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
Tuesday, October 25, 2016
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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