charismaticmicrofauna

The best way to deal with seasickness is to take a nap. As soon as I start to feel queasy, I lie down in my bunk and when I wake up I feel better. I have tried to power through seasickness before because there is a lot of work to do, but it only prolongs my body’s ability to adjust to the motion of the ocean. When I woke up after my nap on our first evening at sea, it was around 6:30 and I suddenly remembered that one of the best rituals about living on a ship is watching the sunset on the ocean every evening. The lack of land topography and man-made structures to obscure the horizon combined with the elimination of artificial light pollution allow the spectacle of the sunset to be viewed in full. Then the stars, all of the stars on a clear night shine the brightest I have ever seen. There are shooting stars all night if you have the desire to idle your time away by counting as many as you can.

I spent most of yesterday setting up the radioactivity van on the ship. A van on a research vessel is a shipping container that has been modified to be able to serve as a laboratory for a specific type of work. The radioactivity van that I work on is onboard the RV Atlantis when we get to the ship. It is part of the regular operations. Because I work with radiolabel, I have a special certification so that I am able to carry out a specific type of experiment. The first thing that I have to do is an environmental survey of the van using swipes that I take from various areas of the van to ensure that there is no existing contamination of radioactivity before we start our work. In the case that we would leave radioactivity spilled in the van after we leave, we would be charged heavily for the decontamination of the “hot” mess. Hot is a term that we use to describe whether or not something that we are working with is radioactive. If we have a cold solution or a cold sample, for example, there is no radioactivity present. After the van is surveyed, then I can go about setting up my equipment and securing anything that would potentially fly around in the event of high swells.

We also had to attend a couple of safety presentations in the event of an emergency so that we could get off the ship if something catastrophic was to happen. We are each assigned with an immersion suit if we have to abandon ship and also need to know where to go to meet the crew who would be prepared with life rafts if necessary. Another meeting we had was for the science teams to get familiar with each other. For this particular cruise there are only 3 other laboratories with different objectives. This is typical of research cruises that I have been a part of. There are half the number of people on this cruise than there were on my last expedition. At the science meeting we talked about our individual experiments and our objectives for the ALVIN dives. Most of what we talked about was logistics and orienting our work in a way that we could all benefit from maximizing the time that we have on the expedition.

Because we launched from Newport, Oregon we have a 9 day travel time to our site. This is a nice cushion for us to set up, plan, and prepare for the work. It leaves a very narrow window at the end of our time at sea to breakdown our gear, equipment and laboratory spaces. We’re still close to the coast. Yesterday we could see land in the distance along the port side of our ship for most of the day. Today land is out of site, but I can still tell we are close to the shore because the color of the ocean is greener due to the refraction of visible light in shallower waters and algal growth.

When we are further out which should be soon, probably tomorrow, the ocean will be so blue. I always have the strongest desire to dive right into the deep blue water. Open swimming isn’t allowed off of ships like this anymore due to liability. I wonder sometimes how much trouble I would really get into if I dove off the side. Someone would yell, “man overboard!”, a life preserver would be thrown to me and I would be taken back on top. I wonder if I would be helicoptered off of the ship, never to be welcome on a sea expedition again. It’s very likely and I would never dare, but I fantasize about it every time I gaze into that deep blue open ocean.