Juan de Fuca 4: The Final Collection

Equipment ready. Lights up. Preparations complete. All systems online! Roll Cameras!

Well, I'm headed out to sea one last time for my PhD. This'll be my 4th collection at JdF, and my 5th Atlantis cruise while at harvard. All totaled, I'll have spent more than 4 months of my PhD underway.

We leave on the plane tomorrow for Portland, and we'll be out until July 30th. I think the actual ship days are the 6th to the 28th or so, but we'll be working on unpacking/setup before then.

This year we've got a goodly lot of scientists- some greenhorns and some veterans - and the bossman is coming along to keep us all (people and machines) on set and working.

Team Girguis Cast:

Peter
Leonid

Charles

Geoff

Kiana

Melissa

Heather
Adrienne

Alvin is on board and greenlit after a short scare that it wouldn't be fit to dive (more on that later). I'm sure we'll have a good show full of adventures, misadventures, intrigue, and science! Stay tuned.

Lacktivation Energy and Heavy Sees

Deer Deep Reeders,

Well its been three days since my last post. We are currently smack in the middle of a 5 day Drilling Project leg. This is the other group whose site is about 120 miles from ours. After much rangling and negotiations, it seems our group will get two more dives on the Axial Volcano. There hasn’t been much going on for me here, except a lot of down time. Well, down time isn’t quite the right term. Fix time. Everytime I try to fix something two other things break. It really takes the motivation out of blogging and whatnot. To give a quick numbers run by of problems faced by me, either fixed or not right now:

-2 problematic low pressure pumps
-5 faulty high pressure pumps (2 repaired so far)
-1 freezing up data collecting computer (replaced with my laptop so I’m typing this on Scott’s Laptop)
-2 water baths that don’t reach full temperature (out of 2, but I think I have a work around)
-Instrument issues, reading that I have more oxygen at the outlet than the inlet (not physically possible)
-Oh, and the partridge fell out of the pear tree.

Sigh. Other than constantly challenging my underwhelming electrical and plumbing skills, the cruise is going pretty smoothly right now. I can’t do all the controls and calibrations I’ve been trying to get, but a 5 day downtime means I probably can get to the bottom of some of these issues. And currently I do have a working system. I have absolutely nothing in back up right now that works, so I’m hope hope hoping the rest of this holds on for a few more days. I think of this as trying to coax a 300000 mile, 1981 honda civic through the Sierra Nevada mountains on a one way trip to California. If you can get through those last few uphills, it can pretty much coast into the driveway, and you can sell it for scraps if necessary.

Also, we’ve had some heavy Sees out here, with sets coming through up to 15 feet. The Alvin recovery two days ago was impressive to say the least. The roughest I’ve ever seen. Here, I’ll show you. Oh, and Dave the pilot had his very first full fledged dive in it! He got hit with buckets of icy water by the whole Alvin group, and was given one to douse himself.

You know its a rough day if you need hard hats to drive around in a little boat.

This is Mark's High Pressure System. He's had some pressure issues, but now he's up and holding. Go Mark!

May your days low pressure and low stress, unlike mine (haha double pun).

Deep Sea-er

Hello Deep Reeders,

As you can probably tell from the title of this blog, I'm going to attempt to update everyone on my deep sea travels. I'm headed out August 20th on the Atlantis Cruise 15-51. It has 14 scheduled dives, and returns to land September 6th. This will be my 4th cruise on the Atlantis, and my 6th multi-day research cruise on any vessel. I'm hoping to get a bunch of awesome data from my cute little worms of which i'll talk about soon. For now, here's a picture from a previous cruise, from my first and so far only Alvin Dive in 2007.

~Geoff