff inside the core (straw) remains intact and extremely well preserved. The core barrel with the core is then pulled up to the deck, the core inside extracted, and the barrel lowered again to the level of the bit take the next core.
Things have slowed down a lot for the past 36 hours (it takes longer to collect cores from deeper within the sediment), but we're just about done drilling the first hole at the site. We should get busy again once we start drilling a new hole (i.e., moving the boat a bit and drilling through the same sediments from the seafloor down a second time). This might seem a bit silly (Why would you drill the exact same thing more than once?), but because slices of the core are taken away for measurements and the drilling process itself doesn't always recover 100% of the sediments each time, we have to do this in order to acquire a complete "stratigraphy" without any layers or time missing. In the milkshake analogy, this is the part in which you buy another milkshake and consume it in the same way as the first because a little bit of the first one melted or otherwise escaped from your straw. Do so at your own risk.
That's all I have time to write at the moment, but I'll be back with more on the science happening on board the ship.
Avoiding brain freezes for now,
Dan
Saturday, October 15, 2016
G'day, mates!
G'day, mates!
This morning, I woke up to see the ocean for the first time! The Indian Ocean, that is. Last night, we passed through the Lombok Strait from the shallow waters amongst the Indonesian islands to much deeper waters off the NW coast of Australia. This is also one of the major paths through which water and heat are exchanged between the Pacific and Indian Oceans via a current called the Indonesian Throughflow. While much of the water we had been traversing before the Lombok Strait was less than 100 meters depth, we were sailing over a part of the ocean almost 5500 meters (3.5 miles) deep when I last checked. So I'm trying really hard not to drop anything important overboard, as there's no way I'm ever getting it back. We were fortunate to enjoy some spectacular views of Mount Agung, a 3,000 meter high volcano, as we passed the Indonesian island of Bali at sunset yesterday evening.
What exactly am I doing with a bunch of other scientists on a boat for two months, again? As I mentioned briefly in my first post, we're out here to study the regional responses of the Western Pacific Warm Pool (WPWP), the world's largest reservoir of warm surface water, to local and global changes in climate over the past 15 million years. Since warm water evaporates quite quickly, the WPWP acts as a major source of water vapor and heat to the atmosphere in the modern day and thus in an important influence on the circulation of the oceans and atmosphere, the amount and distribution of precipitation in the tropics, and other climate variables. We want to understand how changes in the temperature and spatial extent of the WPWP over the past 15 million years may have affected these variables and played a role in global climate.
It's a bit hard to study things that happened 15 million years ago by just looking at the modern ocean. So, we'll be using a drilling vessel (i.e., a ship equipped with a drilling rig more typically used for oil & gas exploration) to drill hundreds of meters into the seafloor and bring up sediments deposited millions of years ago in 9.5-meter long cores. The sediments contain hard shells and organic compounds produced by organisms that lived during these time periods. We can learn much about the age and environmental conditions documented by the sediments by looking at the actual organisms that are present and their chemical composition. More on the drilling process and what these organisms actually are to come!
We should be arriving at our first site and getting our first core on the ship deck within the next 48 hours. My posts may get a bit less frequent at that point, but I'm looking forward to sharing the exciting details with you all!
Still seasickness-free since 1992 (& crossing my fingers that it stays true),
Dan
This morning, I woke up to see the ocean for the first time! The Indian Ocean, that is. Last night, we passed through the Lombok Strait from the shallow waters amongst the Indonesian islands to much deeper waters off the NW coast of Australia. This is also one of the major paths through which water and heat are exchanged between the Pacific and Indian Oceans via a current called the Indonesian Throughflow. While much of the water we had been traversing before the Lombok Strait was less than 100 meters depth, we were sailing over a part of the ocean almost 5500 meters (3.5 miles) deep when I last checked. So I'm trying really hard not to drop anything important overboard, as there's no way I'm ever getting it back. We were fortunate to enjoy some spectacular views of Mount Agung, a 3,000 meter high volcano, as we passed the Indonesian island of Bali at sunset yesterday evening.
What exactly am I doing with a bunch of other scientists on a boat for two months, again? As I mentioned briefly in my first post, we're out here to study the regional responses of the Western Pacific Warm Pool (WPWP), the world's largest reservoir of warm surface water, to local and global changes in climate over the past 15 million years. Since warm water evaporates quite quickly, the WPWP acts as a major source of water vapor and heat to the atmosphere in the modern day and thus in an important influence on the circulation of the oceans and atmosphere, the amount and distribution of precipitation in the tropics, and other climate variables. We want to understand how changes in the temperature and spatial extent of the WPWP over the past 15 million years may have affected these variables and played a role in global climate.
It's a bit hard to study things that happened 15 million years ago by just looking at the modern ocean. So, we'll be using a drilling vessel (i.e., a ship equipped with a drilling rig more typically used for oil & gas exploration) to drill hundreds of meters into the seafloor and bring up sediments deposited millions of years ago in 9.5-meter long cores. The sediments contain hard shells and organic compounds produced by organisms that lived during these time periods. We can learn much about the age and environmental conditions documented by the sediments by looking at the actual organisms that are present and their chemical composition. More on the drilling process and what these organisms actually are to come!
We should be arriving at our first site and getting our first core on the ship deck within the next 48 hours. My posts may get a bit less frequent at that point, but I'm looking forward to sharing the exciting details with you all!
Still seasickness-free since 1992 (& crossing my fingers that it stays true),
Dan
Wednesday, October 12, 2016
Come Sail Away with Me
Hi friends,
I'm happy to write that we've finally left port and our on our way to the first scientific drilling sites! We departed from Singapore at about 7am local time yesterday and have been in transit to a spot off the northwest coast of Australia for the past 30 hours or so. It will take us another 4+ days to arrive at the site, so we've been having a few meetings and working in our labs to prepare all of the instruments, procedures, etc. so that we're ready to go once we start drilling. It has been really strange not to be able to see any land (and often, no other ships) for the past day or so.
So far, we've been blessed with really calm weather and seas. The gentle rocking of the boat has actually been more sleep-inducing than uncomfortable, but we'll see what happens once reach the Timor Sea and are out in more open waters. We also crossed the equator about 16 hours ago, so I'm officially in the Southern Hemisphere for the first time. I'll be staring at flushing toilets and running faucets more often than usual for the next couple days to observe the direction in which the water swirls.
Tomorrow marks our first official day of shifts. I'll be working noon to midnight local time, 7 days a week until the end of the expedition. The bad news is that the baseball playoffs might be on in middle of the "night" for me. The good news is that the Cubs won! Here's to hoping there's even better news to come.
- Dan
I'm happy to write that we've finally left port and our on our way to the first scientific drilling sites! We departed from Singapore at about 7am local time yesterday and have been in transit to a spot off the northwest coast of Australia for the past 30 hours or so. It will take us another 4+ days to arrive at the site, so we've been having a few meetings and working in our labs to prepare all of the instruments, procedures, etc. so that we're ready to go once we start drilling. It has been really strange not to be able to see any land (and often, no other ships) for the past day or so.
So far, we've been blessed with really calm weather and seas. The gentle rocking of the boat has actually been more sleep-inducing than uncomfortable, but we'll see what happens once reach the Timor Sea and are out in more open waters. We also crossed the equator about 16 hours ago, so I'm officially in the Southern Hemisphere for the first time. I'll be staring at flushing toilets and running faucets more often than usual for the next couple days to observe the direction in which the water swirls.
Tomorrow marks our first official day of shifts. I'll be working noon to midnight local time, 7 days a week until the end of the expedition. The bad news is that the baseball playoffs might be on in middle of the "night" for me. The good news is that the Cubs won! Here's to hoping there's even better news to come.
- Dan
Friday, October 7, 2016
It's Official: I'm on a Boat
Hi friends,
It's time to break out your best T-Pain impression, 'cause I'm on a boat! We're still at port on the not-so-Lonely Island of Singapore, so I can't say it has been smooth sailing as of yet. But getting to the JOIDES Resolution is a good first step. And lo', is she a site to behold!
At 469 feet in length and 69 feet in width, the JR is quite a bit bigger that speedboat your silly friend is always bragging about, but is less than half the length of the largest cruise ships sailing the temperate seas at the present. The most conspicuous feature of the ship is the derrick at its center, which rises 205 feet above the water and helps suspend several thousand feet of drill pipe when the ship is coring seafloor sediments. The ship also features a full suite of labs devoted to preparing and analyzing samples from sediment cores once they're drilled pulled up to the ship, several levels of bunks, a lounge, a movie room, and a gym. While the living isn't luxurious, it's quite comfortable all things considered.
Once the expedition sets sail, the ship will be home to about 125 people for two months; 50 or so of these folks will be members of the science party (including yours truly) plus lab technicians, while the other 65 are ocean drilling specialists and other professionals devoted to operating the drill rig. The science party consists of scientists from many of the nations that collaborate to operate IODP of varying levels of experience, from graduate students like myself to seasoned veterans who have been sailing on IODP Expeditions for over 20 years. Many of the specialists are staff of Siem Offshore, the company that actually owns the JR and operates about 50 vessels devoted to exploration drilling for the oil & gas industry. 125 may seem like a lot of people to be working on a boat at once, but because the ship operates 24 hours a day, only half of the ship's inhabitants are up and working at any given time. Rooms are also double-occupancy as a result of this.
We should be a port for a few more days, during which time I and the rest of the scientists will continue getting accustomed to the ship and going over important policies. The ship is a bit maze-like, so an inordinate amount of this time will probably be spent accidentally walking into the wrong room and getting distracted (Wait, this is the mess hall? I'm trying to get to the gym...oh, is that a self-serve frozen custard machine? Maybe I'll just have a small cone and then go to the gym...). But it's certainly a good way to introduce yourself to folks and start making new friends with similar interests from around the globe.
Until next time!
- Dan
P.S. - You can learn lots more about the JR by going to the ship's website, http://joidesresolution.org/. There's even a virtual tour!
It's time to break out your best T-Pain impression, 'cause I'm on a boat! We're still at port on the not-so-Lonely Island of Singapore, so I can't say it has been smooth sailing as of yet. But getting to the JOIDES Resolution is a good first step. And lo', is she a site to behold!
At 469 feet in length and 69 feet in width, the JR is quite a bit bigger that speedboat your silly friend is always bragging about, but is less than half the length of the largest cruise ships sailing the temperate seas at the present. The most conspicuous feature of the ship is the derrick at its center, which rises 205 feet above the water and helps suspend several thousand feet of drill pipe when the ship is coring seafloor sediments. The ship also features a full suite of labs devoted to preparing and analyzing samples from sediment cores once they're drilled pulled up to the ship, several levels of bunks, a lounge, a movie room, and a gym. While the living isn't luxurious, it's quite comfortable all things considered.
Once the expedition sets sail, the ship will be home to about 125 people for two months; 50 or so of these folks will be members of the science party (including yours truly) plus lab technicians, while the other 65 are ocean drilling specialists and other professionals devoted to operating the drill rig. The science party consists of scientists from many of the nations that collaborate to operate IODP of varying levels of experience, from graduate students like myself to seasoned veterans who have been sailing on IODP Expeditions for over 20 years. Many of the specialists are staff of Siem Offshore, the company that actually owns the JR and operates about 50 vessels devoted to exploration drilling for the oil & gas industry. 125 may seem like a lot of people to be working on a boat at once, but because the ship operates 24 hours a day, only half of the ship's inhabitants are up and working at any given time. Rooms are also double-occupancy as a result of this.
We should be a port for a few more days, during which time I and the rest of the scientists will continue getting accustomed to the ship and going over important policies. The ship is a bit maze-like, so an inordinate amount of this time will probably be spent accidentally walking into the wrong room and getting distracted (Wait, this is the mess hall? I'm trying to get to the gym...oh, is that a self-serve frozen custard machine? Maybe I'll just have a small cone and then go to the gym...). But it's certainly a good way to introduce yourself to folks and start making new friends with similar interests from around the globe.
Until next time!
- Dan
P.S. - You can learn lots more about the JR by going to the ship's website, http://joidesresolution.org/. There's even a virtual tour!
Tuesday, October 4, 2016
Welcome!
Hello, friends! Thanks for taking the time to stop by my blog. I hope that your visit will leave you wanting more.
As I write this post, I am preparing to sail as a shipboard scientist on International Ocean Discovery Program (IODP) Expedition 363. The IODP is an international marine research collaboration among 25 nations that aims to explore Earth's history and modern Earth dynamics through the collection of seafloor sediment samples and observation of current Earth system processes; you can learn more about it here. This particular expedition will be studying the regional responses of the Western Pacific Warm Pool (WPWP), the largest reservoir of warm surface waters on Earth, to local and global climate change over the past 15+ million years. But more on that in later posts.
The IODP operates two research vessels, the D/V Chikyu and the JOIDES Resolution. The Chikyu is newer (read: more shiny) and has the distinction of being able to drill deeper into sediments than any other scientific boat in the world. The JOIDES Resolution (or JR), on the other hand, is an oldie but a goodie and has a track record of highly successful research expeditions that extends back over 30 years. I'll be sailing on the JOIDES Resolution and am looking forward to asking tough questions about its slick past as an oil exploration vessel. The Chikyu is currently off the coast of Japan on a separate expedition studying microbes that live hundreds of kilometers below the seafloor (more on that here), but if I yell loudly enough from the JR, it's possible that my housemate on that expedition will hear me (yo, Kyle!).
That's all I have time for now, but I'm hoping to keep you all posted at least once a week - more if you poke me every once in a while about it. I'm looking forward to sharing my experiences with life on the boat and the exciting science that I'm taking part in. Until next time!
Smooth sailing,
Dan
---
*Side note on the title of this blog. I struggled to come up with something befitting of what I hope this blog will be: a casual, but informative look into life aboard a scientific research vessel and the science that takes place aboard it. It had to be something interesting, something memorable. While "sciencey" makes the grammarian within me go crazy, its definition on the venerable Urban Dictionary won me over: "Being sexy while performing scientific research". And shipboard science is super sexy, so this campaign season, let's Make Science Sexy Again. Sailing the Sciencey Seas 2016.
As I write this post, I am preparing to sail as a shipboard scientist on International Ocean Discovery Program (IODP) Expedition 363. The IODP is an international marine research collaboration among 25 nations that aims to explore Earth's history and modern Earth dynamics through the collection of seafloor sediment samples and observation of current Earth system processes; you can learn more about it here. This particular expedition will be studying the regional responses of the Western Pacific Warm Pool (WPWP), the largest reservoir of warm surface waters on Earth, to local and global climate change over the past 15+ million years. But more on that in later posts.
The IODP operates two research vessels, the D/V Chikyu and the JOIDES Resolution. The Chikyu is newer (read: more shiny) and has the distinction of being able to drill deeper into sediments than any other scientific boat in the world. The JOIDES Resolution (or JR), on the other hand, is an oldie but a goodie and has a track record of highly successful research expeditions that extends back over 30 years. I'll be sailing on the JOIDES Resolution and am looking forward to asking tough questions about its slick past as an oil exploration vessel. The Chikyu is currently off the coast of Japan on a separate expedition studying microbes that live hundreds of kilometers below the seafloor (more on that here), but if I yell loudly enough from the JR, it's possible that my housemate on that expedition will hear me (yo, Kyle!).
That's all I have time for now, but I'm hoping to keep you all posted at least once a week - more if you poke me every once in a while about it. I'm looking forward to sharing my experiences with life on the boat and the exciting science that I'm taking part in. Until next time!
Smooth sailing,
Dan
---
*Side note on the title of this blog. I struggled to come up with something befitting of what I hope this blog will be: a casual, but informative look into life aboard a scientific research vessel and the science that takes place aboard it. It had to be something interesting, something memorable. While "sciencey" makes the grammarian within me go crazy, its definition on the venerable Urban Dictionary won me over: "Being sexy while performing scientific research". And shipboard science is super sexy, so this campaign season, let's Make Science Sexy Again. Sailing the Sciencey Seas 2016.
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