I received a request to write about the stars at sea, and funnily enough, even before receiving this request, I had spent the last few days thinking on how exactly I wanted to address my adoration for the night sky. I lack a camera that can capture pictures of stars, so please enjoy one of the sunsets I saw in the Atlantic. As I move through life, I’m always forgetting to look at the ground in front of my feet. I trip over air, run into every possible surface of a boat when sailing, and generally am a bit clumsy. If I’m at the beach, I’m looking out to sea, hoping for a marine mammal spotting, maybe a spectacular wave, or lately, wondering what lies beyond that horizon and how I can chase that line. At night I feel drawn towards the night sky. I will be the first to admit that I’m not all that great at finding constellations, and yet something about gazing up at the blanket of stars is both comforting and mind-bogglingly big (to quote a favorite author). I find a bizarre contentment in my own insignificance on this planet and my love of the stars really leans into that feeling. Something about the realization of just how small we are on this planet really comes into sharp focus when I’m offshore. Your world shrinks to the size of your ship – in the case of the Ron Brown, it feels like I’ve known everyone on board my whole life – and three-hundred-odd feet feels limiting when there isn’t all that much time spent alone. Shockingly, I don’t find it claustrophobic or suffocating, but there is always the realization of just how large the oceans are when your entire home floats and gets knocked around by the forces of the seas. Night after night from the day we left Miami, the volunteers of my oceanography lab group set out on deck in search of beautiful constellations, excited to have left a huge urban area behind us. Instead, we were greeted with thick clouds, patchy clouds, and a few chilly breezes that sent us scurrying back inside the ship in search of sweatshirts and sleep. The first night a celestial body caught my attention was while we were conducting one of our CTDs off the Cape Verde islands. I beat the survey technician I was working with to the deck and was greeted by warm tropical air and darkness along the starboard side of the ship. A cheeky crescent moon grinned down at me from above the sea and I remember holding onto the ship and grinning right back. Most of my late nights on the Ron Brown have been spent by behaving slightly silly, as I am wont to do in situations with little sleep/less sleep than I would like – particularly when it’s a self-imposed lack of sleep. During the course of our CTD survey, I have danced with the stars on deck, sang to them and the sea, and glared menacingly at clouds that had the audacity to block my view of the heavens. On Valentine’s Day, we had our final major operation for this cruise. We replaced a moored buoy and conducted our last CTD cast. To ensure that the installation of a moored buoy is successful, we always do a flyby: checking to see how it’s sitting in the water, making sure that all of the sensors are working – what you would expect from an inspection of a scientific sensor. The operations took us into the evening and as we were making our approach toward the buoy, I stood on deck in the dark and sought out Orion’s Belt – the only constellation I can consistently locate in the night sky. I feel as though I anchor myself in this world in relation to Orion – there’s something so comforting about the consistency of looking up and finding the stars exactly where they should be. Luckily for me, my anchor can be seen from anywhere in the world, since the constellation Orion resides near the Equator. I was unable to locate the Southern Cross during our brief foray into summer and the Southern Hemisphere, but a sky full of stars unmarred by the artificial light of the cities I’ve grown up in has made this trip absolutely unforgettable. Thanks are due to Josh for the reminder to go outside and look at the stars. I spent much of 2020 feeling untethered and lost in this crazy pandemic world, but I had only to spend some time looking up to find my anchor again. Sitting alone on the back deck and staring at the sky has brought about some of the clearest thinking I’ve had all trip. I may not have more to say about the stars themselves, but thank you for helping me find the words to illustrate their significance in my life.
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The sun has set, the Equator has been crossed, and I find myself sitting in the computer lab for what may end up being my shift’s last CTD cast on the PNE PIRATA 2021 cruise. Although my last post may have made it seem like all we are out here doing is having fun and sitting in pools on the back deck, I did volunteer to help conduct science at sea. And let me tell you – science was CONDUCTED! CTD Sunsets (Photo by Tara Clemente) A research vessel like the Ron Brown is designed to more or less be able to conduct scientific work on a 24 hour a day schedule, so our small team of volunteers working under the ship’s Chief Scientist figured out a watch system. However, unlike the multiple short watches we take when sailing offshore, our watches on this ship are 12 hours – you’re either on the clock or not – and during that time you’re responsible for all of the CTD casts that fall during that shift. My roomie and I were luckily on the same shift – noon to midnight, which seemed easy enough at the beginning of our schedule, but as we hit a region with increased sampling it ended up being really tough! CTD casts are conducted in pretty much the same way every time: open all of the Niskin bottles, turn on all of the sensors, and send the whole rig up and over the side of the ship and down to 1500 meters depth (or nearly a mile deep). As the rosette is pulled back toward the surface, it is stopped at depths that have interesting salinities or oxygen contents. From the comfort of the dry room we can tell the CTD to close an individual bottle on the rosette, thereby taking one water sample at that exact depth. We do this at multiple depths until all of the bottles in the rosette are filled with samples. After taking our samples, the whole apparatus is brought back onto the ship for processing. For each depth sample we fill one fancy glass flask full of water for oxygen titrations and another for measuring the salt content. The Autosal lives in the Salt Dungeon here on the Ron Brown Our team split up the processing of samples and I got to learn how to use an AutoSal. It’s a fancy machine that looks like the technology hasn’t changed since the 1980s, but can tell you what the salinity of your sample is using the conductivity of the water in the chambers. SCIENCE!! The AutoSal on the Ron Brown is located in the room called the Salt Dungeon – an apt and silly name for a room that stays at 24°C ALWAYS, which feels very warm on the otherwise very cool ship. The dungeon part makes sense because when processing samples you can be in there up to 4 hours at a time. On this cruise, our team’s two different watches have conducted 60 CTD samples along 23° West in the middle of the Atlantic. It has been such a wildly different experience from the last research cruise I was on: for one, as we were taking some of our first CTD samples, we were passing by the Cape Verde islands. Standing outside in the dark on the deck watching the lights go by on the horizon was a very foreign feeling – we’d been at sea about 2 weeks, seeing nothing but water and the occasional other ship going by along the horizon. Seeing shore and knowing we still had 4 weeks to go on our ship was a little jarring, especially because it has been relatively easy to forget that the world is still negotiating pandemic-related life, while life onboard is as close to “normal” as anything I can remember in the last year. Because we have had to travel between CTD locations and because we don’t sleep for 12 hours a day, we definitely still have had time to have some fun while on the CTD survey line. As we approached the Equator, someone placed an inflatable pool on the back deck. Although I’ve been on cruise ships before, there is nothing that ever prepared me for the feeling of being in a pool on a ship moving through even more water. A shipmate put the feeling best – it’s kind of like being in a perpetual wave pool. The Ron Brown's Pelagic Pool We also crossed the Equator on this trip – my FIRST TIME crossing the Equator by sea! At the Equator we got to do an extra deep CTD where we sent the rosette to (very close to) the bottom at 3900 meters! The pressure at that depth is immense … and as such we took it upon ourselves to evaluate the pressure using the tried-and-true method of sending Styrofoam to the bottom of the ocean and pulling up a much, much, much smaller piece of Styrofoam than what we sent down (see below). In addition to the Styrofoam, we sent a 2-pack of cinnamon poptarts to the bottom of the ocean to see what would become of them, and then ate the slightly soggy – I mean lightly salted – poptarts once they made their way back to us. Did I stop and taste the water that came from the bottom of the ocean? ABSOLUTELY!!! It tasted … like accidentally taking a mouthful of salt water at the beach. BUT ALL IN THE NAME OF SCIENCE!!!! My styrofoam disk, with my hand for scale! We were in the middle of our CTD survey crossing the Equator the first time, however, upon crossing the Equator the second time we conducted a proper Equator Crossing Ceremony, and I now hold the title Shellback! Looking forward to crossing the Equator by sea in the future as well! Quite possibly one of my favorite things about spending time working offshore, is what you can find to do on the ship when you aren’t working. Of course, we are out here to conduct science, but like any job there’s the time that you spend working…and there’s a fair bit of time that you’re not working! Our CTD survey line is closer to the coast of Africa than pretty much anywhere else in the Atlantic, so I’ve had ample time (around 2 weeks!) to explore the Ron Brown and spend time with different parts of the crew! As I learned from my last research cruise, I love running on treadmills while at sea. That said, it is still very difficult to run on a treadmill when the very ship that the treadmill is connected to is moving around. Thus, the belt on the machine isn’t always where you left it. Frequently for me this translates into almost going flying off the treadmill in a graceful step of one foot landing partially off the treadmill and the other foot SCRAMBLING to keep me from falling face first into the controls of the machine. I imagine watching this process is much like watching a dove in flight (or then again, probably not). With the ever-present threat of falling off the running machine, you might not think that it would be all that desirable to go for a run. However, I have found that the treadmill is quite possibly the hottest commodity in the gym – every time I go down to the gym space it is exciting to see the treadmill not occupied. Another common way to pass time on offshore trips is reading – I’ve read thousands of pages of fantasy novels all over this ship! But seeing as the ship is a large space, my bunkmate and I have also spent lots of time exploring the ship and getting to know our shipmates. During one of our early briefings on the ship, we were told that we were welcome up on the bridge so long as there were not major operations occurring. We took this information as an invitation to spend every possible minute between breakfast and lunch on our transit across the Atlantic standing on the bridge with the captain and officer on watch. I learned how to measure distances on nautical charts (maps of the ocean floor are called charts!), I discovered that there is a Gibbs Sea Mount in the Caribbean, AND we got to see hundreds of flying fish frantically skimming across the surface of the sea away from the bow of the ship. In addition to beautiful views of the Atlantic, we were graced with an absolutely wonderful rainbow during the transit which was a treat! This rainbow made my WEEK This cruise has been a lucky one for me as far as wildlife spotting – I’ve seen a lot of firsts this trip! While we were observing the moored buoy operation, we spotted a tuna chasing a flying fish. Both hopped out of the water near the ship and it was an exhilarating predator-prey interaction to have the pleasure of seeing! Although spotting dolphins is pretty commonplace when spending time at sea, we saw hundreds of dolphins surrounding our ship near Cape Verde, jumping alongside our wake and following us for a few magical minutes. However, today I had a HUGE first for me in the form of a really unexpected marine mammal sighting. We heard an announcement about marine mammals off the port side and rushed outside to be greeted by a pod of short-finned pilot whales frolicking near the ship!!! After my trip to the Pacific where we saw shockingly few animals, I had low expectations about the wildlife spotting on this trip and have been THRILLED to have that expectation overturned. There are dolphins in this pic ... I was really excited to see them and forgot about my camera There is also currently a ship-wide ping pong tournament happening – we have all kinds of participants from almost every department of the ship, and the stakes are high. Pride is on the line after all! The games occur in all kinds of weather and, as with running on a treadmill in almost any sea state, the ship can pitch or roll any which way. Personally, I think the roll of the ship really adds to the excitement of spectating a ping pong game, in addition to leveling the playing field a bit. The ping pong table is set up in the main lab, so ping pong is a common way for me and my bunkmate to spend time just before meals or waiting to get on site for an operation. Our time spent recreating on the Ron Brown is drawing to a close as we approach our survey line of CTDs, which begins 300 miles off the coast of Africa. Our survey line will be really cool, as our research group splits into a day and night shift, collecting CTD samples around the clock! I’ve been having a wonderful time bouncing around the ship helping with other group’s projects (like re-painting the mooring buoys), but I’m really looking forward to helping conduct the research I volunteered to participate in back in November! Doing SCIENCE and painting buoys (Photo by Grace Owen)
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AuthorBree Gibbs, here. I'm a recent Master's Grad just trying to share what it's like to be a trash scientist (for those who aren't in the know, I'm a marine biologist). Categories
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March 2021
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