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)