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!
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