dozens of dophins and ones of whales

well, i know i thought i had posted the last graphic for a while, but
i heard "porpoises on the port side" on the loudspeaker and i ran for
my camera. i went out on the fan tail (the stern of the main deck) and
looked to port and saw ~6 jumping in unison... did not have my camera,
but i ran around up a deck and got ready. as i was doing so, casey
(computer lab tech from UW) yelled, "look a whale." we saw a beautiful
humpback swimming alongside for a few seconds...

then i looked around and saw many many whale spouts and hundreds of
dolphins. my zoom is small on my camera, so i got ready for ones that
would swim closer to the ship.... after about 150 shots, i got a dozen
good pics. so beautiful. these are pacific white sided dolphins
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pacific_white-sided_dolphin

this is the best close up of the lot, with two looking up at me (lol).

neah bay radar

oh, here is a shot of the ships radar i took when we were in neah bay.
if you go to maps.google.com and search for neah bay washington you
will find it on the northwest tip of WA. this is where we sought safe
harbor to do the electronic repair on the ships engines...

you will notice the shape of the green radar returns match the shape
of the coastline you might find on google. very cool.

now i am about to pack my computer, so not likely to get off any more
graphic posts until i am on land again... peace and blessings, jay p

getting ready to wrap things up

i just had my last dinner aboard the tgt tonight. gonna miss this ship
and her crew. good times had by all. casey and brandi in the lab were
awesome. could not have done this without them. jackie was a great
intern, even though we could not come up with a demeaning nickname for
her. ;~).... sarah was a great steward (cook) and thanks for making me
some extra food dishes i could eat. yummm. tony and terrence were also
great in the kitchen, thanks! captain john was particularly helpful
and easy going, even when i told un-funny jokes. terry the first
engineer has a good sense of humor (as he laughed at my un-funny
jokes). dana africa was always a joy to chat with, what a great and
rich perspective she has. russel, frank, mike, mark, jay, pat, zeke,
dave, and all the other crew (sorry i do not have your names in my
head right now) were all very supportive.

we hit newport tomorrow and i leave the ship to get back to work on my
research (and to tie some loose ends that were left to tie when i left
for seattle ~2 weeks ago). it was fun. ill be posting the cruise
report web site soon here. stephen marley is in arcata on thrs.

blessings, jay p

clean and safe science

while at sea we practice safe and clean science. there is no alcohol
aboard because soemtimes people do not show up to their shift. this
sometimes leads to the discovery that they are no longer on the ship.
if you fall off the ship and nobody knows about it,,, that is the end
of your story for sure. so, a few years ago, alcohol was banned from
all UNOLS (the organization that runs the US science fleet) ships.

this is not really a problem. just thought i would share it with you all.

finall ygot sub-bottom profiler to work

after struggling with this for the entire cruise... with the
assistance of brandi (uw science tech) and knudesn techs, we have now
the correct settings (ping rate) to correctly compensate for heave
(motion of the ship up and down). this way, the software can plot the
ocean bottom flatly, if it is flat.

this image shows how the data looked before (on left) and after (on
right) we made this correction. we are quite pleased as the second
half of the cruise will collect this better-cmpensated data... woot
woot.

to give brandi, bran, and tim credit, they had, the night before,
figured out how to process the data to compensate for this. this took
many days with conversations with the person who wrote the software
they were using to do the processing (sioseis and seisee, linux and
windows, along with kingdom suite, windows). this processing will need
to be done eventually on all the data, as we are collecting the raw
unprocessed segy files... but the binary file plotted on the software
during acquisition is correct now (what the screen dump shows in this
image). thanks all.

hope these work, lol

well, i was walking around on deck the other day and noticed the
expiration date on these. the ship was constructed in 1991, but these
have been kept up to date since then. of course, if you look at the
expiration date... what caught my eye was the 2011 year, that is this
year. luckily, our cruise ends before july.

ship is trusty, but in need of repair

well, we lost propulsion last night as i was getting ready to nap
after my shift... apparently, one of the engines needs to be repaired
in some way. in order to prevent losing propulsion when we enter
newport harbor this coming sunday, we will be heading to neah bay on
mon/tues to get these repairs made. we will probably stay on the ship,
regardless of how interested we would be in an adult beverage (which
is prohibited on the ship). if this were a french ship, we would have
a glass of wine for lunch every day. good thing is that the rough seas
we are expecting (4m mean high wave height) will hit us when we are in
neah bay.

also, the multibeam had been troubling us for a while in the last day.
this was troubleshot to be related to the supply voltage. the ups
system was kicking in every now and then when the pings hit off.
brandi (super science tech from UW) and terry (head engineer) worked
this out. they simply changed the source of power for the ship. now,
the multibeam is operating within specs. so, we will not need to get
parts sent nor head for port to repair it (which was considered a
likely option earlier today).

other than all this, it has been a great monday!

here we are now

here is a shot showing where we are right now... our position is
demarcated by the symbol that looks like a crime scene murder mystery
symbol. lol

engine troubles will bring us to neah bay on tuesday,,, hopefully
avoidign the 16' seas....

turbidite heaven

this is where turbidites go when they decide to die.

there are over 35 m of turbidites in this image. the upper most dark
horizontal line is the surface return (the contrast between sediment
and water). then the brighter parts (white) are sandy and the darker
parts are muddy (generally)... i counted at least 18 turbidites in
this sequence. this would be a spectacular place to collect a deep
core to investigate earthquake history. i now count more than 18. you
can read the lat/long in red, if you want to search for this location.
the amplitude envelope is in green on the right (for the current ping,
which is not representative of the turbidites seen in the center of
the image).

the other shot is from the bow of the thompson. i risked my life to
take this shot (not really, although i could have lost my balance and
fell over the edge).

confluence test

here is a shot of the multi beam as we were collecting while roaming
above the confluence of the Cascadia and Willapa channels offshore
Washington. you can see the cahnnels are in blue and the surrounding
levee systems, which are less deep, are in yellow.

cromsos did an excellent job at laying out our waypoints so that we
could hit the confluence, which has yet to be mapped in such detail. i
suspect this bathy will end up in a powerpoint slide very soon! this
is a key part of the seismo part of the story for the turbidites. more
on this later, i need to get to bed... gotta get up early for work.

working on the ship (captain and 1st engineer)

here is a shot of our trusty captain john and first engineer terry
making some adjustments to the radar equipment (i believe). since we
are simply mapping (and not coring, which would require much more from
the ship and science crew), the ship's crew is able to attend to some
maintenance of the ship. the thompson did recently spend about 3
months in port where they rebuilt all the engines and drive motors
(z-drives). they also completely rebuilt the cranes and many other
parts of the ship as well. they actually cut holes in the sides and
deck of the ship to extract the engines and motors so they could be
rebuilt! ill try to post pics of the welded up patches soon.

first site reports

here is a sample of our draft OBS site reports. i am still doing some
edits, but these is the basics of what i am providing the group.

i have indesign set up to produce a report for each of over 150 sites.
one has bathymetry and one has backscatter in places (lighter grey
corresponds to 'harder' areas). there is a possible mud volcano just
north of the site (J58 is in the center of the map, designated by a
black dot). you can see it in the bathy and also a brighter bleb
(technical term) in the backscatter. thanks cromsos for pointing this
out. very cool.

wednesday is today, i am pretty sure

we are progressing quite successfully. we have surveyed our first OBS
(ocean bottom seismometer) site and it looks to be fine. i have
prepared an 'indesign' document that we will use to create OBS site
reports. these reports will be our way to let the others (who are
making the million dollar decisions) know of the conditions of any
potential OBS site. this will allow us to have a discussion regarding
the suitability of any of these sites. we have ~144 OBS sites and i
have prepared a sheet for each one. i also have a spreadsheet with
data to enter for each site (lat/long, our interpretation of site
suitability, alternative site locations, etc.). once we have maps and
sub-bottom profiles to place in them, we will send them out for review.

we also just passed over the second OBS site and think it is probably
not suitable for OBS deployment as it is in the center of a large
submarine channel. this channel is a place where turbidity currents
might (probably) travel following a large earthquake. if this were to
happen, the OBS could be translocated by the current and it would
either .1. make it difficult to recover because we would not be able
to locate it or .2. change how its position is, so data before and
after the movement could not be compared. there are many other aspects
that i will not cover here.

we noticed this and mr romsos and myself made a rapid decision about
where we needed to adjust our survey in order to make sure we had
enough bathymetric/sub-surface information to consider an alternate
site.

also, the Cascadia Initiative is the main reason we are at sea. so,
here is a link to the website that covers the workshop i attended
where we developed the plan to deploy these OBSs.
http://www.oceanleadership.org/2010/nsf-cascadia-initiative-workshop/

there is a final report that summarizes the workshop here:
http://www.oceanleadership.org/wp-content/uploads/2010/05/CI_Workshop-Report_Final.pdf

and finally, here are the guidelines we are using to site the OBSs:
http://www.oceanleadership.org/wp-content/uploads/2010/05/Guidelines_for_Cascadia_OBS_Deployments_v2.pdf