Mission:Ecosystem Monitoring Survey Date: 6/19/2013 Geographical area of cruise: The continental shelf from north of Cape Hatteras, NC, including Georges Bank and the Gulf of Maine, to the Nova Scotia Shelf
Weather Data from the Bridge: Latitude/longitude: 3853.256 N, 7356.669W
Temperature: 18.6ºC
Barometer: 1014.67 mb
Speed: 9.7 knots
CTD reading on the computer. Blue is density, red is salinity, green is temperature and black indicates the depth.
Science and Technology Log:
Even before the plankton samples are brought onboard, scientists start recording many types of data when the equipment is launched. The bongos are fitted with an electronic CTD (conductivity, temperature and density) and as they are lowered into the ocean the temperature, density and salinity (salt content) are recorded on a computer. This helps scientists with habitat modeling and determining the causes for changes in the zooplankton communities. Each bongo net also has a flow-through meter which records how much water is moving through the net during the launch and can is used to estimate the number of plankton found in one cubic meter of water.
Zooplankton (Z) and Icthyoplankton (I) samples.
The plankton collected from the two bongo nets are separated into two main samples that will be tested for zooplankton and icthyoplankton (fish larvae and eggs). These get stored in a glass jars with either ethanol or formalin to preserve them. The formalin samples are sent to a lab in Poland for counting and identification. Formalin is good for preserving the shape of the organism, makes for easy identification, and is not flammable, so it can be sent abroad. However, formalin destroys the genetics (DNA) of the organisms, which is why ethanol is used with some of the samples and these are tested at the NOAA lab in Narragansett, Rhode Island.
Holding one of our zooplankton samples – photo by Paula Rychtar.
When the samples are returned from Poland, the icthyoplankton samples are used by scientists to determine changes in the abundance of the different fish species. Whereas, the zooplankton samples are often used in studies on climate change. Scientists have found from current and historic research (over a span of about 40 years) that there are changes in the distribution of different species and increases in temperature of the ocean water.
At the Rosette stations we take nutrient samples from the different water depths. They are testing for nitrates, phosphates and silicates. Nutrient samples are an important indicator of zooplankton productivity. These nutrients get used up quickly near the surface by phytoplankton during the process of photosynthesis (remember phytoplankton are at the base of the food chain and are producers). As the nutrients pass through the food chain (zooplankton eating phytoplankton and then on up the chain) they are returned to the deeper areas by the oxidation of the sinking organic matter. Therefore, as you go deeper into the ocean these nutrients tend to build up. The Rosettes also have a CTD attached to record conductivity, temperature and density at the different depths.
Scientist, Chris Taylor, completing the dissolved inorganic carbon test.The dissolved inorganic carbon test uses chemicals to stop any further biological processes and suspend the CO2 in “time”.
Another test that is conducted on the Rosettes is for the amount of dissolved inorganic carbon. This test is an indicator of the amount of carbon dioxide that the ocean uptakes from outside sources (such as cars, factories or other man-made sources). Scientists want to know how atmospheric carbon is affecting ocean chemistry and marine ecosystems and changing the PH (acids and bases) of the ocean water. One thing they are interested in is how this may be affecting the formation of calcium in marine organisms such as clams, oysters, and coral.
New word: oxidation – the chemical combination of a substance with oxygen.
Cape Cod canal.
Personal Log:
This week we headed back south and went through the Cape Cod canal outside of Plymouth, Massachusetts. I had to get up a little earlier to see it, but it was well worth it. The area is beautiful and there were many small boats and people enjoying the great weather.
Small boat bringing in a new group to the Gordon Gunter.
We also did a small boat transfer to bring five new people onboard, while three others left at the same time. It was hard to say goodbye, but it will be nice to get to know all the new faces.
Common Dolphins swimming next to the Gordon Gunter.
So now that we are heading south the weather is warming up. I have been told that we may start seeing Loggerhead turtles as the waters warm up – that would be so cool. We had a visit by another group of Common Dolphins the other day. They were swimming along the side of the ship and then went up to the bow. They are just so fun to watch and photograph.
We have been seeing a lot of balloons (mylar and rubber) on the ocean surface. These are released into the air by people, often on cruise ships, and then land on the surface. Sea turtles, dolphins, whales and sea birds often mistake these for jelly fish and eat them. They can choke on the balloons or get tangled in the string, frequently leading to death. Today, we actually saw more balloons than sea birds!!! A good rule is to never release balloons into the air no matter where you live!
A mylar balloon seen in the water by our ship.
Did you know? A humpback whale will eat about 5000 pounds of krill in a day. While a blue whale eats about 8000 pounds of krill daily.
Question of the day? If 1000 krill = 2 pounds, then together how many krill does a humpback and blue whale consume on a daily basis.
NOAA Teacher at Sea Beverly Owens Aboard NOAA Ship Henry B. Bigelow June 10 – 24, 2013
Mission: Deep-Sea Corals and Benthic Habitat: Ground-Truthing and Exploration in Deepwater Canyons off the Northeastern Coast of the U.S. Geographical Area: Western North Atlantic Date: June 17, 2013
Weather Data from the Bridge:
Air temperature: 17.60 oC (63.68 oF)
Wind Speed: 13.41knots (15.43mph)
Water Depth of current dive: approximately 1800 m (5905 ft)
Science and Technology Log
I have been amazed in watching the Science Crew (scientists and TowCam engineers) operate this week. With any challenge that is presented, they work as a team to make minor adjustments, troubleshoot, and correct any issues that may arise. That got me thinking…what skills or characteristics are important in becoming an engineer or a scientist?
I surveyed the Science Crew, and based on their responses, have developed a list of skills important for scientists and engineers:
Have a positive attitude.
Be an excellent student. Learn to think independently.
Be a good writer.
Communicate well with others.
Develop analytical thinking skills.
Volunteer or become familiar with resources, like labs, museums, or other scientific institutions.
Develop strong math skills.
Develop computer skills or computer programming skills.
Perseverance: If you make a mistake you can’t get down about it. You have to pick yourself up and try again.
Curiosity: If you are curious, you’ll be passionate about what you’re studying, and will be able to communicate that to others. If you’re passionate, you will persevere and work through the challenges.
Personal Log
During my Teacher at Sea experience, I have had the opportunity to observe the Science Crew during many different activities. Below are some skills or characteristics that I have seen exhibited by the scientists and engineers involved in this research expedition.
Work as a team.
Cooperate: Get along with others.
Be tenacious and persevere; be steadfast, never give up.
Look at things from different perspectives; think “outside of the box.”
Listen to and respect other people’s ideas.
Focus on the task at hand.
Think things through before jumping in.
Come up with hypotheses or solutions and test them. If the solution doesn’t work, try another one.
As science teachers, we try to instill these traits in our students in the classroom. Whether it is completing a group project, conducting a lab, or taking notes, there is always opportunity to improve our science and engineering skills.
Did You Know?
One feature of the deep ocean is that this region of ocean is subject to very high pressure due to the tremendous weight of the water above. So, how about a demonstration?
Take one Styrofoam cup, decorate it, and send it over a mile deep in the ocean. What happens to the Styrofoam cup?
It shrinks! Why? Pressure in the ocean increases about 1 atmosphere for every 10 m increase in depth. The increased pressure compresses the air inside the Styrofoam, and the cup condenses. It’s the same reason why your ears start “popping” when you drive to an area of higher elevation, like the mountains, or fly in an airplane. In that case, increase in altitude means a decrease in pressure
Increased pressure at the bottom of the ocean caused the Styrofoam cup to shrink.
Geographical area of cruise: Southeast Alaska, including Chatham Strait and Behm Canal, with a Gulf of Alaska transit westward to Kodiak
Log date: June 14, 2013
Weather conditions at port: 19.08⁰C, scattered cumulus clouds with little vertical extent against bright blue skies, 43.05% relative humidity, 1017.36 mb of atmospheric pressure, wind speed of 9.5 knots with a heading of 79⁰
A panoramic view of the Port of Juneau with a cruise ship beginning its exit of Gastineau Channel
Explorer’s Log: Mendenhall Glacier
Flying across the North American continent at an altitude of 34,000 feet is an experience somewhere between looking down upon a held globe and walking across the terrain. Maybe that’s too obvious a sentence for starting this second blog entry, but the fact of that obviousness is the necessary beginning, I think.
As we walked the few miles through Tongass National Forest and across or around several mountains along the West Trail to Mendenhall Glacier, Ensign Steven Wall and I followed piled stone trail markers called cairns.
Crossing the skies above the glaciers of western Canada and eastern Alaska, I was overwhelmed by the sheer majesty of the sights below me. Stretching from one horizon to the other, mile after seemingly endless mile of nearly blinding albedo from frozen water reflecting the sunlight of the approaching solstice at the nearly-Arctic latitude, interrupted only occasionally by jutting dark crags of towering mountains with just enough warmth or slope to slough the otherwise boundless field of snow, and dotted here and there by impossibly sapphire pools of today’s meltwaters. Eons of valleys carved by the almost imperceptibly unhurried slog of ice advancing under the magnitude of its own weight. Cascades of energy waiting, breathing, crawling, leashed only by the chilly bonds of molecular attraction below a certain thermal mark. But the hiker in me instantly feels a frostbitten ache in the ankles and knees just from peering downward at the tremendous glaciers from the warmth of the airplane cabin, entirely based on the mere consideration of just one day’s walk across the frozen sheet, thousands of frigid footfalls constituting a single-digit of traversed miles, at best. Truly, the glaciers are awesome when seen from an airplane.
These ice formations are at the leading face of Mendenhall Glacier as it slowly creeps along and melts into the lake and river below. Even though they seem small, the rocks beneath the ice are more than twenty-five feet high above the water line in this picture! About an hour after I took this photograph, a chunk of ice calved away from the glacier, making an explosive sound that could be heard for miles.
On a globe in my classroom, though, those magnificent glaciers are mere splotches of white and maybe a bit of texture for the fingertips, an entirely different paradigm, to be sure. Accurate, proportional, and contextually appropriate on a cardboard sphere that must display the major surface features of an entire planet. Excellent for showing young people comparative and relative size and location in order to launch discussions about geography, tectonics, Earth’s axial tilt, or the water cycle, but not likely to send shivers through the imaginations of the young students whose travels more often are flights of fancy rather than physical treks to distant lands.
This was our first close-up view of Mendenhall Glacier. The “ramp” of ice that you see on the right is more than one hundred feet high.
The point of this comparison? A study in perspective.
Where a biologist sees a species of tree (or maybe a whole ecosystem), a painter sees verticality or varieties of green, and a carpenter sees a cabinet. Importantly, all three observers are valid, correct, and good in their perspectives. Perhaps more importantly, not one of those perspectives has to be deemed wrong just so that the others can be right at the same moment. Likewise, the globe and the look-down from the airplane both are meaningful in providing totally different perspectives on the same glaciers.
Pressure, temperature, and friction work together to carve holes and caves in glaciers, some of which are big enough to walk through… with safety gear, of course!
Therefore, I was overjoyed to hear on my first morning after boarding Rainier a bit of enthusiastic encouragement (and a quick primer on how to use a can of bear spray!) from the ship’s XO, Holly Jablonski, insisting that Ensign Steven Wall and I should spend the day actually exploring Mendenhall Glacier above the Tongass National Forest, just outside the Juneau city limits. With snacks and drinks in hand, Ensign Wall and I were dropped at the head of the West Trail, where we hiked through a few miles of verdant evergreens and mosses, over and around a few mountains, and up a rock face before arriving at the toe of Mendenhall Glacier. Abruptly, here in front of me was a rippled wall of ice with folds so large that singular words of description are insufficient to capture their enormity. What had appeared from miles across the meltwater lake to be small chunks of ice at the face of the glacier now were towers more than 140 feet tall, and yet their backdrop still showed them to be relatively tiny. In the river below were chunks of floating ice that had fallen forward from the glacier’s leading edge, seemingly just a few feet wide… until I saw kayaks completely dwarfed next to them like flies next to football stadiums.
If you look closely, you’ll see that the black specks on the lake are kayaks, which will give you some idea of the size of the “small” icebergs adrift in the water below Mendenhall Glacier.What appears to be a small crack really is a crevasse more than twenty feet deep, and its small drainage cave continues downward for more than 150 feet to the lake below the glacier.
Indeed, the ice was cold, but the feelings at the front of my thoughts were more about size and power, awe and beauty. Nothing in my previous education had prepared me for my sudden inability to appreciate the magnitude of the behemoth. Crawling through caves of ice and walking on the surface of the ice was both spiritually overwhelming, as I joined something so much larger in size and time than any human experience, and also tremendously frightening, as the sound of every creak and every drip striking a floor hundreds of feet below the edges of the hole served as a reminder of my fragility at the hands of such forces.
Next, though, I surprisingly was struck by exactly the opposite of the feeling that I had expected: Rather than feeling the tremendous difference between the frozen landscape in front of me and the 90-plus Fahrenheit degrees that I left before dawn just one day earlier in Florida, I was moved instead by an overwhelming sense of unity, sort of a bridge between the airplane view and the globe view about glaciers that already had passed through my mind. I couldn’t escape the connection between this mountainous ice sheet and the swampy lowlands where I live thousands of miles to the southeast, because ultimately it is the existence of this frozen ocean atop the mountains of Alaska (and its neighboring icecap, extending toward the planet’s pole) that leaves the great liquid oceans of Earth at a lower level, thus exposing the small peninsula of Florida that I call home at the far other corner of the continent. And then I saw everything around me differently: The flowing ice around the peaks looks very much like the wind-blown sands at the beginnings of beach dunes, the small deltas in the mud from the trickles of meltwater are shaped identically to the much larger region surrounding the Suwannee River as it crashes into the Gulf of Mexico, and the wetland grasses miles below the glacier are nearly twins of the salty marshes near Florida’s Intercoastal waterway. While very different, also quite the same in many ways.
A delta is formed when running water meets the friction of an obstacle in its path (often a larger body of water) and spills leftward and rightward of its banks, making a triangular shape (like the shape of the Greek letter delta) in the nearby land when seen from above. This tiny delta is at the end of a rivulet at the base of Mendenhall Glacier, but it has the same basic form as larger river deltas all over the world.
As my students and friends hear me say so often, we are the sum of our stories, and every story is interesting if told from a meaningful or exciting perspective.
If I simply had described the past few days of my life as a series of long and uneventful flights followed by a walk among some trees and ice chunks, it wouldn’t have been untrue; it just would have been less interesting. We all know that the best stories often come from places of familiarity, but spun with unfamiliar points of view. During the next three weeks, I look forward to hearing and sharing ideas and insights with scientists, mariners, stewards, and technicians aboard Rainier as together we explore the same scenery along the waterways of Alaska, but from our own different perspectives… and then sharing those stories with you here.
By finding the ice features along the left wall of this picture on other photos in this blog may give you some additional perspective about the tremendous size of Mendenhall Glacier, as here you can see a group of hikers along the edge of a meltwater stream.
In our hurried world of expediency, cell phones, and paved highways, perhaps we too often put on blinders to see our travels from only one frame of reference. As you walk your own paths, I challenge you – as I again challenge myself – to look at each new thing in several ways before closing any doors of possibility or windows of perspective. Keep exploring, my friends.
Explorer’s Supplemental Log: Juneau, Alaska
The native Tlingit people carve and paint totem poles and other images to tell stories, record events, and celebrate or worship. Central to their totemic imagery is the great raven, a powerful bird of the local skies. The items in this photograph are at the entry to Village Drive, where many members of the Tlingit Tribe still live just a few blocks from the water in downtown Juneau.
Before my excursion to Mendenhall Glacier, I first was taken to the ship port in Juneau, where NOAA Ship Rainier has been at port for two weeks. Despite the late hour of my arrival, the sun at this northern latitude so near the beginning of summer remained far above the horizon, and so I decided to explore the local city on foot.
Many colorful flowers bloom in the warming air in and around Juneau as summer approaches.
Juneau, the Alaskan state capital, is nestled among several evergreen-rich yet white-capped mountains on both banks of the mighty Gastineau Channel, which carries its glacial headwaters eventually to the distant Gulf of Alaska in the North Pacific Ocean. While Juneau has served as host for my shipmates during their hours of liberty in the past several days, the city traces its history both to the discovery of gold in the nearby mountains and waters and to the native Tlingit people who moved from nearby Auke Bay. During the past century and a half, those beginnings have laid a strong foundation for commercial ventures in mining, exploration, and government alongside a rich cultural heritage that still is seen in the stories told by the totem poles at the entry to Village Drive. Further, those roots have since grown as other visitors and new residents have brought their own religions, cultures, and curiosities, resulting in a small and beautiful city of varied flavors and voices, a city whose shopkeepers, fisherman, sailors, citizens, and guests mingle their perspectives into a lovely harmony with those of the soaring eagles, boisterous ravens, playful otters, and hungry gulls.
Downtown Juneau has many beautiful older buildings, like this one, which houses the movie theater (a favorite evening site for ship crews ashore).Senators represent their home districts as they debate, negotiate, and legislate in the Alaska Senate Chambers in the state capital city of Juneau.This is the oldest Russian Orthodox church in North America, constructed in the 1800’s to educate and convert the local Tlingit people.
Did you know?
Like other living things, languages grow, ingesting new ideas and experiences, and then converting them into written or spoken symbols called words. The study of vocabulary often reveals another important lesson in perspective, as word roots give us clues about how the inventors of those words saw the items and events in their own worldviews.
For example, a glacier is an enormous sheet of ice, but the etymological root of that word is the same root that underlies glass (which looks like ice in its nearly-clear, fragile, appearance of solidity) and glaze (which means to coat or polish a surface so that it appears to be covered in ice, a metaphor that is extended into frosting and icing on cakes). And in many European countries, you can order a frozen treat by asking for a glacé. Also, when a frozen chunk of the leading face of a glacier breaks free of the main body of the glacier, the event is called a calving, as the inventor of that term in that context must have seen the many ways that the event is like the birthing of a smaller baby cow from its much larger mother.
(By the way, calved chunks of glaciers that fall into bodies of liquid water don’t sink, but rather they float to become icebergs. Most substances become denser when they freeze from liquids into solids, but water is unusual. The buoyancy of water ice – which you’ve experienced on a small scale every time that you see ice cubes floating in a glass of drinking water – is caused by the greater density of liquid water compared to the lesser density of frozen water, as electrochemical forces lock water molecules into a more spread-out lattice during the freezing process than those same molecules experience as they flow more closely around one another in the liquid state.)
NOAA Teacher at Sea Marla Crouch Aboard NOAA Ship Oscar Dyson June 8 – 26, 2013
Mission: Pollock Survey Geographical area of cruise: Gulf of Alaska Date: June 14, 2013
Weather Data from the Bridge: as of 1900
Wind Speed 9.57 kts
Air Temperature 6.84°C
Relative Humidity 81.00%
Barometric Pressure 1,030.5 mb
Latitude: 53.52N Longitude: 166.34W
Science and Technology Log
The sonar on the Oscar Dyson recently created the graph below. The graph displays the sea floor, the red, yellow, and green bands toward the bottom and along the top a few meters from the surface the layer of green and red, is the mystery.
Graphic provided by NOAA
The echoes, that create the graph do not look like fish. The scientists recognize that something is there, the questions is, what? Further exploration is done, but nothing definitive is found. This creates a bit of a dilemma, which initiates a whole series of conversations about trouble shooting the equipment, using different data gathering techniques (something different than a trawl), and hypothesizing about what is creating the image since there are no apparent biology. Could the image be created by something physical in the water? Until the make-up of the image can be identified the sonar signature, is titled and recorded as Mystery Mix One.
Taina Honkalehto, one of the scientists on this cruise, tells me that they have been encountering Mystery Mix One for a number of years here, in the Gulf of Alaska, and in different parts of the ocean at different times of the year. Mystery Mixes Two and Three are floating around as well.
Investigating Mystery Mix One: Time stamp 12 June 2013, 050952 GMT (This time stamp equates to 8:09 almost 8:10 p.m. June 11, 2013 PDT.)
The stereo camera, which I talked about in my last blog, is a new piece of equipment that scientists are using to collect data about the ocean floor and the biology of the region. The stereo camera was launched and submerged to a depth of 50m into the middle of Mystery Mix One, and left at that depth for 30 minutes while the Oscar Dyson drifted with the mix. When the pictures were downloaded, the only identifiable objects were copepods, big copepods. Remember “big” is a relative term, big compared to what? Copepods can be smaller than 1 mm in length. These big copepods are probably 6 to 8 mm.
The light image in the upper left-hand corner is a copepod. Picture provided by NOAAThis is a clearer picture of a copepod. Picture courtesy of comenius.susqu.edu
The strong sonar image created by the copepods heighten the mystery; starting another round of questions and discussions by the scientists. Why are copepods creating such a strong sonar signature? Why are the copepods so prominent on 18 kHz? (18 kHz is a low frequency that usually captures echoes from large objects, while small things like copepods would be seen at higher frequencies, like 200 kHz.) Could something else be in Mystery Mix One, something that was not seen by the camera? The discussion goes on creating a working hypothesis; the signature is being created by a combination of the copepods themselves, whatever they are feeding on and gases, being produced. Not all the scientists are in agreement. If Mystery Mix One was to be sampled again, would you get similar results?
Pictures from the stereo camera provided one piece of possible evidence that may lead to answering the question, “What is in Mystery Mix One?”
The next day another piece of possible evidence is added. OscarDyson’s sea water intake filter is cleaned and what is found? Krill and big copepods. Pictures are taken and the evidence is recorded in the scientists’ journal. More evidence needs to be collected, but advances are being made to identify Mystery Mix One.
Krill are in the red ringed filter. Copepods can be seen at the bottom of the bucket.
Personal Log
The first few days out at sea the waters were really calm, 1 to 3 foot swells or seas, which feels like the soothing glide of a rocking chair. Now however, weather is moving in; wind speed is up around 15kts and the swells are about 9 ft. Friday’s forecast is for 30kt winds and 12ft. seas. Looking at the big picture, 9 to 12 foot seas are not very big. But, walking around the ship with seas of that height requires due diligent to safely navigate the passage ways and steep stairs. And you definitely need to mind the doors, make sure the door is securely latched and when opening hold on tight, as you don’t want the door to get away from you. Somebody might be standing on the other side. Another activity that can prove challenging is getting into and out of your bunk.
The berths, or rooms, aboard ship are, for the most part, designed for two people. Look at the picture of my berth. You can see a desk, chair, dresser and two draped bunk beds. Mine’s the top bunk. Our room is just about even with the water line. That is important to know, because the lower you are in the ship the less dramatic the motion. I’ll talk about the pitch and roll of the ship in a future blog
This is my berth.
Now imagine yourself lying on a teeter totter. You are right above the fulcrum, so you are nice and level. An unbalanced force is now affecting your teeter totter, your feet go up your head goes down and you slide a little. Then there is a change and you head goes up your feet go down and you slide back. This back and forth motion is continuous, and the motion presses you into the teeter totter. I call this the sloshing phenomena, because all the while you are teeter tottering you hear the sea water rushing pass the hull. But wait, there is more. Your teeter totter only moves in two dimensions, but we live in three dimensions. Keep your teeter totter going, up and down, hear the water stream by and add a sideways roll, back and forth. Don’t fall off your teeter totter. You are not quite ready to surf your berth yet, sometimes the up and down, and side to side movements occur so quickly that you actually loose contact with your teeter totter. Now you’re surfing! I have yet to find the seat belt for my bunk.
Remember I said that my berth was low in the ship, there are only a few berths on this level, and more berths are two and three floors above me. Now think about a metronome. If you’re not sure what a metronome is think about a windshield wiper on a car. Both the metronome and the windshield wiper make small movements at the pivot point or fulcrum; the further away from the fulcrum the greater the range of motion. Think about how the motion is magnified as you move up from the water line. Those folks above me are really surfing.
Did You Know?
When Taina and I were talking about Mystery Mix One she said the 18 kHz frequency ensonifying the larger fish. I think ensonify is a cool word. I wonder if Mrs. Sunmark or Mrs. Delpez (our school’s band and orchestra teachers) have used the word ensonify in their classes? Can any of you tell me what ensonify means?
Did you know you can follow my voyage on NOAA’s ship tracker website? Here is the link.
NOAA Teacher at Sea Eric Velarde Aboard R/V Hugh R. Sharp Wednesday, June 13, 2013 – Monday, June 24, 2013
Mission: Sea Scallop Survey Geographical Area: Cape May – Cape Hatteras Date: June 13, 2013
Weather Data from Bridge Latitude: 38°47.3002 N
Longitude: 75°09.6813 W
Atmospheric Pressure: 30.5in (1032.84mb)
Wind Speed: 14.5 Knots (16.68mph)
Humidity: 70%
Air Temperature: 19.2°C (66.6°F)
Surface Seawater Temperature: 19°C (66.2°F)
Bridge Weather Data Collection
Science & Technology Log
Cleaning, stabilizing, and testing the Habitat Mapping Camera System, or HabCam V4 was the focus of work on June 13, 2013. This work was done to ensure that all image collection & processing during the Sea Scallop Survey proceeds without any technical mishaps. Following cleaning, the HabCam V4 fiber optic cable needed to be stabilized to minimize vibrational interference using an ingenious combination of copious amounts of galvanized electrical tape & zip-ties. Once the HabCam V4 fiber optics cable was properly stabilized, the vessel set out to sea to conduct preliminary testing to ensure that all systems were operating properly.
Stabilizing the HabCam V4 Fiber Optic Cable
What distinguishes the HabCam V4 from other HabCam systems is that the HabCam V4 records Stereo-Optic images (3D images) using 2 cameras in order to give an unprecedented view of the ocean floor organisms and their habitat substrate in the highest image quality available. In addition, the HabCam V4 also possesses a side scan acoustics system, which allows the HabCam V4 Pilot (AKA, “Flyer”) to visualize the sea floor using Sonar technology. Visualizing the sea floor using Sonar allows for more precise HabCam V4 flying so that the HabCam V4 is kept at a safe distance from the sea floor, which is contoured similarly to Earth’s continents.
HabCam V4 Pilot Interface
Flying the HabCam V4 requires tremendous amounts of teamwork, as there are several operations that must occur simultaneously to ensure seamless HabCam V4 winch operation, data retrieval & image annotation. The Pilot is stationed behind a 5 screen interface where the following information is received: fiber optics cable feed & receival (smaller, upper left screen), loading deck real-time camera feed (upper left screen), Sonar visualization (upper right screen), altimeter/fathometer data (lower left screen), and HabCam V4 real-time image feed (lower right screen). The HabCam V4 is controlled in the Dry Lab by the Pilot who uses the interface to determine how much of the fiber optics cable is needed to be fed or received so that the HabCam V4 remains at a safe distance from the sea floor. A winch operator is stationed on the loading deck to assist in managing fiber optics cable feed & retrieval. In addition to piloting and winch operation, a co-pilot works at a 2 screen interface to monitor the movement of the HabCam V4 relative to the vessels motion, as well as annotate the incoming images in real time so that observed organisms can be categorized, flagged, and timestamped.
Vic & Amber Piloting/Co-Piloting HabCamV4 in Dry Lab
Due to incoming severe weather & HabCam V4 data retrieval complications, the vessel had to return to port in Lewes, DE to ensure the safety of all crew members & scientific technology. The vessel is set to return to sea once the seas have calmed down and when the HabCam V4 is at its full operational capacity.
Incoming Severe Weather
Personal Log
This experience seems like a living dream. Flying from Raleigh-Durham International Airport into Philadelphia International Airport was a breathtaking flight. The clouds were wispy, full, and complex. My mind was filled with anxious anticipation, and perhaps quixotic wonder & awe. As the plane descended, I was still wandering in the clouds in my mind. Even the drive from Philadelphia to my hotel in Rehoboth, Delaware where I spent the night before boarding the vessel seemed to be filled with restless excitement.
Philadelphia Clouds
I’ve been working hard to become well acquainted with everyone and everything on board. This has already become a life changing experience for me. I have never had the opportunity to eat, sleep, and work in such an immersive scientific environment until this experience. Being in such close proximity to other scientific minds is very fulfilling, providing transcendental feelings of scientific curiosity, sincerity, and beauty. My natural tendency to introvert has begun to fade and I cannot stop the feeling of wanting to contribute as much as possible to the successful operation of the vessel and our mission.
R/V Hugh R Sharp Stern View
Mindfulness, teamwork ethic, and lightheartedness are shared integral parts of everyones personality and are key features of the personified identity of the R/V Hugh R Sharp. Teamwork is contagious aboard this vessel, and it is simply the most wonderful scientific feeling I have had in a long time. One of the unique relationships that I have made is with La’Shaun Willis, a ’98 graduate of Bennett College. Never had I imagined that I would have the opportunity to work with a Bennett Belle on this cruise. She makes me feel at home. I cannot wait to share this relationship with my students, faculty, and our higher education partner, Bennett College.
La’Shaun Willis, NOAA Museum Specialist
In addition to interacting with the scientific team while completing dredge tow sorting & HabCam V4 operation, I plan on developing an understanding of the operation of the vessel itself through the engineering team. The engineers operate behind the scenes and provide an invaluable resource, the full functioning of the vessel itself. I am extremely interested in how, specifically, the vessel navigates through the seas, how waste and water are managed, and the logistics that are behind the planning of this tremendous voyage.
Engineering Team & HabCam V4
The weather has been improving and I feel that the best has yet to come. I cannot wait.
-Mr. V
Did You Know?
The HabCam V4 takes up to 10 images per second, which are stitched together to create a mosaic image, allowing for the visualization of a larger area than a single image could offer.
