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.