by Life at sea begins pretty early aboard the R/V Roger Revelle. My alarm goes off at 6:15am; it’s time to wash my face, brush my teeth and arrange my mess of a hairdo. I stumble through the hallway grasping the sidewalls as the boat sways back and forth, taking my feet from me and giving me wobble-legs. My boots bang and clang on the metal floor. Sounds reverberate everywhere aboard the Revelle. While I sleep, it’s the slamming of waves against the side walls, on-deck, it’s the swoosh as wind roars past my ears and walking around my quarters, it’s the Star Trek-like “ping” made from the sonar emitting Multi-beam under the ship. The Multi-beam maps the sea floor with waves of sonar, displaying a three-dimensional image of the 3-mile wide track directly below the boat.
For my 8am shift my task was to monitor the Multi-beam data as well as log the inputs received from the magnetometer that we launched yesterday. The Magnetometer is designed to read the magnetic signature embedded into the basalt as it was created on the sea floor. We are monitoring anomalies that present themselves in the form of high or low shifts in the magnetic signatures of the rock, this would indicate a change in the polarity of the planet. Watching the monitors and logging the data feels slow at times, my coffee hadn’t kicked in yet. But everything changes as a 3,000-foot sea mount rises from the abyssal plain and dominates the oceanic topography. Bright colors of orange and yellow show the relief differences between the mount and the royal blue sea floor on the sonar display. These underwater features are absent from the GPS charts displayed by the NobelTec systems.Is our team seeing something new, something previously undiscovered?
Our tasks today prepared us for the real adventure tomorrow of retrieving the MT instruments from the sea floor along the Mendocino fracture zone, 600 km off the California coast. Our 12-hour instrument recovery shifts begin early tomorrow. At 4:30am we will be in position to send an acoustic release signal to the MT instrument on the bottom of the ocean floor. From there it will begin its 3-hour accent to the surface, be captured by our team and then dismantled for later data extraction. As of now its been a fairly calm expedition; no one’s fallen overboard, no one’s lost an eye…but the voyage is still young. I’m anxious to get dirty and ready to get wet. Tomorrow begins early again and this researcher needs his sleep.
-Gabriel Perez
