ROPOS is recovered after a hard day and night of work.

Coping with the Interface

Last night during operations on the seafloor, ROPOS's engineers were having problems with one of its manipulator arms. I am fascinated at the concept that this electrical behemoth hundreds of feet below me can function at all while it is immersed in salt water. It turns out that ROPOS had a loose wire that was only intermittently responding to commands from the computers on the ship. This meant that any work requiring the arm's fine motor skills would not be possible. The bad news was that we had to abort the dive in order to fix it. It took several hours to bring ROPOS up, secure it to the deck, have samples and other equipment removed from it. The good news was that the engineers were able to fix the arm after it was back on the ship, and we are now ready to use ROPOS for another dive. Hooray!

Brooke Silvers and Kevin Roe (both from University of Washington) work on their chemistry samples in the main lab.

But then this morning, I was introduced to the next pitfall of oceanography: weather. I was greeted this Sunday morning by a wall of clouds all around the ship. At home, I appreciate a foggy day because I associate them with poor visibility, less boat traffic, low winds and great fishing. Well, I wasn't too concerned about boat traffic out here and I've got no plans to fish in the near future but I wasn't quite sure what this would mean to the scientists and crew. I did immediately feel a sense of sadness when I entered the galley for breakfast, though. Over our oatmeal and french toast, the disappointed people at my table filled me in on this weather system that was unusual to me, but not uncommon out here. We are caught in a gradient between a high and low pressure system which is enabling the winds to build. After breakfast, Keith Tamburri, one of the ROPOS engineers, showed me the erratic behavior of this morning's winds on one of the ship's computers. If we deployed ROPOS in something less than 20 knot winds and already had been on a dive when winds kicked up to 20-25 knots, we would have been able to stay down and just keep an eye on the winds. However, if we start out with 20-25 knot winds when we deploy ROPOS, by the time it actually leaves the deck the winds can easily pick up to 30 knots, and we also have to worry about "snap loads". Picture our ship bobbing up on the wave's crest and down into the wave's trough. When the seas build and the ship is towing a heavy item (such as ROPOS) by a cable, there is a period of time when the item may not move up and down at the same rate as the ship. When this happens, a heavy item may actually jerk the line. This would be severely damaging to the piece of equipment. You can probably imagine why a decision was made to hold off with ROPOS's next dive. The engineers will evaluate the weather again in six hours. That will give the crew time to prepare and the weather time to play out.

As the Chief Scientist Bob Embley expressed, sometimes it seems that going out to sea has more unknowns than going into space. In space you deal with one atmosphere of pressure (granted, going from zero to one atmosphere is a big deal), but beyond that, everything you deal with is in air or a vacuum. For deep-sea research, however, you must deal with incredible frequent pressure differences (as you bring the equipment up and down through the course of the cruise), corrosive properties of seawater, and the interface between the air and the sea (that's the one that's causing all the problems right now). Even though there's disappointment and long faces while we wait to dive again, I'm sure only a handful of people on this ship would rather be an astronaut. They know that this is all part of the gamble you take when you go to sea. What we planned to do, while waiting for the weather to decide what it was going to do, was to keep moving down the expedition's tasks and take on whatever would involve quick deployment or retrieval. We were able to accomplish a great deal today, even if our number one task was delayed. We deployed two moorings that will monitor water temperature and currents over the next year for the NOAA Vents Program. Some people caught up on processing their samples, some people caught up on some much needed sleep, some people did their laundry, and some people arranged a ping pong tournament, which should provide an excellent lesson in physics as well as some down-time entertainment for all.

Visitors at the Hatfield Marine Science Center in Newport Oregon ask, "What
are some of the results from the work you've done so far on this cruise?"

One of the benefits of working at the NeMO Observatory is that we are
learning about changes that happen here from one year to the next
(time-series measurements). After the 1998 eruption at Axial Volcano, a
large area was covered by the new lava flow, a "clean slate" of sorts. In
addition to the knowledge that has been gained by watching life colonize new
hydrothermal vents, scientists have also been able to look at the physical,
geologic, and chemical processes that occur after a volcanic eruption. The
time-series study is similar to what has been done at Mt St Helens since its
eruption in 1980.