Final stretch...!

We’re now in the last few days of the cruise. Hard to believe it’s almost over, and at the same time it feels like it’s been a lifetime! Everyone’s been busy wrapping things up, including me. I’ve been trying to finish getting my AGU abstract put together, put the final touches on the metadata I’ve been working on, and helping to get all of the other data to a good enough point that I can leave it to come back to in a month (and not feel too guilty leaving it with Bobby and Ryan in the meantime). There’s also, of course, packing, laundry, and cleaning to do in the off hours. We’re all going to have to work 16 or 18 hours the last day, because we need to wrap up the lab, pack up, and help up on deck. A little less sleep, perhaps, these last couple of days...

We’re theoretically docking in Kodiak on Sunday morning at 8 a.m. I’m scheduled to fly out of Kodiak with a bunch of other folks on an 11 a.m. flight to Anchorage. Once I get to Anchorage, I have a 12 hour layover, and after that lovely wait I get to board an 11:55 red eye flight to Denver (5+ hours). Yay. I’m definitely going to try to get my Kodiak flight changed to one later in the day – perhaps the flight the Texas guys are on at 4:50 – so I can at least have someone to hang out with in Kodiak for a while.  Otherwise, I might try to get out of the Anchorage airport and see the town a little bit during my enormous wait. What’s the first thing I’m going to do when I get off the plane, you might ask? Call my mom. Then what? Go to the nearest place that sells beer. Gotta have priorities.

I thought I’d be super homesick at the end of the cruise, but it’s really not too bad, other than being jealous of the nice weather and exercise people are getting at home. I’m certainly missing everyone and it’ll be wonderful to be back, but the cruise has been keeping me busy enough to largely keep my mind off of that, thank goodness. They’ve allowed us to sign up for 15 minute satellite phone calls over the weekends, which have been really nice – I’ve been able to talk to my parents, roommate, and boyfriend voice to voice while out in the middle of nowhere. Sometimes the calls make it worse though: when I talked with my roommate Sara over the weekend, she told me about her life, which basically consisted of tanning, hiking, enjoying the beautiful weather, hanging out with our friends, drinking beer... did I forget anything else fun that I can’t do out here? I was like, great. I’m going to get home, you’re going to be tan and gorgeous, and I’m going to be pasty and fat. Ugh. Well, I’m getting a head start on my PhD thesis, and free food every day. Take THAT. (For the record, I’m still jealous.)

I AM finding myself missing weird things though, randomly. Like, singing. I’ve started humming all the time because I haven’t sung anything in weeks. Other things, too... Driving, watching TV, being warm, the sun, tanning, having the option to tan, doing my hair, wearing skirts, walking... yah. It’ll be good to be home.

All told, though, this has really been an excellent experience. I would say that I’ve really had a very good time at sea. All the people were wonderful – very friendly, understanding, helpful, and funny (good thing, too, since I’ll be working with a lot of them for years). Toward the end – as is what happens with most new people I meet, I’ve noticed – I kind of became “the person to make fun of” because apparently, it’s an easy thing to do. I’m comfortable with it because that usually means people can at least tolerate my company. And, it makes me feel like I have friends (even if all they ever do is laugh at me (or with me, as I’d like to think)). The living situation was significantly better than I was expecting, and I’ve been fairly comfortable. Definitely not hotel comfortable, but 3-weeks-on-a-boat comfortable, for sure. I was very pleased with the research – I find it all fascinating. I learned tons on this cruise, about marine geology, seismic data, and processing, and I honestly enjoyed nearly everything I did. The only complaint I have is that I sometimes feel like a complete moron, 1) because I don’t know anything and I’m well aware of it, and 2) because everyone around me is so intelligent it’s scary. But, I hear this is a common feeling to have in grad school. So hopefully I get used to it, because I’m almost certain that the feeling won’t go away anytime soon.

So, moral of the story: Going to sea is awesome, and given the opportunity, I will most definitely come back. Being seasick is miserable, and makes you want to jump ship and never look back... BUT if you’re able to get through it (and it goes away after a day or two regardless for almost everyone), the experience is really based on the people and the work. I’ve learned that I do indeed get seasick, but it’s really only when the weather turns bad, and it’s certainly manageable. Luckily, we had great weather almost the entire way through and I had the privilege of working with wonderful people. So I guess, slightly revised moral: I would definitely do THIS cruise again, and would totally go on another cruise sometime. Hopefully, as a UT student (and in my future career), I’ll have at least a couple more opportunities.

This is officially the last cruise post, but I’ll try to get up a post-cruise post, just to wrap things up nicely (because I’m like that). If you made it this far and you’re still reading my blog, thanks Mom.

Hiccups in research

So I was really only planning on posting one more time before the end of the cruise, but we’ve had a bunch of exciting/interesting/not so good things happen in the last two or three days. I figured you all (read: my mom) would enjoy an extra update. Don’t worry, I’m still planning to put up an “end-of-cruise thoughts” post, for those of you (my mom) who care.

A couple of days ago, we had a near-crisis with the streamer – the last two kilometers started having telemetry problems, meaning they were recording bad data (or rather, not recording data at all). This was a freak-out moment because we are nearing the end of the cruise and don’t really have the 20 or so hours required to roll in the streamer, replace the bad two km, and roll it back out again. The chief science officer came up with the idea to simply turn off the last two kilometers of the streamer, which actually affects our data very little; we just need to change a few processing steps. If this happened closer to the beginning of the cruise, we likely would have taken the time to replace the streamer, but since we are so close to the end of the cruise, almost all of our seismic lines are completed and we’re pretty much just collecting bonus data at this point. So, all told, the whole situation could have been a lot worse.

Today was filled with lots of excitement. This morning, I woke up to the news that we were right next to a for real Navy battleship, about 7 miles away – but close enough still for it to mess up our multibeam signal and cause noise in the seismic. It wasn’t a huge problem, but the captain got on the radio and asked them to turn their sonar off so it wouldn’t mess with ours. It was pretty cool to hear him on the radio saying “Research vessel Marcus G. Langseth here...” There was also apparently at least one other Navy ship in the area, and possibly a sub also. We didn’t get to see them, but still – very cool!

Another cool thing from today that started with something that could have been disastrous: a week or so ago, one of the engineers apparently got some sort of metal splinter in his eye, and there was talk of it being serious enough to stop the cruise and bring him into port to go to the hospital. I actually didn’t even know that this whole situation happened until today. Not sure how I managed to miss that. Anyway, they ended up putting him on some antibiotics and he was stable enough to work, but still in pain. Conveniently, we’ve had this smaller ship called the Northsman following us around because it’s been picking up the ocean bottom seismometers after we shoot over them. The Northsman just so happens to be heading back to port almost three days earlier than we are. So, just after lunch today, the Northsman caught up to us, sent over a powered lifeboat (they call them “zodiacs”), and the metal splinter guy hopped off our boat and got shuttled back over to the Northsman! I saw the whole transfer, but unfortunately didn’t get any pictures. I guess they do stuff like this all the time, but it was still cool to see! 

Well, that’s all for now... at least one last update coming. Can’t believe it’s almost over!

More boat pictures!

The pictures are less boring than the text posts, so here's some more for you! I tried to get some of the other cool things on the boat, aside from the snake pit (which is really probably the best part, but whatever).

My view, every day. Weather: Cloudy and 50 degrees, wind 15 mph. Every day.

One of the science techs (Mike) loading a sonobuoy into the SONOBUOY LAUNCHER. You don't even know what's in store.

I know right. Seriously - so good. I have video. Watch for it on YouTube.

The streamer rigging behind the boat. The disturbance you see a little way out is the airguns.

Some of the enormous streamer reels on the streamer deck.

The gun deck. Where they keep the guns.

The PSO tower, the highest place on the boat. They go up there all day, every day and watch for whales and stuff.

Well... I guess it's not ALWAYS completely cloudy...

Beautiful Alaskan sunset, at 11:00 p.m. This is the night before the longest day of the year.

The mess, where I spend 90% of my time and the reason I'm now twice the size as when I got on three weeks ago.

The movie room. We only deal in class here.

The lab, where I ACTUALLY spend 90% of my time. We counted the live monitors in that room, I think there's something like 60. And we seriously use all of them.

The back table, where the geophysicists isolate ourselves to process data.

The science team. This is the cruise facebook, on the Langseth intranet (so obviously, the best picture of everyone ever taken). I work with these people all day, every day. It's been pretty great, all told.

Some of the other science folks I've had the privilege of working with in the lab and getting to know over the past few weeks.

More science/my research

The past few days here have been very interesting for me personally, as I’ve started discussions with Sean and Bobby about what research I’ll be doing at UT over the next several years. I know most of you don’t care, but for those of you who do (my mom, myself) here’s an overview of what we’ve found so far and the research we’ve been talking about.

The data we are collecting on this cruise will be unique because they are high-resolution, high-quality geophysical data in a relatively unexplored area of the Gulf of Alaska. In addition to the multi-channel seismic reflection data and the multibeam bathymetry I’ve already mentioned, we are also collecting wide-angle refraction data with ocean bottom seismometers (OBS), chirp data (shallow, high-resolution seismic data), and sonobuoy data (another type of seismic data). Bobby and I will be some of the first people to have access to and use these data, which is very exciting from a research perspective. We’ll be looking at places in the world that no one has seen with this kind of detail ever before.

One of the areas that we’ve been crossing over quite a bit is a large region covered by a feature known as the Baranof Fan – a large marine sedimentary deposit straddling the border of the U.S. and Canada. The USGS is interested in this area because the sediment here is thick enough to extent the U.S. economic zone. We at UT-Austin are interested in this area scientifically because no one really knows how exactly all that sediment got there and what tectonic and/or climatic processes caused its deposition. It could a combination of any number of things, from submarine slumps caused by earthquakes to erosive glaciers. Bobby has already completed a chapter of his PhD dissertation on the formation of the Surveyor Fan, another large sedimentary system to the north of the Baranof Fan.

Thankfully, I’ve had the opportunity (while on watch or downtime during processing) to read several papers on the Gulf of Alaska that Bobby gave to me. The last comprehensive paper written on the Baranof Fan, as far as Sean knows and as far as I can tell, was written in 1987. (That’s almost 25 years ago. Hello?) Back then, the researchers had a lot of unanswered questions about the area. Since no one has answered them since then – and since we have all this great new data covering the fan – Sean and I have decided that it’s my job to do it!

We discussed some of the questions that need answering, and there are a TON. It’s a little bit overwhelming! To start off, we’re going to focus on the “big picture” angle of the tectonics and depositional processes that formed the fan. We’ll begin analysis by doing some surface mapping, sub-surface channel mapping, and tectonic reconstructions. That’ll probably take me two years (seriously). There are other possibilities for the other chapters of my dissertation, as well. I could use some of the refraction data from the OBS lines to look at basement structure (which would be great, especially coupled with the excellent reflection data we have). Sean also has a proposal in for collecting data off of Yakutat, AK, where there’s a lot of interesting things going on tectonically and morphologically. If that goes through, it’ll almost certainly be a part of my project, and we’ll collect data next summer.

We’ve talked about presenting some of these data at the annual American Geophysical Union (AGU) conference this December in San Francisco. It’s rare for a first-year grad student to present at the conference (I presented as an undergrad... *ahem*), since it’s so difficult to complete enough research in the first semester. But with my head start on field work and my strong work ethic, both Sean and I feel I can pull things together in time to present at AGU. We’re going to try to get some initial analysis and a rough abstract completed on board here, since I’ll be in Colorado during July and abstracts are due by August 4th (!). Very exciting that I’m already well on my way toward my degree!

It’s funny, because I’m currently enrolled as a Master’s student at UT. That’s going to last all of about five minutes when I get there. PhD, here I come!

Life on board

Well folks... it’s almost halfway through the cruise (crazy!) and I’m finally safely in my routine. I think I’ve gotten my “sea legs” at this point, though I am a little worried about getting re-nauseous with the inevitable onset of rougher seas... the forecast looks good, so hopefully we’ll stay calm for at least a few more days.

Since my shift is 8 am to 8 pm, I thankfully have pretty normal, regular hours (and they key there is, I overlap all three meal times). A typical morning starts with me getting up at around 7 (although, I was a bit late for my shift the first couple of days due to a variety of unfortunate circumstances so I’ve upped the wake-up time to a little earlier). I’ll shower pretty much every day, sometimes the night before, sometimes in the morning. It’s a little bit tricky because my roommate Jenny is on the midnight to noon shift, so she’s usually sleeping when I get off at 8 pm. If I shower at night I’ll do my best not to wake her up while moving around grabbing my stuff.

A note on showering: Depending on the wave height, it can certainly be an interesting activity. The first time I showered after leaving the dock, I was a mess – soap and shampoo were falling everywhere, I needed to lean into the wall, and the floor was 100% puddle by the end of the whole experience. When the waves are calmer, however, it’s not so bad at all, though you do need to do your best to conserve water. I’ve gotten my showers down to about 5 minutes (impressive if you know me), and less than that of running water time since I turn it off to lather up.

Anyway, after showering and getting my stuff together in the morning, I’ll head to the mess for breakfast, usually consisting of a delicious combination of scrambled eggs, French toast, regular toast, pancakes, bacon, sausage, potatoes, hot cereal, juice, and an assortment of fresh fruit. From there, it’s straight to the lab for a day of work.

Sean has divided our 12-hour days into thirds: the first four hours we do seismic processing, the next four we’re on watch, and the last four we do multibeam processing. Since we all overlap each other by four hours, there should theoretically be one person on each task at any given time. This system took a few days to get fully into place as we started collecting data (and it’s still somewhat loosely enforced), but now we’ve all got plenty to do during the day and it’s getting busier and busier as we continue to collect data. I know I’m in the right field, because I honestly look forward to going to the lab every morning to learn new things about geophysical data.

We’ve been collecting lots of data, but not all of it without issue. We’ve been shooting the airguns (collecting multichannel seismic data) almost constantly since we left port, and the data are looking good, for the most part. We had some pretty serious issues with the sound velocity profiles for the multibeam (I will NOT bore you with the explanation of what that is) but we finally got it figured out today! Unfortunately, this means re-processing all of the data we already spent hours processing, but overall it could be worse.

We’ve also had several shutdowns for whales. If you’re not familiar with marine seismic acquisition, this may come as a surprise. To collect seismic data, we literally have “air guns” trailing off the back of the boat. I put them in quotes, but that’s literally what they’re called. They shoot high-energy “puffs” of air every minute or so, and there’s been discussion that it’s destructive to surrounding marine life (whales, dolphins, etc.). So, to prevent this, we have these people called protected species observers (PSOs) on board who stand at the top of this tower (the highest point on the boat) all day and look for whales. If they spot one close enough (or hear one... they’re listening in the lab, too) we have to shut down the guns for 30 minutes. It hasn’t been much of a problem so far, but one of the lines has a few gaps in it because of this.

The people on board have been consistently very friendly, funny, and personable. There are really only a few crusty old sailor types; for the most part everyone is pretty much normal – their job just happens to be on a boat. I’m almost positive I’m the youngest one (by a margin) on board, but thankfully there are plenty of other women around so I’m not a minority in all counts. There are two others on the science team (one is chief scientist) and all five PSOs are women. It wouldn’t bother me much if there were more men (as is typical on these cruises), but it gives everything a bit homier, more comfortable feel with the additional women.

An additional, slightly random note: I’m becoming legitimately concerned that I’m getting fat. I’m getting three full meals a day and there’s an unlimited supply of snacks. In addition, I’m sitting for 12 hours a day in a lab and don’t really have time to work out. I keep checking daily to see if my pants are any tighter. Oh well. It’s all free, right?

Langseth photos

Ok everyone... I know you've all been dying for more pictures. Waiting by the computer, etc. Well, here they are! Some of them, anyway... Pictures of the outside and inside of the ship, to give you an idea of where I spend my time each day. More to come (of the deck, other rooms, etc.) in the near future. Enjoy!

The Marcus G. Langseth, at the dock (couldn't quite fit the whole thing in, but got close!). It's about 220 ft long (car for scale).

First leaving dock - exciting!

Off we go! Our last sight of Kodiak. Too bad it was foggy that day...

The "snake pit" common area - very swank.

The communal bookshelf area. Yes, that is a mini fridge. It was ALL OVER the place during the storm too.

The desk on the other side of the common area. There are also two cabins over there.

The inside of my cabin. My bunk is on the bottom, closet off to the right, and bathroom door to the left (we share the bathroom with the cabin on the other side).

Our (again, very swank) bathroom.

And off we go...!

Well everyone... we are officially underway! I’m posting this from on board the Langseth, where I’ve been living now for two days. But before I share all the ship’s details with you, I’d like to give you a few more pictures of other things I saw and experienced in and around Kodiak leading up to the ship’s arrival. Thanks to the Langseth’s 36 hour delayed departure, we had ample opportunity to hike and continue to explore the beautiful landscape (as well as the delicious local brewery). Below are some random samples of some of the best pictures I’ve yet taken. Enjoy, and be jealous.

The dock near our hotel in Kodiak - about a 2 minute walk from my room.

We saw this on a hike. Hello?

More amazingness.

At the Kodiak brewery - this beer is a real thing. I drank it.

This is called... Fort Abercrombie? Or something? Anyway it was gorgeous.

Me at Ft. Abercrombie.

The Kodiak airport - literally the size of my face.

Me at the top of the windmill hill.

These windmills power 80% of the town (or so I'm told)... how cool is that?!

More unbelievable views from the top of the hill.

The far right dock is where some of the "Deadliest Catch" boats are.

A view of Kodiak from up high.

The ship arrived on Sunday evening (June 5^th), and we boarded that same night (after almost not finding a place in town that was open after 9 pm for dinner). The ship itself is fairly large, somewhere between 200 and 250 feet in length, but certainly no cruise liner. It’s quite impressive to see, though it is about the size I was expecting. I took some pictures, but they upload at approximately snail pace, so I'll post them separately in the near future.

My cabin setup is similar to my sophomore year of college...  I’ve been assigned a room in a small pod-like area with four cabins total, each off of a central common/living room area, and each pair sharing a bathroom between them. I am indeed rooming with Jenny, and there are two other graduate students (Ryan from UT and Erik from Wyoming) sharing the bathroom between us. The other side of the pod (or “snake pit” as the crew and students have deemed it) has Bobby (UT grad student) and Kevin (IT guy at UT) sharing a bathroom with Ray (USGS) in the other room. The cabins, at least on my side, are small but certainly livable, and much nicer than I was expecting. I have my own little closet thingy and a drawer to put my stuff in which I also was not expecting. The bathrooms and showers require flip-flops, but otherwise seem, again, small but livable. I don’t anticipate any issues – I get along well with everyone and have been able to sleep well so far, so hopefully that will continue. Again, I have some pictures that I'll put up later.

Other facilities on board include a mess hall (just around the corner from my room... essential), laundry (with brand-new machines, also just down the hall), a movie room with a decent selection of films, a fitness center, and of course, the science lab, where I will be spending 12 hours a day for the remainder of the trip. We spent much of the first day getting settled into the cabins, having safety meetings (real ones), and setting up the lab network with the processing machines. Photos to come.

The food so far on the ship has been great – apparently we have some of the best cooks on board with us, and you can tell. Most everything is cafeteria-style, but there are always a number of delicious options. Breakfast has been American-style, with eggs cooked fresh the way you request them, bacon, sausage, breakfast potatoes, fresh fruit (wonder how long that will last...), a variety of toast/bagels, and a refrigerator filled with every kind of juice imaginable. There is also coffee and tea, but we’ve decided to take it upon ourselves to make coffee and bought a pot to keep in the lab (read: the coffee here=not good). Lunch today was stuffed cheese shells, rice, Chinese-style honey chicken, and mixed vegetables with a few other side options, including seafood and vegetable soup (good). There were cookies for dessert and there’s always ice cream in the freezer (yummmm). Dinner was a choice between steak and baked halibut, again with a number of sides including baked potatoes and mixed vegetables. Between meals, there’s usually fruit out, and you can always grab juice, water, cold cereal, or make sandwiches with the lunch meat in the fridge. There is also always a well-stocked salad bar available any time. This is certainly better than I usually eat at home. And yes, though it seems impossible, there’s a strong possibility of weight gain because of it. Yes, I’m ok with that.

The shift I’ve been assigned is a 12-hour shift (same with everyone else), but I just so happened to get lucky and get the best shift ever. I’m on watch from 8 am to 8 pm (i.e., almost normal working hours). We’ve got a rotation system set up in which someone new replaces someone who was on watch comes on every four hours. During my 12-hour shift, I’ll be doing 4 hours of seismic processing, 4 hours of watching (making sure all the data looks good, keeping logs, etc.), and 4 hours of multibeam processing. (See the first post for info on what these things are.) More info on this as I actually start doing it!

As far as ship motion goes... we started off in very calm water in port, and it’s been steadily getting worse. The ship very noticeably pitches and rolls (I eyeballed the tipping at about 30 degrees at worst), and every so often you can hear and see a wave crash outside the window in the snake pit. Word on the street (read: on the ocean) is that we’re going to hit some fairly rough weather the first couple of days we’re out. I’ve heard lots of different advice on how to handle seasickness, including doing nothing. I seriously considered going without any medicine just to see how I handle the seas on my own... but I decided that it’s important to be able to focus on work these first couple of days, and also that it’s a bad idea to test-run my seasickness in rough weather. With that in mind, I decided to try a half patch of the scopolamine prescribed by the doctor, which requires you put it on four hours before you need it. Turns out that was an excellent decision. At first, I found the motion of the boat to be quite lulling (I took a 3 hour nap shortly after hitting some rougher water), but this morning I almost threw up after taking a shower (a very difficult activity, it turns out). After recovering and showing up late for my shift, I was called up on deck to help out with deploying the streamers (long, 8 km length sensors that record the seismic data returns). I felt like a cold, wet slingshot the entire time I was out there, and sure enough, ended up throwing up over the side. Great. A rite of passage, maybe? Ugh...  I find that if I don’t think about the motion of the waves too much, I feel a little better about the whole situation, though it’s hard to concentrate in 15-foot swells... hopefully I’ll feel better as time goes on. Might put on the other half patch at some point, though the one I already have on is certainly helping.

Will keep you all updated!