Bruised and battered...

Today we are recovering from a lot of abuse! The night before last we got high swell, about 5 m, not the worst, apparently northwest from us it was 15 m, so you could say we were lucky. It started in the middle of the night, we were all awakened at about 5:30 am by being tossed around our bank beds! I tried to stay in it and carry on sleeping but it was impossible. I decided to stay in bed because walking would have been quite difficult. Eventually I got up, had a very weird shower, that took twice the time that it normally should take and then tried to get dressed. My old supervisor used to say at times like this throw all your clothes on the floor and get dressed sitting down. Didn't throw them on the floor, threw them on my bed and got dressed sitted the whole time. Then I ventured out of my cabin, it was like a ghost ship, couldn't find anyone, I decided to find a way to go outside but the doors had been shut, so I went to the Bridge and the Officer told me to go to the top deck, that it would make me feel better. It did indeed, because the sun had come out, the wind had died down mostly but the roll was insane! 15-16 degrees from the horizontal from side to side. It feels much worse when you're inside! Everyone I bumped into looked like a zombie. We got so tired just by trying to stay upright and protect ourselves from bumping into things! That was abuse, the ship abused us all! We all needed to sleep, I skipped breakfast because I couldn't get up, I skipped lunch because I preferred to sleep!

This is how it started the afternoon before.

This happened while we were transiting to a deeper-water location, several kilometres south of where we've been so far. On the way we were taking a seismic profile and mapping with the multibeam. but the weather seemed to have an adverse effect on our data collection as well. One of the cables for the seismic acquisition showed a fault, seems to have broken somewhere in its 80 m length and there is no way of knowing exactly where. So we've been doing some mapping since yesterday, which is ok we need that too, and in the meantime Heiko, the technician is making a new cable! Apparently it's easier to construct a new one than try to find the fault in the 80 m one, then he can spend as much time as he needs on that one. 

The weather today is amazing! It's like summer and even the sea temperature is 21 degrees! We'd be able to swim in this water - if we were allowed, but we're not, it's too dangerous! How can it change so fast? OK we are further south, we're in the Gulf Stream, which explains the sea surface temperatures, but apparently this area is well-known for how quickly the weather changes. One day we're wearing all the jumpers we own, the next we don't have enough sun-block! So today everyone is much happier and chirpier, yesterday we all needed some proper sleep.

We are now operating at 4,500 m water depth, so do the math, if the box corer winch lowers the box corer with 0.8 m/sec speed how long does it take to get a box core? That's right about 3hrs! And then we'll send the gravity corer down, but the winch for that is faster at 1.5 m/sec that will only take 2 hrs. That gives you a little perspective, we can't waste our time "trying" things, we need to be careful with our decision-making. 

I realised a couple of days ago that we must be very close to the Titanic's resting place, so I looked it up and there it is, the red circle. The white box is our working area, we are indeed very close... it just made me think about it...

The story of a rock

This I think would make a great animation movie.

Look at this rock we found in a core we opened this morning. 

Let me tell you its story:

We think this is a gneiss, a metamporphic rock that is formed when you take an igneous rock like a granite, or a sedimentary rock like a sandstone and you put it under a lo-o-t of pressure and relatively high temperature. So the life of this rock started when magma rose to the surface of the earth and crystallised to form a granite. This rock was then eroded and turned to sediment, which was deposited somewhere maybe on a beach. This area then got drowned by the sea and what used to be a beach is now buried several km deep under other sediments at the bottom of an ocean. These buried rocks were subjected to great pressures and relatively high temperatures is they are buried very deep. Then tectonic movements pushed this area and this rock and uplifted it high - so much that the rock ended up being part of a mountain. Temperatures dropped significantly and ice age started and the mountain got covered by glaciers, which moved over the rocks and grounded them and picked up pieces of it, locked them in the ice and transported them 100’s of km across a continent to the ice shelf margin where it meets the sea. The glacier started breaking down. Icebergs, containing the rocks the glaciers had eroded and locked inside the ice, broke off and one of them travelled over the St Pierre slope and while travelling, it started melting, and as it was melting any rocks inside it sank to the seafloor. That part of the seafloor then became part of a submarine landslide and the rock got trapped inside the landslide deposit together with the sediments on which it had settled and it stayed there for a very very very long time, until a bunch of scientists from Germany, Canada, Ireland and UK dropped a 12cm diameter gravity corer and brought the rock inside the landslide deposit up to the surface again…

Tell me now that geology isn’t fascinating and awe-inspiring!

One week in

We are now one week in since we left port. Everybody is starting to get used to the work and the people have started working into teams. We have three teams; the seismic acquisition team, the sedimentology team (otherwise known as “team extreme”) and the CPT team (cone penetration testing – geomechanics). Data is coming in steadily and we are beginning to understand that this is not going to be an easy task. The slope seems very complicated with many small landslide scars everywhere! Old, very old, more recent…. it will be hard to understand what happened here. And why should it come as a surprise? People have been working on this slope for decades and we’re still none the wiser as to what happened in 1929. See, the conundrum we are struggling with is that small landslides don’t in principle generate tsunamis. It’s the large ones that do. We are not finding anything big though, and no one found anything big here before us (and it would have been found) so we are scratching our heads trying to come up with working theories and make scientific plans. This is how it works; 1) you get an idea based on existing data and this is your hypothesis, 2) you need to test your hypothesis so you try to figure out what data you need for that, 3) you make a plan of where on the slope you have good chances of finding that data, 4) you get the data (if nothing goes wrong), 5) your hypothesis is either confirmed or debunked (most frequently somewhere in the middle), 6)you then must alter your hypothesis or come up with a new one (usually we work with two or three different scenarios at the same time). The key is to be open-minded and expect your hypothesis to be wrong, and to never try to fit the data to suit your hypothesis. If you do that you’ve lost the game.

Coring at night

Playing with mud - taking measurements of the strength of the sediments 

And then shoveling the mud overboard

At the moment we are working on the St Pierre slope, so we haven’t moved too far offshore yet. You may have heard on the news about hurricane Joaquin. We’re very much close to it but just north of it. Two days ago it was rough, very rough; doors to the deck were shut, computers put on the floor and bruises were acquired from knocking about against door handles and bannisters. If you are not seasick it’s great fun trying to take a shower in this weather, as you try to chase the water and place yourself underneath it! I’ve been lucky this time and haven’t got seasick, the tablets have worked, fresh air on deck, the ginger cookies that Aoife got me, carbonated water seems to help as well.

In the middle of the bad weather day, we also had a birthday onboard, me! I tried to keep it to myself and didn’t tell anyone anything, and I thought I was going to get away with it, until at lunch time, in the mess, Ralf, the 1^st officer came behind me and hugged me and said “it’s your birthday today isn’t it? Happy birthday!” Everyone was really surprised (as I hadn’t said anything), but the Captain and the Officers have our passports and so they gave me away :) That evening we had a small party – yes, in the bad weather. But sure if you’re drinking you don’t know if it’s you or the ship that isn’t steady.

Our chief scientist, Sebastian, opening the bottles

I also got birthday cards, one from the crew and one from the scientists J It was the first time I had my birthday at sea and it was a very nice experience. Everyone tries to make you feel special and everyone enjoys it because it is an excuse for a party. Sebastian provided a few bottles of cava and beer and everyone had a good time. Surprisingly no one asked me my age and if anyone is wondering it was another 29^th hahahaha!

The postman found me in the Atlantic

Yesterday was a gorgeous day, sunbathing on the deck while waiting for the core to come up, and a pod of pilot whales paid us a visit. It must have been about 30 of them and they came quite close to the ship. I think they were feeding, they looked like they were feeding. Everyone was really excited and we’d been on the look out for whales as we are in a very busy spot for them, and yet we hadn’t seen any yet.

The day after the night before

Whale-watching

Sunset in the Atlantic

A bird also sought sanctuary in our lab last night, a storm petrel. The poor thing came flying in and went crashed against one of the windows. True to my former supervisor’s training I gently picked it up, put it in a box, covered it with a towel and let it settle and rest overnight, and released it this morning - he flew happily away!

When we're not busy playing with mud we play table tennis and kicker on a moving vessel - our version of extreme sports!

And we're sailing...

We finally waved goodbye to St John's yesterday at 5 pm. We had been sitting on the "wrong" side of the fjord for about eight hours, where the bunker pier is, as we needed to fuel, and boy did we need to fuel! Fueling that lasts for 8 hours, that's some deposit this ship has!
The day was glorious, just a tiny bit of swell with a magnificent coastline lacing our way out. Many people expressed their desire to come back for a hiking holiday. Indeed it is beautiful and probably worth a longer visit. The geology looks pretty nice too :)

That's our ship!!!

                                     

 Leaving St John's.

The Pilot escorting us out of the fjord. Look at that geology!

Soon after we were out in the open ocean it was dinner time. This is my feel-good spot for this post... maybe not so feel-good for you but certainly for us all, as we entered the mess room and we each were given a whole lobster along with utensils to break it! The mmm and yam noises from all the tables mixed with the cracking shells and oohs and aahs from all the liquids squirting across tables. Seriously somebody explain to me why this is a posh dinner? You have to eat it with your hands, suck the legs, wear a bib...! Not very classy but oh so yummy! For anyone who doesn't know St John's is the place to get lobstern and generally this side of the Atlantic, from Maine in the northern States all the way to St John's. So that was a nice surprise, I can get used to that!

Lobster for dinner! This has never happened to me before!

Later on we had our first Science meeting, where our chief scientist, Sebastian, gave a small talk about the objectives of the cruise and why we're doing this and then we went around the table each one introducing themselves and their background and their scientific interests and role on this cruise. Most of the participants are German 17/21, the other four are myself, Chris from England, Jaume from Barcelona and Maxlimer from Venezuela (but works in the States). I only knew Sebastian, Chris and Maxlimer from before, now I'm trying to get to know everyone else.

My cabin

We spent nearly half a day on transit to our area of interest. Transit usually takes place at full speed and no instruments recording. When we started approaching we switched on all the acoustic devices, multibeam for seafloor mapping and Parasound that records the sub-seafloor layering, sort of like a cross section under the seafloor (think of cake slice and the layers you see vertically once you've cut it), these are called sub-bottom profiles and they help us decide where is a good location to go and throw our corer. The corer is a long steal tube (barrel) in which we put a plastic liner, which looks a lot like the plumbing tubes that are used under the streets. At the top of the steal barrel there are weights that amount to two tonnes of weights, and at the nose of the barrel, we have the cutting shoe, which is a sharp edged cone and inside it is the core catcher which is made out of overlapping blades. The corer is lowered to the seafloor at a speed of 1.5 m per second, under its weight when it reaches the seafloor it penetrates it vertically. The cutting shoe is the one that comes in contact first, sediment enters the tube through the core catcher, whose blades open up to let the sediment in. Once it has reached the maximum depth it can go, we start pulling it out, the blades of the core catcher close and so the sediment stays inside the tube. We can use different lengths of corers, 3 m, 6 m, 9 m, 12 m and increments of 3 up to 24 m. We have 3 m and 6 m barrels that can be connected to make longer corers. The decision about how long a corer to prepare is made based on the sub-bottom profile we have seen. If the character of the sediments looks like they are going to be soft we prepare a long core, if the seafloor character looks like it might be hard, we go for a shorter length. If we are not careful and we send down a long core on a hard seafloor the barrel, upon finding too much resistance might buckle under its weight and bend, and once this happens the barrel is useless. Of course we have some spare ones but we obviously want to avoid destroying our barrels.
So we chose our first core location and we have our first data coming in!

                                       Launch and Recovery System (LARS) for the corer.

                                                  Corer coming up having gone through the top
                                                  14 m of sediment below the seafloor.


So what are we looking for?
In November 1929 there was a relatively severe earthquake in the area offshore Nova Scotia and Newfoundland. The earthquake was a magnitude 7.1 on the Richter scale, Not much was damaged by that earthquake but a couple of hours later a series of events took place; across the towns of Nova Scotia telecommunications were being lost and half an hour later a big tsunami hit their coast cause the death of 28 people. At the time nobody could understand what had happened, but at the beginnng of the 80's scientists tried to understand what had happened and they figured out that the earthquake must have caused a submarine landslide which as it was traversing the submarine slope cut the telecommunication cables one after the other and itself caused the tsunami. Based on the distances between the cables and the time when communications were lost it has been estimated that the slide was moving at a speed of 20 m/s or 100 km/hr! That's pretty fast! When large volumes of sediments move through the sea they displace water out of the way and that's what causes the tsunamis. So it was in the early 80's that scientists first became aware of this process. A lot of studies have followed since then and guess what; the slide has never been found! It appears like many small slides did initiate in many areas on the slope but something like this cannot explain the tsunami that was generated. We have come here to do some more mapping to add to what already exists and take many cores, looking for the deposits of the slide and then work out where on the slope they came from. In order to do that we have to come up with our scientific plan, our strategy if you like. We need to look at what data exist, what they have taught us and use this knowledge to go to the right places and take samples. The area is vast and we only have a month to do this, so we can't just go everywhere. That's why every about 3-4 days the more experienced, more senior people will meet to review what we have so far and what we need to do next. But now I must go and look at the core we collected and see what's inside. Bis spaeter :)

The first sunrise onboard

Here we go... Follow me...

Alarm goes at the unforgivable time of 5 am. How tempting to switch off the alarm, turn around and go back to sleep! And I do for a split second when I suddenly realise, no I have a plane to catch, to St John's (Newfoundland, Canada - not one of the most well known places, but still direct flight from Dublin surprisingly). Poor Laia, she woke up as well, to come with me in the car to the bus stop so she could drive my car back :) (feeling the love ❤️).

So the travels I'll be posting about for the next six weeks will be on a research cruise I'm joining in the Northwest Atlantic. We're sailing from St John's on the 30th (tomorrow) and we'll dock in Ponta Delgada in the Azores in precisely a month, 30th October. The next day I'm catching a flight to London Stansted, then I have to make my way across London to Heathrow, to catch a loooooong flight to Wellington, New Zealand, via Singapore and Auckland... I think... That's to attend a conference there. Only gonna stay 4 days though... :( due to the teaching commitments... All the way across the planet to stay only four days... just doesn't seem right...

So journey starts today; Going to St John's so I can board a research ship! It's times like this I feel like a true mariner. They ask you at the airport "what is your business in Canada?" and in all honesty the answer is "I'm boarding a research ship". Wish I had taken a picture of her confused face! I could tell she was trying to form a question but even she didn't know exactly what to ask so she just said "can you explain that to me?" so I did and she got all excited - said she hadn't met anyone doing that before... I know it's unusual what I do.

This journey has been in the planning since May. That's when Sebastian asked me to join this cruise, and I got super excited and my colleagues were willing to arrange their teaching and swap hours with me for this term around my cruise. So don't think that I'm taking time off, no no no no no no no... I've been teaching non-stop before I came (double the amount that I normally would) and I will be teaching a lot more when I get back. It's just that all my teaching has been squeezed into five weeks instead of 11! But now is not the time to stress about that.... I'll stress later - and you know me, I will stress later.

                                         Newfoundland coast, Proterozoic sedimentary beds.
                                         For the geo-heads out there they look like they are dipping
                                         ESE at about 60 degrees, no idea about younging
                                         direction.

                                       St John's from above. Second ship from the left at the 
                                       bottom of the picture, is home for the next month. As all 
                                       German research vessels in its identifying blue, white 
                                       and orange.

Every day or at least every time I post something I'll have a feel good story, or the funny story of the day. So here is one: You know these YouTube clips about flight attendants that make the whole safety spiel funny? I always wondered how come after all these flights I've been on I've never come across anyone like that, and today I did. A few of his jokes: Life vests are under the seats, only inflate the vest once outside the aircraft. Pull firmly on red cord, if that doesn't work I hope you can swim - just kidding... At the end: Sit back and relax and enjoy the flight, or stand up and be tense, whatever, it's your choice. When we arrived: If there are smokers amongst you, yeih you made it this far, it means you can quit! Just kidding, none of my business... but seriously it's bad for you - whispering in the microphone. Made us giggle.

Now to the more pressing matters... What of the Rugby world cup? Well I don't know, it's a German ship, the vast majority are Germans, they don't care about rugby. I'm waiting for Chris, he's the only Englishman that will be joining us I bet he'll care, hopefully we'll be able to get Canadian television, they're in the cup in the same group as Ireland...! Don't wanna miss the entire tournament....

So friends, send me comments, ask me questions, I'll try to write as much as possible, take you on this journey with me and hopefully show you why it's so exciting to spend a whole month out on the ocean exploring. Hint... it's in the last word.... exploring.... :)