back in town

Greetings all, pad eye kup

 

I arrived last night after ~30 hrs in airport terminals and planes. I like incheon int’l airport (seoul) and most dislike seattle (verrry poorly designed, hope they tear it down sometime soon, it is aging and there are three separate underground trains one needs navigate that are poorly labeled). Both of denver’s airports are even better than seattle’s. Korean airlines is the best ever. Service is par excellance and the food is the best I have ever had on a plane. I only hope they expand their American airport destinations!

 

I had a great time in phuket! Played it low key walking on the beach and sleeping. I have some cool shells and carbonate beach sand. Ate great food. Phuket is not much cheaper than Oregon (perhaps because it is catered to rich germans and Americans on holiday). The first place I stayed at was the cape panwa resport. Very POSH at over 3,000 baht a night, with a buffet breakfast and a room large enough for two thai families (based on what I observed when walking around neighborhoods later in my trip). Disparity! Second place was at Ao Bangtao Lagoon Bungalos. The room was 1300 Baht (plus 10% and 7%) ~1500 = 45 bucks. This was 50% the peak rate! I could have rented a tent, but I wanted a bed. Meals were 150 Baht ($4.50) at the hotel and 300-400 B ($9-12) at the great local Indian restaurant. Next time I go to Thailand, I will stay away from the tourist areas. I had reasonable luck communicating in phuket (with my dictionary that had thai script that I could point to if I could not pronounce the word, verrry important). If I stray from there, it may be more of a challenge (but I feel comfortable enough that I am sure I could do it).

 

I will post some pics soon and more summaries. I do still like coffee. As of now, I am cleaning my house that was left in disarray during my rapidly rushed departure. Following that I plan on attending my friends wedding (jay and sacha) in Humboldt county. Back next week for some debriefing.

 

Luv you all, krup koon kup

 

J R Patton

jpatton@coas.oregonstate.edu

541.753.0421    home

541.737.9622   office

707.498.4290  mobile

http://oregonstate.edu/pattonj

P.O. Box 392

Arcata, CA  95518

 

 

in port, hasta la vista

salutations

this is my fond farewell to the crew of the R/V Roger Revelle. they have been a
most excellent companion to my first adventure on the high seas (although the
seas were relatively calm). the cooks on board (jay and pete) were key in my
comfortibility. i only ate less than 1/2 my personal food stores. i also feel
really healthy (sans my previous gastrointestinal issues that i will not mention
again...). jon the computer tech was very helpful (i spent much of my time in
the computer lab planning our course and coring sites). i will miss him for
sure. captain tom a`was a joy to work with. he was easy going and very helpful.
the cheif mate rob, second mate, mellissa, and third mate heather (roger that)
were all the best. the cheif engineer, dave, was very helpful as we had many
techinical failures during the cruise. all the other guys, jack, rick, jd,
manny, eddie, edwin, matt, scott, steve, jim, jim, john, and i hope i did not
miss anyone are great!

the indonesian crew was particularly helpful. this morning when i was beginning
to take apart a table, udrekh jumpoed right in and said, "jay, is there anything
we can do to help?"

i am ready to go to the dock, after our group picture .

we have already cleaned up all the labs (excpet the computer lab desks where our
computers are still hooke dup for lasdt minute file transfers). my room mate
bart hass already cleaned our room and taken the alundry out and cleaned the
abthroom. he is awesome.

sea you all on the flipside of the globe soon. i have many pictuers to share, i
will post them on my web site. i also have a couple videos. i plan on making a
presentation at HSU geology next fall, as well as at hfog?

luv you all, jay

phuket in the mist

greetings

it is 2:30 pm local time. we will arrive at port around 8:00 am tomorrow
morning. we have been getting all of our equipment put away and the deck
transformed back to the way it was before we got here. i am busy making sure we
have redundant copies of all the data we have collected. only one piece of
equipment is running and we hope to be done with that by 9pm tonight. that will
give me ~9 hrs toupdate the data and then pack up the computers.

my shoulders are strained from all the whale gut swimming i did yesterday and
the gally still smells like squid (gross and salty). most of our stuff is done,
but we are still really busy. we want to have our stuff loaded and ready to get
off the ship whenwe pull into port. it will only be a couple hrs after that that
the containers (i.e.vans) will be lifted by crane onto flatbeds to be shipped
back to seattle. we will have to wait till august to get that stuff. i expect
tonight to be a late one. too bad there is no alcohol on board (at least
officially and legally) that i know of. i am sure we will be celbrating soon.
one of the coring crew is expecially ready to leave for home. he is retirement
age and has been extra cranky since we were 1/2 way throught he cruise.

jay-roy

last core on its way up

greetings and salutations

our last core is 15 minutes from being on deck, a multi core. we recovered our
last piston core just before that.

last night was the wog entertainment ceremony. (wogs, pollywogs, are single
celled organisms who have yet to be welcomed into the world of king neptune;
shellbacks were once wogs, but king neptune has accepted them as worthy; i will
detila this later)

today, begining at 6am, after 4+1 hrs sleep, we began our initiation ceremony.
we wore our clothes inside out. we had to walk backwards everytime we were in
the presence of a shellback. we had to do whatever a shellback said. (sort of
like hazing, but not that bad). we did some things like measure the ship with a
1/2 hot dog (i counted while my wog partner held the hot dog). we were then
brought before king neptune and his court to stand before for our charges. i
plead guilty. i was a special case (i did some really bad things). so they
really gave it to me. they pretended to cut my hair off. they pretended to
electrocute me. they oured goop all over me and made me swim through kitchen
wast (historically, wogs 'swam' through the innards of wales and out their
anus). this ceremony goes back centuries and i got a really cool certificate
(and a laminated card i will carry with me whenever i go on a ship that will
cross the border, so i do not need to go through this again). the certificate is
cooler than all of my different diplomas combined. i still smell like kitchen
waste. i need a second shower. eughghhgh...

more later. gotta go give coordinates to the bridge. we are goin home! 36 hrs
form now, the ship should be unloaded.

luv jay

4 degrees 20 minutes

greetings

we just passed 4 degrees and 20 minutes to our final trench core site. we will
do one to two more piggy back basin sites on our way to port.

today is the wog ceremony. last night was our entertainment night. we made two
films. some of the shellbacks were not too entertained as they were expecting a
live show... but most everyone was on the floor laughing with tears in their
eyes. it was quite hlarious. i will have a digital copy of this movie. but you
need to do an equator crossing on a ship to view it.

back to sleep for an hour more nap (after my 4 hrs already) before we get
awakened for our day of hell... stressing out about it, got a headache, gonna
really suck. i hope i enjoy it.

me'ya lat'r

tic toc

welcome to this message,

i began the cruise reading. it was very comforting and relaxing. i do not get to
read much, too busy, too much oging on. i soon fell to the needs of the cruise
and stopped reading. i look forward to returning to this book once the cruise is
over.

the winds today were up to 20 knots, so the waves have answered the call and are
smaking the boat pretty heavily. the core deployment the afternoon was pretty
wet. the sunset tonight was wonderful. the one last night was aboslutely
spectacular. there was a squall moving between the ship and the sunset. really
awesome. i have taken about 4 GB of pictures and about 15 GB of video. i am
still reeling them in. gotta get the moments, it has already been fun looking
back at times from early in the cruise. we left a few people in padang and it
seems like so long ago (not sure how long it really was). miss those guys.

one of the guys we left in padang is a filmaker for cbc (canada). they are
making a film about the cascadia subduction zone. since there are many parallels
to oru study here, they decide to send him along. a week before we left cv, a
whole slew of calls came in from different companies (natl geo, etc.), but there
was not enough time for the paperwork for int'l clearance (was that a pain, took
about 6 months for most of it to go through). i am not really photogenic (long
hari and all), so i do not expect to be in it. it may take a couple years till
we see it. look forward to it.

gotta go get the bridge set up or our next plans... then perhaps a nap before an
all night survey and site selection again. yippee. i hope this cruise never
ends. i have my seventh wind!

reggae rising is just 54 days away. i can't wait! check the lineup i am most
excited about (the best yet, as always: reggae reggae reggae):
anthony b
abyssinians
queen omega
sly and robbie
ziggy marley
cherine anderson
morgan heritage family
tanya stephens
damien marley
stephen marley
steel pulse
freddie mcgreggor
ishi dube.
I CAN'T WAIT
i hope lee scratch perry makes it also (he was on the lineup for reggae on the
river, probably due to the 2B1 production connection) (for those less informed
of the political issues between reggae ont he river and reggae rising, go to
reggaeontheriver.com for a quick summary, or go to reggaerising.com for the
lineup that is going to happen) as he was on the 2B1 lineup and there were
rumors some acts would be transfered...

luv one, j-sun

2004 earthquake

greetings

we have split therest of the piston core from the basin we were in last night.
we have a good view of the entire deposit we think is likely the 2004 turbidite.
it is over 1 meter thick. this is the thickest deposit, by four times, that we
have seen in all the cores recovered on this cruise. below that turbidite are
perhaps over a dozen thinner turbidite sequences. many of them have thin mud
turbidite 'pre-cursors?' and then nice buoma (person who typified bedforms of
turbidites) b,c,d, and mud tails. the ripples of buoma c are particularly
beautiful! also, lucky for us, there are hemipelagic deposits between most of
these turbidites. residing in these hemipalagites are forams. the age control we
were looking for. core 96PC will be a benchmark of this study.

most people are in a good mood, as we are getting close to the end. i hope
these4 last few days last a long time, but time is running really fast (back to
sans sleep mode).

the ocean is still blue. the moon is waning. sunrise this morning was
spectacular.

later gator, jater

2004 rupture zone and thai massage

greetings and salutations,

we are amidst the 2004 rupture zone again. oru most recent core in a piggy back
basin looks like we got the event. there is a nice upwards fining unit at the
top of the core. ifning up into a nice mud. looks like we have a good tail to
the 2004 turbidite. of course, when we launched and recovered the multicore
device (to capture the sediment-water interface, in up to 8 cores), it looks
like we overpenetrated as most every core was 100% full. after looking at the
piston core form this location, i am not surpised. we will have a few more
chances to capture this interface, so we are heading back to the trench right
now to get another piston core at this latitude. we probably have two more
trench sites and two more basin sites, plus or minus. if we are lucky.

i am looking forward to a week in phuket. i plan on staying in a bungalo on the
beachd on the west coast of the island. kata beach or patong. or several to try
different ones. i really want to go snorkeling to see coral reefs and tropical
fish (you know, the vibrant yellow, pink, and green ones). i may need to travel
by boat to an island to get good snorkeling. we'll see. i also plan on sleeping,
waking up, getting a traditinoal thai massage (2 hrs), going back to sleep,
waking up again for another thai massage (about $30 bucks for 2 hrs), for a
couple days before i go adventuring. kata beach is less tourist packed than
patong, but patong has discos where i might be able to socialize with some
beautiful ex pat. woman so, i will try to mix it up.

3:30 local time right now, gotta keep an eye on things. later.

louvre jay

got sleep?

sleep? forget what that is. i will try it again soon.

brevity master jay

steaming ahead

greetings all, one love,

we are moving right along. the end is near and i can taste it. while i feel like
i am now ready to return, i know as soon as i do i will wish i was still on the
ship. i just watched tha sunset, a mildly rare ocurrance for me, so it was a
treat to relax sitting out on the deck somewhere near the bow. we have only a
few more core stations to go (about 5 or so). we on or ahead of schedule (dont
tell anyone on the ship we are ahead, they will begin to expect to get back to
port early; we will probably throw in a new core station if we are early;
although i would like to get back a day early, so we have time to pack up
everything).

gotta go, just found some good stratigraphy on the sub-bottom profiler....

luv me

smooth operator

cool runnings

irie

congrats to tom and susan leroy on their spanking new born with a goatee!
congrats to sam van lanningham on his soon to be defended defense!

will be home soon, more later, gotta go get some mud.

l-j

mud thud

greetings and salutations,

king neptune has been very patient with us as we are about to cross the equator
again. most of us pollywogs (those not experienced with a crossing ceremony) are
i sdue trouble with king neptune. we are slated to be lower than whale shit
slime balls for the transit back to phuket once our science is over. we will be
wearing our clothes inside out and do what ever a shellback (one in good
standing with king neptune) tells us to. i expect to get slimy, greasy, grungy,
and dirty. i will probably work very hard ond something(s). i hope i do not get
hurt (other than my very large pride). following this hardship, we each get to
entertain king neptune for 15 minutes. i hope i do a good job. the shellbacks
have been threatening to cut my beard and hair off. i am shuddering in my shoes.

science is going well. i have been getting to do some core logging. much like on
land cor eloggin. more detailed in some ways, less detialed and way less
rigorous than i am used to doing (thanks ken aalto for the preparation). i tried
to make some changes to the strat logging sheets, but i was not to be heard
(chris was surprised at this, so he and i will sit down after the cruise and
improve on their existing core log sheets)... mud is mud. getting my fingernails
dirty again is a good thing, albeit i am still short on sleep. i did get over 6
hrs last night, all one solid block of time. yippee.

luv you all, j-sun

still testing ship's equipment

hello there all beautiful people

we continue to test the ship's equipment. the bow thruster has gone out and it is a challenge for the bridge crew to maintain precise
locations for our coring operation. we hope that the part that is broken is not one that is not on the ship...

also, we are coring again in relatively deep water (5,800m), so the winch has been failing. basically, it goes into free fall mode. and
then the winch operator needs to put on the brake. the piston core we are using now is very sensitive to vertical motions up-and-down,
so we need to be careful not to abruptly change its velocity or it will 'pre-trip' during the breaking and re-descent operations. if it
pre-trips, we loose the ability to do a piston core (where the piston sucks the sediment up into the core) and our device is simply a
gravity core. so, we would probably just bring the corer back up on deck and reset it for a second deployment. doing this operation on
the aftdeck (becaseu the equipment is broken to do it otherwise) is the most dangerous coring operation that the coring chief has done
in his 30 yrs of experience. i have videos...

a second problem with pre-tripping is that the core usually drops with sufficient force that the cable snaps and our $50,000 equipment
gets delivered to davey jones. fortunately, we believe the shock absorber i designed (with the assitance of an engineer to make sure we
were orders of magnitude on the right track) saved us from losing the coring equipment during a pretrip we have already experienced.
glad i spent all that time working on that (about a month). more planning to do...

safety first! jay

moving along

greetings

we have been having moderate luck with piston cores in the piggy back basins.
however, the multi corer was deployed twice lastnight/this morning and we
recovered zero sediment. chris moser is curently working hard to troubleshoot,
but we think it is unlikely to send another attemp to the sea floor,as we are
getting behind (with the core stuck for a day and the double failure on the
multicore). we may skip a few core locations on our way back...

time is passing by really fast now. it will only pass faster. most of the crew
has been on a vacation cruise because we have so few cores. i have been busy,
along with chris goldfinger and a few others. this shift in time management will
be a struggle for those vacationers on board. we'll see... i must say that i
personally got a good 7 hrs of sleep last night. i did not know what to do with
myself.

luv jay

we're loose, finally

hello there, greetings and salutations

i awoke from a dream, that i was in class and everyone was taking a test and
everyone got all the answers correct and the teacher started singing a bob
marley song and then asked 'what does the next line talk about? and wait until
the market is high: and everyone rose their hand, to the ship making a noise and
we were floating around heavily. when i went to sleep, we had been anchored at
high tension to our core that had been stuck in the sea floor for over 10 hours.
i knew one of several possible things had occurred. either we cut the line, the
line broke, or the core was free. i got dressed (lucky for my shipmates), put my
boots on (lucky for me) and went up to the fantail (the aft deck where the a
frame is and where we are deploying the cores from). i soon discovered it was
the latter. yippe. we really did nto want to loos all that equipment (nor get
anyone hurt).

so, b4 i went to sleep, we tried several attempts to get the core out. we pulled
in the cable to a high tension. we tried letting the cable out 5 meters, and
then pulling it in again, twice. eventually we pulled it in so much that when
one large wave came by, the tension went over 28,000 lbs. the elastic limit of
the cable is 24,375 lbs. the breaking limit is 32,500 lbs. we definitely
stretched this cable. it will be unusable and we'll have to cut it off and
dispose of it. the solution (we came up with, but implemented duign my slumber)
was to payout some wire, relocate the ship so to create an angle to the core
with the wire, and then increase the tension again. sans more details, this
finally worked (approx 27 hrs stuck in the mud). i cant wait to see what we get.

bfast time., hungrily and well slept, j

southernmost core 101 53' 9.876" E 6 32' 43.860" S

hark yee fond readers

wrapped up yesterday as a 21+hr day nicely with a partially successful piston
core. the piston core itself was empty, but the trigger core was fulll with over
2 m of sediment. looks like we got the 2001 M7.9 earthquake turbidite at the top
of the section. very loose sandy mud. very loose. then we began our trek north
to find core sites in the slope above our other core sites. the depth is less so
we expect to find foram shells to provide age control (if we can correlate the
cores with the abysall plain stratigraphy) for our earthquakes.

then i got a godd 5 hr nap, to find that at our first piggyback basin (basins on
the slope that reside above fault generated folds in the accretionary prism)
piston core (follwing a successful benthos gravity core) was coming on deck. got
it videotaped. then i got another 2 hr nap following a shower. i feel better
now.

we are now having problems with the pinger (a device that sends pings of sound
every second so we can tell where the seafloor is so the core is stopped close
to the sea floor bottom -- instead fo driving it too far into the mud). a big
deal, but we are handling it well.

i can't believe we are already going back north. it seems like this cruise just
began. i have heard many great stories from the salties on board. i have had
some to share myself, mostly from land. i am loking forward to drinking some
alcohol. dont really miss it, but i think it will be fun. sort fo forgot how it
feels. but i think it is fun. ganja i do remember.

rollin along, luv j-sun

5 meters of mud

well, hellow there all. greetings and salutations,

i gues it is my assumption that anyone other than myself and my mother are
reading this blog, so.. hi mom; hi self.. hi back to self (delerium continues as
i talk to myself through my blog). as i jsut said at lunch: 'it is better that
we are laughing endlessly rather than punchin each others' faces'

got a good 2 hr followed by a good 3.5 hr nap last night. feel xhausted (as
usual, but i usually say i am feeling great, becasue i feel great while
exhausted... don't try to make sense of that please). early this am we recovered
an astounding 5+ meters of sediment in a piston core, the second one deployed
from the stern at night. got it all on video, including the deployment and the
retrieval. the trigger core still had zero sediment and we are hard at work
thinking about what to change to better that issue.

we have just arrived at our most southern core location (if this core is
successful). this is the deepest site we have yet cored (6278 meters); the
deepest chris has cored ever. the depth has been below the ccd (carbonate
compensation depth; ccd = depth when carbonates dissolve) for quite a while, so
we have not been finding foraminiferid fossils (made of carbonate). this wil
hamper our age control, but the stratigraphic correlation for segment boundary
testing comes first. ages are still an important part of that (since we do not
have terrestrial earthquake studies to compare to, unlike cascadia -- brian
atwater scoured the bays and estuaries to find that modern bioturbation is
already destroying teh stratigraphic evidence of the 2004/2005 eqs: crabs are
just eating up all the evidence).

our plan, after getting one more successfull piston core, is to transit back
north to phuket taking piston cores where were were denied earlier due to
equipment malfunctions. argghh.

here is a new saying my bunkmate, bart a.k.a. superman, has me saying (he is our
local mental dr, with the multisensor track van he works in is the mental
hospital): life's a bitch and then you are reborn. kinda like a cartoon (like
willie e coyote).

one love, jay

history mystery mud, the sand ran down the clog, we cored again, again and again, teh sand ran down the clog

sooooo, greetings all

last night, to which i was only a partial observer due to having slept through
my alarm (drasted six hrs of continuous sleep, feels guilty but overall is a
good thing...). we have had horrible luck with our 2.5" gravity cores (a.k.a.
benthos cores). the last two we have deployed were brought up on deck with
strange contents. while the outsid eof the barrels were coated in mud for
between 2-3 meters, the liner contents inside recovered only 10's of cm of mud.
stranger yet, could it get any more, was the water coloumb (i mean column,
maybe, heheheh) above the recovered sediment was a chocolate milk color and very
opaque. so opaque we initially got excited that we had an entire core of
sediment. while i had tasted some of the water from previous cores (well, at
thousands of dollars a core, how often does one get a chance to taste water from
5-6 km deep?), i chose to not taste this water. this chocolate milk was
confounding. drat, fouled again. so, we found one variable (there are two one
way flapper valves installed at the top of the core to allow water to go up when
the core is penetrating the ocean floor and to prevent water from going down and
washing out the sediment when the core is being raised from the sea floor up to
the ship), the flapper valve had a strange doubel spring on the flapper. so, we
used the other flapper valve and se-submitted our benthos for sampling. 2 hrs
later, we got a core with 30-40 cms of sediment and crystal clear water. this
was good and bad at the same time. no choc milk, but also not much mud. the
sub-bottom profiler (a kudsen 3.5 khz echosounder) data suggested the sea floor
was rather soft (muddy) with some harder (more sandy) strata at shallow depths.
this was just like our rosetta stone site where we recovered 5-6 meters of
sediment with a piston corer. so, we decided to go upslope a little (5 nautical
miles) to a site a wee more sandy where we deployed the piston corer form the
stern a frame (visible on the web cam most of the time). this operation wetn off
rather well as i caught it in60-70 no-flash (not to distract the crew with the
first time attempt very dangerous task) pics form two decks above. wanted to
document for science and for the people working hard. i wanted to stay out of
the way as there were several extra hands already in the way (they did not
realize this of course).

went to sleep to wake up 4 hrs later at 4:20. slept til 6:30. oops. butt (not
really but) i missed the major dissapointed reactions of many aftert the core
was recovered. the trigger core (that triggers the 5,000# weight for the piston
core) sticks in the sea flor first. this core recoverd zero sediment. very very
strange. triangle of dissapointment and confusion. doooohhh. as well, the piston
core recovered only 2.3 ish m of sediment. people's emotions w4re all over the
place. i am glad i missed this. we thought it was the perfect site. we thought
it was better than the rosetta stone. what egos we have? (well, i am the
beginner here... learning form others...) what arrogance? so, now i am awake and
we are folowing a survey i set up last night (glad i thought ahead again)
looking for a new site. right now we are transiting over thick sand, ergo my
time to write (right) this email.of course, my newbie lower self-estem judgement
is questioning all that i have learned so far (in terms of what we think is a
good site with respect to the 3.5 khz data). but that is all i have to go on (of
course in the context of my wonderful humboldt state geology field geomorph
skills, which i rely on heavily and successfully time and time again). good luck
to me.

lotsa squid in the sea at night, feasting on flying fish and other shiny fish.
the moon is bright and so are the stars. my habits are doing well, except fo rmy
chocolate one. i had a discovery several days ago and now they are all gone. i
switched to jelly bellys (uggh, pure sugar, eeewwwhh). need to avoid them, my
candida overgrowht sure craves them though. need to be strong. i am going to go
get some right now though (weak that i am, i cant wait to sleep for a week).

luv you all, even though you are land lubbers like myself. jaysun

the real attachment may be here

no attachment, maybe it is here?

jay

steaming ahead

greetings

we sure keep the engineers busy on this ship. we have come to find that the
several of the main sheaves are made of delrin, a plastic material that seems to
deform under pressure when heated. well, we are sure applying pressure and ti
sure is hot here in the equatorial region. so, after three post padang triage
piston core deployment and recoveries, we have shifted piston core operations to
the a-frame, on the stern deck. this is a very complicated, dangerous, and time
consuming way to do such a thing. i will beleaguer (sp?) you'all the details. it
is also less than optimal for sediment recovery because the aft of the ship is
constantly heaving up and down (this can flush the sediment out of the core,
assuming we recovered sediment into the core. so, whiel the operations were
moving to the stern, we have only been able to take reconnaisance 2.5" gravity
cores. there are many core stations (core sites) we will need to revisit on the
transit back to phuket.

my health is good as my hunger has returned with my love for food! i am back to
my 2-3 hr naps and i feel great. someone needs a good attitude, it might as well
be me (it is also really fun). i have learned most all the ship crew's names,
but i am still a little rusty on a few of the science crew.

i am unsure how to post images to the blog via email (i have not seen the
internets (a bushism) for a while, including my blog, so i have been unable to
read your comments, if any), but i am attaching a quick map showing our core
stations. there are 35 core stations and 52 cores. we usually take several types
of cores at each station, unless the first 2.5" core is a wash (no sediment).

i have a ship email address: jpatton@rv-revelle.ucsd.edu that i have access to.
this is how i post the blog. basically the ships unix email system stores up
emails and sends them out at regular intervals. not instant (usually), but
reliable. (unlike my coas email, or any such internet surfing).

i am taking alot of pictures, about 2GB so far.

luv you all, jay

sedimentary abundance (out of order, b4 padang)

greetings

whiel some of my blogs have been sent out in inverse ordre```, this one follows
the previous ones (another attempt to state the obvious, which i am good at).
(actually, this one originally went out on 5/18, today is 5/24... i think i have
the blog edress right now) so, i have really screwed up the chronology of my
blog, at least it does not affect the chronostratigraphy at all. (this email was
sent before padang

we have had good luck for cores along the 2005 rupture area. we placed cores
from sites ranging 250km from each other and have found a surprising
rese`mblance between them. the upper 1/2 meter almost looks exactly alike in
each core. this is good.

we are now south of the equator and soon neptune will punish us all for having
angered him (according to his scribe, davey jones). tomorrow we can expect to
pay tribute to him with various creative actions (much like hazing, but i hope
not too much like hazing). all who are new to equator crossings are called wogs
(short for polly wogs). more on this later.

the ships web site: ship.rrevelle.sio.ucsd.edu
there is a link to video web cams there. more sleep when the cruise is over.
getting about 6 hrs, often split up into segments. i am busy keeping the ship
going (goldfinger and myself are the two responsible to find core sites,
although everyone wants to give their advice, usually when we are in the middle
of doing something else.

positively jay, love

------------- End Forwarded Message -------------

back on track from padang

greetings landlubbers,

argghhhh. a few days ago we arrived at padang to 1)try to fix one of our sheaves
and 2) pick up a sheave we had freighted over from scripps (where the atlantis,
the sister ship to revelle, was conveniently docked). while the machine shops in
padang could not repair the sheave we had, the one from atlantis got installed.
i am just getting over 3 days of GI distress. mama mia, papa pia, dia----. i
think i can hold my food down, ill let you know. i am suspicous of the dish
cleanliness, but who knows...

we were unable to take piston cores until last night (remember we broke much of
the necc. equipment). we had a successful attempt with about 5 meters of
recovery. yippee. since the equip broke down, we could only take gravity cores
with an average recovery of about 2 meters max. so we are quite pleased. of
course, the sheaves are already smoking and this makes us very nervous. one
would think that this equipment would be in better shape. but, scripps manages
their equipment like many other public institutions, fix it when it breaks
(unlike maintain it so it does not break).

i did get to catch up on my sleep as we went into padang and during my illness.
so i am feeling rather well rested, a short lived experience. i am feeling much
more confident making decisions on where to core, following some successfull
choices without goldfinger at my side. expensive time, so lots of pressure to do
the right thing, but i can do it. all of my humboldt trained field geology
skills are paying off, ONCE AGAIN! thanks ken and bud and longshore, etal.

peacefully yours, one love jay

transit to padang

salutations

we are on our way to padang to pickup some scientists and drop off others. we
will also hopefully get replacement sheaves so we can take piston cores. using
only gravity cores has been severely limiting. however, great mud stratigraphy.

i will sleep a regular night tonight (at least i hope, we are at marsec II
security -- prates arggh!).

good day/night, jay

red eye

red yes

red eye

ready

little sleep and ready to core. lately the 4 hr sleep regime (when i am lucky)
is bearing hard on my eyes. they hurt. i am wearing sunglasses at night for a
different reason than the song. i am planning my next core site, last one b4 we
transit to padang (west coast of sumatra). i am looking forward to a little
sleep. we will be there for 1-2 days while we make ship repairs. have not been
able to do piston coring (longer cores, more strata, better) since we broke all
the ships equipment. howver, we have been ghaving rather goo dluck with the
cores we have been taking (ever since our second channel i spoke about many days
ago (lost track of timestill). what day is it? GMT julian day 139, 22:30.
whatever that means to youu, that is the timeline i am on. it is hartd to keep
track of 3 times: GMT, lcoal, and CA PST... i do still have the ability to
determine whether the sun is shinging or the moon is setting (had the first
opportunity to take a 5 minute breather and relax as the moon set tonight).

awesome love, jay

piggyback basin

also a delayed message, i hope i have the posting email address correct now...

greetings

similar to the CSZ there are sections of this subduction zone where the upper
plate faults switch vergence (the direction updip: landward vergence = updip
towards land; seawrd vergence = updip towards sea: the megathrust -- main fault
-- of the subduction zone is seaward vergent). ou first coring location was a
chanel system in the north in a landward vergent section. we had reasonable
results (russel wynn, turbidite sedimentologist from england) with ~15+ mud
turbidites. the folds are low angle and lesser erosion provides lower volume
turbidites. our second channel system was in a seaward vergent section. the
folds in this section loook like boxwork sandstone cliffs, providing ample sandy
sediment for turbidites, but we had terrible luck recovering much more than a
few decimeters in our cores (remember that we broke several of the sheaves that
we use to operate the main crane/winch that deploys our best coring device : the
piston corer: the piston corer uses suction and a trigger core to give us the
best penetration and the longest cores up to 20-30 feet; we are left with using
the aft a frame and 10' cores). sometime in the last 36 hrs (can't remember days
right now, still doing 16-20 hr shifts), we went to a piggy-back basin up on the
slope of the upper plate, in about 1/2 water depth fo the abysal plain (~1900m).
we had great luck retrieving cores here, found several ashes, can't wait to xrf
them. but... we also found stratigraphy that is difficult to interpret (no good
contacts, very gradual, no blatant turbidites). next we went to a channle system
in the next landward vergent section. here we had great luck acquiring the
longest core since channel 1 (HBO, where we wrote our own version fo six feet
under).

we are now transiting to the last landward vergent channel system before we pass
the rupture boundary between the 2004 and 2005 eqs. (simileue island).

i have been spending much of my time doing site planning, ship planning (telling
the bridge where we want to go, how fast, requesting crew, etc.), and assisting
the coring crew on deck. i am very tired (not conplainging as i am having the
time of my life, love it). eating mucho-vitamino. i am not going hungry... yet.
we pass the equator soon, where i will be indoctrinated to sea going farers
(basically, there is a ceremony where neptune does stuff, and the newbies are
calle dwogs and do penance of sorts, just hope they dont pour gallons of porkfat
al over me.).

you can find webcams on the ship's web page. google "scripps revelle ship", or
something like that, to get to the web page. the co-PI, joe stoner, not from
humboldt, his finace has told joe that she has seen me quite frequently in the
computer lab (our planning area) and on the aft deck coring. she told joe i am
not getting enough sleep. she is porbably right. there is usually (during good
stellite conditions) a ten second cycle on the refresh rate.

love you all, jay

long days short nights, or the inverse, can't keep track

this message was also sent orig a few days ago...

i love being on a ship. the ocean is such a deep blue. we have been very
fortunate and the seas are not very rough. the ship rolls and pitches quite a
bit for others. there are 1/2 dozen indonesian scientists on board and i have
been letting one of them use my ginger caps. i have not needed them since my 1st
two days. yippee.

we are just ow pulling up another 2.5" dia gravity core, so we really hope we
find something. having destroyed some of the essential winch equipment after
only a cuple of days of coring, we can only do a few types of cores. we are
expecting to meet up with replacement gear in padang (west coat sumatra) in less
than a week. so... we are using what equip we can to get recon data adn then we
can come back on our return transit to sample at specific locations we determine
now.

adios (there are 1/2 dozen spanish on baord as well) jay (more later)

turbidites

greetings and salutations (i oring sent this to the wrong address, so, a little
late)

i have been assigned two 12 hour shifts a day, so we'll see how long that lasts
(actually, i just fit in sleep when i can, about 4-6 hrs a day). i am spending
much of my time doing site and cruise planning. we look for large channels that
have large catchments that can provide large volumes of sediment for turbidite
production.
in 4ish days, we have cored one channel system using four different coring
devices with varying levels of success. we have found at least 15 mud
turbidites. we have also broken most of the large sheaves (blocks/ pulleys) that
are used for coring. so, we are now coring from an a frame form the stern.
things are going poorly.

next day: after mapping much of yesterday to fill in where previous bathymetry
was lacking, we have been searching for our second channel system. after finding
this system, we sent down a core and i finished my 21 hr shift with a 5 hr nap
to find that that core recovered less than 1 cc of very clean sand. the core did
not penetrate due to the sand (this means we found the channel, but it was full
o fsand). so, i set up a new mapping track to find a more distal location for
the channel (hopefully more muddy and less sandy). while many of the science
crew (not the coring techs nor the ships resident technicians) have little to do
(no cores), a few of us have been quite overworked. i do not see an end to this
work schedule. several hrs ago, chris and i found a location in this second
channel system that bends south due to interference with a large normal fault.
we are patiently awaiting the arrival of the core form the depths below. the
pulllout force was apprently representative of a core having penetrated into
sediment. we will know in about 1/2 hr.

saw two birds yersterday and a large water spout today. we have had several
squals, usually during coring operations. i have operated the a frame. we hope
to get new equipment sent to us in padang. later, jay

at sea

greetings

left the dock yesterday at about 4:20 pm. i had fun in phuket town, went out at
night and tried the local whiskey. i dont like whiskey, but i cant drink the
local beer. i wish i had spent more time learning thai, but asking how to say
things (like thank you korn-koon-cup for men, korn-koonku for women) is
apppreciated by locals. everybody likes a good joke (esp. when i am self
depracating; e.g. i played santa claus and a cowboy shooting guns in the hotel
lobby one night; they want me back for xmas)

taking ginger caps, so i am not sea sick, just a little quesy all over my body n
(prob jet lag more than anythying). the ocean color is the most blue i have ever
seen it.

very hot when there is no cloud in the sky. i seat at least a gallon two days
ago.

i already did some major boo-boos (mr clumso here). left some data back at the
lab. i am baby sitting the sattelite tracker because it does not work. we are
dl'ing 7X100 MB files. takes 10MB for 1 hr... i have selected our first core
site and chris adjusted it only a little. we should be there early tomorrow am.
cant wait.

just discussed the device i invented with the coring science crew salty's. we'll
see if it does not work. (if it works, we'll never know if we needed it. i
designed a shock absorber to absorb 30,000 #.

no pics for now. gotta go. love to all, as i should survive as today we got our
first education re: safety first and excape rafts

-j

seldom more welcome

greetings and salutations

i turned 37 yesterday. in several days i will be on the other side of the world, about 6,900 nautical miles away. i will post comments to keep my friends and family aware of my existence. lately my fingers have been typing verrry long emails, so be aware.

chicken is my cat's name. i study earthquakes. i will be on R/V Revelle, a ship out of Scripps, studying turbidites (submarine landslides) that may be generated during strong shaking caused by subduction zone earthquakes along the sunda trench offshore Sumatra and Java. i will be working with chris goldfinger (oregon state, COAS, my advisor). he has used this method along the Cascadia subduction zone (CSZ) and the northern San Andres fault (SAF). google away. http://activetectonics.coas.oregonstate.edu


i will spread uplifting and positive vibes to everyone i meet. we are all from the same stone toss. burn it up. irie. love jay