Thursday, May 31, 2007

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

Tuesday, May 29, 2007

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

Monday, May 28, 2007

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

Saturday, May 26, 2007

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

Friday, May 25, 2007

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

Thursday, May 24, 2007

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

Wednesday, May 23, 2007

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 -------------

Tuesday, May 22, 2007

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

Sunday, May 20, 2007

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

Saturday, May 19, 2007

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

Tuesday, May 8, 2007

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