Guam, U.S.A. (13.30, 144.48)

So I am currently sitting in the Denver airport awaiting my flight to Bozeman to go to my brothers wedding. And since Denver is the best, the airport has free internet so I thought I would take advantage of this time for my final blog entry.

Our final night on the ship was spent staying up late and watching stars on the top deck. We could see the faint glow on the horizon telling us Guam was close by. We could also see distant lighthouses flashing from near by islands. I was really cool to see lighthouses from sea. You can count the time between flashes and then match their unique signature to the map.

On Tuesday morning, as we were coming into port we saw a pod of whales cursing north. They were a bit of a ways off; the only thing giving away their presence was the trail of blow spouts. After making port, waiting for the customs agent and paying $60 for a cab, we made it to our hotel by about noon. We spent the afternoon on the beach, by the pool and at the bar. I love land. 

We met up with some of the crew and science team Tuesday evening and drank in memory of the OBSes left behind.

Overall this experience was a very unique and exciting adventure. Not many people can say they have gone 3.5 weeks without seeing land, without hearing their cell phone ring and without ever being still. I got to experience 70 mph winds and amazing sunsets. I learned about the lives of sailors and a bit about boats. I feel very fortunate to have had the crew we did. They are a bright and spirited bunch.

Thanks to all of you who kept me company at sea these last few weeks. Your comments and support got me through the lonely times.

Farewell BBQ (14.30, 145.51)

Tonight we had a delicious BBQ on the back deck of the ship. We pulled out the grill and had a meat fest made up of dogs, brats, sausages, steak and ribs. We got to sit outside and enjoy the warm tropical evening and sunset. It was a delicious way to spend our last evening on the ship. Tomorrow morning we will be arriving in Guam around 8 am. I might be cracking open a beer around 10 am to celebrate (don't judge, that is like 6 pm in Rhode Island). Then off to the beach for Tina and I. That is assuming I can figure out how everything once was packed into my backpack. Wish me luck!

SNQ (18.34,147.23)

The Trophy

America has Sunday Night Football, the R/V Kilo Moana has Sunday Night Quoits. The championship game to be exact - this one is for all of the marbles folks. Last night was the semi-final matches and almost the whole crew was packed in the quoit arena. The music was load and the energy was high. The only thing missing was beer and a hot dog. The last of the science teams was defeated and tonight the championship game was between the chef (reigning champ) and kitchen assistant 1 vs. kitchen assistant 2 and one of the science lab tech guys. Needless to say, the kitchen was full of trash talking and excitement today. You could cut the tension with a knife (the same knife, in fact, that I used to cut my grilled cheese sandwich). The trash talking reached a whole new level when a victory cake proclaiming "2010 Quoits Champs" with the chef's team's names on it was set out at dinner, 2 hours before the match. Who knew such a low blow could come from white and blue frosting and rainbow sprinkles. By the end of dinner, the cake had been defaced, saying "2010 Quoits Chumps". Things were getting dirty. As 7:00 pm rolled around, the stadium was bursting at the seams and the stereo base was loud and low. In the end, the cake did not lie, and the chef was named champion, again.

The stadium was packed.

The winning double ringer.

The champs blinded by the flashing bulbs of the paparazzi.

On the other battle front, the scientific data damages has been analyzed and the final count is this: of the 12 OBSes recovered, 8 recorded data and only 4 of those 8 had the full years worth of data. So that means 4 of 16 OBSes functioned properly. Not good. Granted we were setting records for depth deploying these instruments in the locations we were, but we had hoped for a far better success rate. Without having the complete arrays of data, we will not be able to answer the questions we set out to. However, after looking at the data, there are some interesting and unexpected wave phases that were recorded, which could lead to answering other questions. So hopefully in the end, this mission will be able to make some forward progress to characterizing structure of the upper 400 km of the Earth. We will have to wait and see.

We have one more full day on the ship. That means I only have to wake up at 4 am one more time for my watch. Hooray! We get to celebrate Monday night, our last night on the ship, with a BBQ on the upper deck. Then Tina and I plan to spend as much of Tuesday as we can soaking up land on the beaches of Guam.

Early Morning (22.49, 148.41)

 

 

Time To Go Home (27.31, 149.08)

Today was a dreary day at sea and not just because of the weather. Tina started analyzing some of the data, only to find that the first three OBS data sets were nothing more then 365 days of noise. No seismic activity was recorded. They are unsure still as to what went wrong. They don't know if it was set up incorrectly, if the seismometer leaked or if the pressure was just too great that the instruments could not properly function. This is not good news for our scientific breakthroughs. I do not know yet what the rest of the data looks like but things are not looking up.

Tina and I also lost in the first round of the illumination bracket for the quoits tournament. The final score was 21-12. I guess all of the OBS recovering got us out of quoits shape. So we don't have being awesome to look forward to any more either.

In addition to all of the negative energy of the day, I think all of the science team is getting cabin fever and is pretty much done seeing each other. Interactions are short and only when required. We are all tired and the further deterioration of the science mission has everyone pretty glum. I think everyone is looking forward to a cold beer.

We finish surveying this evening and set our sights on Guam at about 1 am tomorrow (Saturday) morning. We are expected to port in Guam at about 9 am on Tuesday morning. Personally, Guam can't come soon enough. Being so far from home has finally sucked me dry and I am badly in need of solid ground, my husband and enough room in the shower to shave my legs.

White Flag (28.17, 149.54)

Today we finally surrendered to the sea. No more OBSes would be recovered. Not due to lack of trying however. Our final effort finished this morning after 12 hours of trying to communicate with our last instrument (and last hope). Drastic measures for communicating consist of lowering a "rescue beacon" 5000 m (3.1 miles) into the sea in order to get closer to the OBS. Pictured right is the crew setting up the rescue beacon (the yellow cylinder) to be deployed. It takes about two hours to lower the beacon 5000 m. The big gray cylinder is a 400 lbs weight to aid in the decent. After getting no clear responses, we finally called the OBS mission off.

Of the 16 OBSes that were deployed, we recovered 12 ( 9 of 10 of the G1s and 3 of 6 or the G2s). Additionally, two of the recovered G2s had incomplete data sets- one with only 80 days of data and one with only 240 days of data. Two of the recovered G1s also had incomplete data sets, both only collecting about 80% of the total data. We won't know the total repercussions of the lost data until the data we did collect is analyzed. If it is high quality, there is still hope for our science mission.

The question we are trying to answer is how thick is the plate (the hard outer layer of the Earth that migrates and subducts and causes earthquakes) in old ocean seafloor. By answering that question, we will have some insight to the thermal dynamics occurring in the interior of the Earth, since how fast that plate can cool and thicken depends on how hot the interior of the Earth is and how fast it is cooling off. These results would be a physical observation to try to match with the theoretical thermal models that I program on the computer.

Tina and I spent our time after dinner tonight getting a tour of the engine room and bottom of the ship. Since the hulls of the ship are divided up into water proof compartments (so if we spring a leak, the water will be contained in one holding cell and we wont have a repeat of the Titanic) to get a tour of the inter workings of the ship you have to climb up and down over the water barriers and through tiny little man holes. Plus it is really hot and load down there. We definitely got a work out. When we got to the bottom of the ship, we were 45 ft below the water surface and standing in the little torpedo looking things at the bottom of the hulls.

The things that I remember leaning is that the ship has 4 engines, two in each hull and that it carries about 135,000 gallons of fuel (enough to be out at sea for about 50 days). If you guess about $5 a gallon, that is over half a million dollars just in fuel. It also carries enough supplies that they could build an entire additional engine if they needed to. The ship makes its own drinking water, using the heat from the engine to evaporate sea water, which is collected, condensed and then ready to drink. It only costs about 5 cents a gallon to make drinking water. Pretty clever if you ask me.

Control board for all engine components. Looks like a movie prop from a bad 50s Sci-Fi movie

Restricted Access... Oh yeah, we got connections. Fine print reads Starboard Motor Room.

Tina between the two starboard engines.

We also found the candy stash.

One of the larger and cleaner of the man holes we had to climb though.

The propeller shaft that drives the propellers, which are on the other side of the wall. Don't get your hair stuck in that one girls.

A for Effort ... (27.56, 151.15)

F for recovery.

After trying to talk to the OBS for 14 hours, pulling out every option imaginable, we called it quits. As we sat around in the lab taking notes and listening for any faint response from the OBS, our hopes slowly plummeted. The only thing that kept us all from flat-lining during the wee hours of the morning was the occasional humorous banter over the radio between the crew members.

We have been flanked by storm clouds for the last few days which have provided quite the rainbow display. Out here, with nothing to get snagged on, the rain clouds move across the sea at their leisure and so far, none of our rain showers have lingered. As we left the OBS site this morning, the sun was rising and sending us on our way with this good looking scene.

The rest of the day was pretty mellow. I spent my time reading, knitting, painting my toes and watching a movie. We are headed back to the site of the other non-responsive OBS and are hoping this time it will magically cooperate so we can steal back a point from the sea. We are taking a zig-zag route, mapping and surveying as much new ocean floor as possible as we go. We have about 20 hours of down time until we need to get our hopes up just to watch them fall again (I am not very optimistic as you can tell).

Another One Bites The Dust (26.49, 149.58)

We are currently on location at our last OBS site and things do not look good. We have been trying to talk to it for 4 hours with no clear reply yet. We are pulling out all the tricks, but I stopped holding my breath after hour 3. We have two days until we need to start our trip to Guam, which were supposed to be used for surveying and mapping, but may instead get used up trying to save our last two OBSes still stuck on the bottom. I am not sure when you call it quits, but these two stragglers are in key locations on the ocean floor, so recovering even one of them would help a lot.

When you think about it though, it is amazing these things return to us at all. I mean we are sticking these instruments, the size of a mini fridge, at 6,000 m below the sea surface (3.72 miles) at near freezing temperatures and expect them to survive for a year. Then we come back a year later and try to communicate with it by using tiny acoustic pings, which sound more like a chirp of a song bird, which are supposed to carry a ten digit code through 6 km of ocean and be heard by the OBS. At any time a tiny fish could swim in the way and mess up part of that signal ( I am not really sure if that is how it works, but that is what I picture). Then we expect the OBS to send a response across all that ocean and be heard by our coffee can size transponder dangling off the back of a very noisy ship. THEN, the OBS needs to still be functioning properly so that it can drop its anchors and float to the surface. In order to see it on the surface, the radio transmitter and strobe light need to be working and the ship needs to be in the right position. There are about a million things that could go wrong, the most probable being a whale carcass is laying on top of the OBS blocking communications and not letting it rise to the surface.

We did make two successful recoveries earlier today, so chalk up two points for Science. I am going to temporarily give this current OBS point to the ocean, however, and hopefully that will change by the time I wake up in the morning. My watch shift is over, which I am celebrating with a bowl of ice cream topped with gummy bears, and then I am headed off to bed.

Women at Work (Tina and Julia)

Knit One, OBS Two (28.44, 149.35)

We had a successful recovery this morning around 2 am (chalk it up!) and spent the majority of the rest of the day wrestling with another OBS. We were having a difficult time communicating with it and are unsure whether it is due to the choppy waves (winds picked up this afternoon) or due to the fact that the glass ball used for flotation imploded and damaged the radio equipment. At 3 pm we called it, needing to move on. We are going to go pick up our next two OBSes and then swing back by and try to communicate with it again, hopefully in better weather. So the sea has temporarily scored another point. But everyone keep your fingers crossed because this is one of the important ones.

I spent most of the day on the back deck, knitting and watching it rain. Some of the crew was unable to do work around the ship because of the weather so they were sitting around keeping me entertained. Tina joined me for some craft time too. Then we decided we needed naps. For dinner we had roasted game hens with baked manicotti, steamed vegetables and rosemary roasted potatoes. Dessert was butterscotch chip blondies with ice cream. It was a pretty rough day at sea.