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