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Woot woot! Only a few more days till we see land. As much as we want to see land, we’re still enjoying our last few moments on good ole R/V Armstrong. Today was pretty action-packed! One of the first things we did was learn about ocean exploration, in particular, Doc’s Windows to the Deep expedition on the deep part of the Charleston bump. We watched a plethora of marine life video clips that they took on the voyage including funky brittle stars!
My favorite part of today was following the crew on firefighting and safety drills. It may not sound exciting but watching people try on firefighting gear was pretty hilarious (see photo of Professor Laurel below). Part of the drills included practicing how to send out (expired) flares. After the mates showed us how to send out handheld and air flares, several of the STEMSEAS students got to fire their own red flares (under close supervision), including me! I was pretty scared at first, but I found that the burning red flares were actually beautiful. Lastly, the crew demonstrated spraying the fire hose off the back of the ship, which gushed out tons of water for firefighting. I’ve always seen how firefighting was done, but never got to experience a small part of it myself. Fun fact: the captain said that firefighting on a ship is totally different from firefighting on a boat due to the balance of water needed to put out flames/keep out water from sinking.
After all the drills, we deployed an XBT instrument (eXpendable BathyThermograph), which measures temperature as it falls through the water. This instrument is similar to the CTD that we launched earlier because that instrument also measured temperature, salinity, etc. of the ocean. One last noteworthy activity we did today was led by fellow STEMSEAS students Baylee and Isabel on a computer-based biointeractive module on Understanding Global Change. They taught us how to use this fun interactive program in order to explain a particular system on earth such as coral bleaching and glaciation. We used nodes and arrows to express how particular pieces of a process are interconnected and related. Our busy schedule today made our STEMSEAS experience even more memorable. Personally, I have thoroughly enjoyed learning about the ship experience alongside all the science we have already learned. Hopefully, more thrilling events are in store for us on our last few days on the ship and on Iceland!
-Mylene Gonzales, College of Charleston
