Danparktica

Dear Readers,

2007-03-16T02:03:00.000-07:00

Tomorrow we dock at Fremantle, Australia, and the day after that I fly to Los Angeles where crazy things await me. In late March/early April, I’ll make a brief side trip to Cambridge to pick up some stuff and then I’ll return to LA where crazy things await me.

I guess I’ll make just a few more posts before I close Danparktica forever... this here will be my last “serious” or “substantial” post containing some last thoughts on global warming. I’ll also clarify the relationship between what goes on this boat and the larger picture. And I promise I’m feeling a bit more optimistic today... Then later I’ll have one last post about a dream I had about a pod-robot named RSR-5. That one is a sad story... but sort of funny in a way too. Then that’s it, I promise! Sorry if this blog has gotten heavy or boring lately, but I guess it’s mostly what I’ve been thinking about these days. Can’t wait for some Starbucks.

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MY LAST SERIOUSLY OPTIMISTIC POST:
A few days ago, I had a conversation with my bunkmate Dave, who, just for the record, is a very intelligent and friendly dude with piercing blue eyes. Ladies, he is also an optimist. Anyway, our discussion looped around and around: we both agreed that overpopulation was probably a big part of the problem, and any proposed solutions were distant and difficult and brought up myriad other problems. But Dave brought up an interesting point: for all this talk about global warming, for all you hear about “saving the planet” or “preserving biodiversity”... in the end, that’s not what people care about. Short of blasting the thing to bits with bombs or whatever, the issue at hand is not about saving the Earth. It’s about humans... it’s about saving lives.

Some skeptics will speak about how the world has frequently gone through huge swings in climate and cite that as reason not to worry... they’re right in one sense: through the geological history of the earth, there have been even larger climate swings than anything we are seeing now. But to then conclude that there is no reason to worry is nonsense: for one, there is no clear evidence that mankind would survive a severe change in climate. The past 10 or 12,000 years have been the most stable time climatically in many millennia (relatively)... it is even possible that people could not have developed agriculture without having been granted this boon. Will agriculture still be possible in a changed earth? How many people will diminished food supplies be able to support?

The earth will continue to exist, and it will continue to have land, oceans, a fiery core, whatnot... that is almost assured. Many species of plants and animals may become extinct, and yes I think that stinks, but the Earth, were it conscious, would not care less. The biggest question facing us is: having done what we’ve done, will we even be able to survive? All signs point to an impending warming climate that may yet be tempered by human efforts. One thing you can conclude from the IPCC Working Group I Summary for Policy Makers is that the the intensity and rapidity of the coming change are still up in the air, as seen from the report’s use of several forecasting models for different possible economic states of the world.

Perhaps some of the most heartwarming things I’ve read have come from Ms. Brice’s 8th graders... if I may quote Ms. Brice:
“Many (about 70%) of my students are from immigrant families and have lived in countries with much less than what they have here. The point was readily taken that even though they enjoy the new luxuries, their old life was still a happy one. Most were willing to give up things to help the environment and the community. That is why I love teaching 8th grade, no matter how bad the news is, I walk into a classroom with adolescent 14 year olds and they always give me hope the world will be ok...

“The most insightful comment I heard all day was one student who said: ‘So Dr. Swift says the world is what we make of it, that means we can make it better too.’”

In earlier posts, I’d referred to Jim Swift’s summary of the problem, that in order to correct for overpopulation, social structures will have to become less ‘fair,’ or there will have to be drastic reductions to our ways of life. It may sound to older generations unthinkable to have to get rid of our 2nd or 3rd television set, to eat steak half as often, to commute to work on a bike or train... but an educated younger generation may find it easier to adapt to a changing world.

Back to my earlier conversation with Dave, some of the solutions we came with were birth control—but then you have religions and cultures that specifically deny this option—or huge energy-reduction mandates—but what politician would put this on his platform and still have a chance at winning?—or technological fixes—but all attempts at carbon sequestration and iron fertilization have yet to be proven cost-effective and even heat-efficient, and climate tampering has never before solved more problems than it has created... plus it’s merely a band-aid covering up a still-growing source of greenhouse gases—or the development of clean forms of energy—but it has been determined that solar and wind power simply cannot provide for all of the world’s energy needs as is, and hydrogen power has not proven efficient, nor do western nations seem ready to support cleaner nuclear power in places like Iran—or the continuation of the social structure of energy-rich and energy-poor—but as young idealists we don’t like the thought of there always being a huge gap in quality of life between people of the world... and so on.

The real answer probably lies in some combination of all the above at moderate degrees... some family planning controls, development of some technological solutions, construction of many windmills and solar panels, and social recommendations but not mandates: turn off the lights when you leave the room, switch incandescent bulbs to efficient spiral bulbs, take public transportation... and perhaps mankind’s chance at effecting such moderate but blanket change will require the extra efforts of a younger generation who better understands the world—because the world today is certainly not the world of 1970 or whenever it was that all those old people came from. It’s all about education.

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To be more specific, we need to improve quality of education by enabling more people to learn how to think logically. How many Americans really know what the scientific method is? Most people use it without even blinking; oh, the light’s out? Maybe the fuse is gone, or the bulb is out, or the switch is broken. Check the fuse, nope that’s fine. Replace the bulb, still out? Must be wiring or something else. Etc. Actually I don’t personally know what you’d do then other than call the electrical company, or Dad, but that’s still the basic logical process. Problem, hypothesis, experiment, observation, result.

But how many people approach academic problems with this sort of mindset? Research for a paper is conducted in the same fashion: have a prompt, think about several different methods to approach it, outline or try each out, okay you decide one is the best, continue and write. Or: what’s all this about global warming? Maybe I’ll just read a little bit about it, get some facts, start digesting those facts, decide which is best, then think about the consequences. Ok, so the consequences are scary: what can be done about it? Etc.

The problem is when you have people turning to the easy avenue for answers, such as getting opinions straight from the television... when the true thinker should initially be a skeptic. Even those scientists who support the conclusion that climate change is due to mankind’s influence should still be skeptics at heart; they’ve just been convinced by a preponderance of evidence in one direction. But every new piece of data must be carefully examined, and nothing should be taken for granted.

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On the Revelle, such activity has been going on at full speed for four solid weeks. Data has been gathered nonstop by rotating shifts of scientists and technicians, and has been regularly sent to the beach for examination and use in new models. Being in the field, I’ve come to appreciate this necessary effort—and it is a huge effort—in the context of developing and clarifying ocean and climate models.

The work on the Revelle does not directly have to do with making policy, but it is instead the first step in that process. Better data inform better models which in turn will forecast climate to the benefit of society. Not having this cruise would be akin to losing some pages of a book: reading it, you’d still get the bigger picture, but depending on what those pages were, the meaning of the book could be slightly altered or even greatly changed.

Anyway, it’s been fun, and you’ve just been the first of my outreach victims.

17 Hours to Fremantle

2007-03-16T00:51:00.000-07:00

(By Pien)

The Captain estimates that we will arrive in Fremantle on the morning of the 17th, a full day ahead of schedule. We completed the science program two days ago, ending the day/night shift split, and the dining area has become too crowded to accommodate everyone at once. Jim’s motto “sleep beats eat” has been replaced with the Captain’s “eat it and beat it.” We’ve since become preoccupied with low-stakes poker and a ship-wide game of "Murder,” which was a surprisingly short diversion. In “Murder,” all participants draw cards, and receive a pair of steel nuts. The Queen of Spades goes around “murdering” people by cornering them and demanding their nuts. On a 55-person boat, where you know exactly where everyone else is at any given time, this game moves quickly. Two-thirds of the “villagers” were killed the first day, and the rest were dead by the next afternoon.

It took us the second-to-last shipboard sunset to catch the “green flash.” As the sun sinks past the horizon, the rays are refracted through the atmosphere and separated into colors, as in a prism. One of the last visible wavelengths is green. On a very clear day, the sun as it disappears is replaced for a split second by a flash of green, which is one of the last visible wavelengths. We filmed the sunset from the flying bridge, the highest deck on the boat, but the camera wasn’t sensitive enough to capture the color.

All the guide books are out, and there is much talk of hotels, surfing, flights. 17 hours to Fremantle!!

Dear Mrs Brice's 8th Grade Class

2007-03-14T06:26:00.000-07:00

First of all, I’m no global warming expert! I’m merely relaying information from one source to another, so I’m really happy to see you’re reading and learning about the problem—and quite a bit too, judging from your questions. By now you seem to know more about global warming than I do, so I left it to Chief Scientist Jim Swift and Professor of Oceanography Chris Measures to compose answers for you. I have posted their letters in their entirety as responses to your comment below, found here. I made some very small edits, and I also took the liberty of highlighting some of the more salient points. They are absolutely worth the read, so please check them out.

Jim’s response in particular makes a few striking statements which get at the heart of the climate change issue while also saying something you’ll never hear from a politician: the real problem is overpopulation. I’ll quote the relevant paragraph here:

If you lived in a poor village in some far-away land, would you like to live as we do? If each of the planet's citizens used same amount of energy daily that underlies the lives of each of us in the USA (not just the energy we use directly at home, but our part of the sum of all the energy that goes into making what we use), and even if that energy were made via an extremely efficient process that did not involve CO2, all of it eventually gets turned into heat, so the sum over the whole planet of everyone living as we do would warm the planet, CO2 or not CO2. Either (1) there are too many human beings, (2) we need to hugely change our lifestyle (in ways that may be very harsh indeed), or (3) we have to maintain a social structure of energy-users and energy-poor.

It’s not a pretty picture, but it’s probably close to the truth... there are too many humans to support as good a lifestyle as we’d like to bring to everyone. We’re headed toward a crisis which puts hundreds of millions of the world’s poor in great danger—an upcoming report from the IPCC will state some predicted troubles which include severe water shortages and rising sea levels. It seems that the measures necessary to mitigate the long term effects of the disaster (but not avoid, as Mrs. Brice’s 8th grade class noted is probably not possible) will require practically draconian measures... either a drastic reduction in population, a drastic reduction of everybody's energy use, or some combination of the two that would result in an unhappy social structure. It may be too much change to voluntarily accept. I think it boils down to this: Humans are an infinitely competitive species living in a finite world.

This is not to say that there’s nothing that can be done, because there’s still a lot that one person can do. If every single person were to take some steps toward reducing their energy use (that would include eating less meat, using fewer things that require lots of energy to build, etc), that would make a big difference. It wouldn't make "all the difference," but certainly it would be productive. It just would be nice if a feeling of social and environmental responsibility were a valuable evolutionary trait... for example, apparently there’s a cleric in Australia (I won't name which religion since I'm interested in the environmental not political ramifications) who is urging those of his religion to have as many babies as possible so they can “out breed” other religious groups. Such an attitude exhibits dangerous environmental irresponsibility.

1 degree

2007-03-10T03:30:00.000-08:00

Ok, so let’s say you agree with the scientific community and accept that global warming is occurring and is due to anthropogenic (man-made) greenhouse gases. But you might wonder why everyone is so worried about what ultimately amounts to only a few degrees difference. Even the IPCC’s worst-case scenario—rapid global economic growth characterized by intensive use of fossil fuels—leads to rise of global average temperature by only 7 degrees Fahrenheit. Individually a bit uncomfortable, but not a big deal, right? By the way, the IPCC uses Celsius, but I use Fahrenheit, because whatever, I’m American.

Let’s say that instead of rushing headlong off a cliff, the world governments decide that the best course of action would be to save the world, so greenhouse gas emissions are reduced in a best-case scenario... we’d still be looking at between 2 and 4 degrees Fahrenheit change over the next 100 years (if all emissions were to completely cease, the temperature would still rise by about a degree or 2). What would a 1-degree change matter? After all, summer in Boston wouldn’t be much more unbearable at 101 degrees than at 100.

Well, a 1 degree rise leads to a number of gradual changes, including the thermal expansion of water, increased precipitation, acidification of the ocean, and others... but here’s one concrete reason why it matters: a global average change of 1 degree might mean that Boston has a slightly more murderous summer, but more importantly, somewhere in the world, the temperature would rise from, say, 31.5 degrees to 32.5 degrees. And suddenly you have a real problem. The freezing point of water is a threshold temperature in that polar regions could warm 5 degrees and not make a significant difference, but as soon as that boundary is reached, ice starts to melt. And melting ice means more melting ice. The albedo effect refers to sunlight being reflected by ice; the more ice there is, the more light is reflected from the surface, and that cools the earth. This feedback effect works both ways: when ice melts, there’s less ice to reflect sunlight, so warming accelerates, and more ice melts.

A global rise of 1 degree on average actually means a several degree rise in the Arctic, as the Arctic is expected to be most affected by warming. This is due to the climate system. Essentially, the climate is the redistribution of heat around the globe. In Chief Scientist Jim Swift’s own words, “The sun shines, solar energy is taken in more strongly at the equatorial regions, and radiated more strongly in the polar region. And the climate is how the earth solves that puzzle of redistributing heat. Not as opposed to weather—the local manifestation—the climate is the overall big process.”

An example of this heat distribution process is the Gulf Stream, which carries tropical water up and across the Atlantic, where it cools off in the high northern latitudes. By “cooling off” I mean that it dumps a tremendous amount of heat into the Arctic region. There are similar currents and winds all around the world that generally pull heat away from the tropics up to the poles. Well, what some scientists are looking into is whether the “climate puzzle” has multiple solutions. Sophisticated climate models point to multiple solutions that get heat from the equator to the poles, but switching from one circulation pattern to another may be like a step function. Once a stable system is upset enough, it may suddenly and irreversibly shift (“suddenly” in geological time, of course). One fear—still considered “behind-the-scenes” as it is not yet verified—is that we may be headed toward one such point of no return. If changes are gradual, people can gradually adapt. But if a change took place in 10 years that was expected to take place over 1000 years, it could be disastrous. But are we accelerating such a process, or reversing it, or changing it in an unknown way? We just don’t know yet. It’s been said before, but we are undertaking the greatest experiment ever, and we don’t know what we’re doing.

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By the way, The Host is out. It’s a Korean monster film. I was in Seoul at the time of its production, and thanks to a wildly cool family connection I was able to visit the set—a dank sewer under the overpass—when they shot one of the monster sequences. It’s always fun being behind the scenes: the star, Bae Doo-na, was relaxing and drinking coffee while her stunt double repeatedly ran from the camera, spun around, got whacked by a guy in a monster costume, and then got yanked back by an awesome wire contraption. They did that shot like ten times over. I hope that shot made the film... I feel bad for the stunt double. Can’t wait to see the movie! And, curiously enough, NY Times Reviewer Manohla Darghis likens it to An Inconvenient Truth.

Under Pressure

2007-03-10T03:15:00.000-08:00

Here's a fun thing: at 4000 meters below, the pressure is about 400 times the atmospheric pressure at sea level. I used this force wisely.

Before:
And after:

Keeling

2007-03-10T02:52:00.000-08:00

(By Pien Huang)

If the I8S route was mapped antipodally (on the direct opposite side of the world), we would have started south of France at the Bay of Biscayne, steamed for two weeks to the Northwest Territories, sampled parallel to the Hudson Bay, through the Great Lakes and down to Alabama, and out to Bermuda. As it is, we’ve seen nothing but ocean for the past three weeks.

There is less land in general in the southern hemisphere. This has to do with the way the continents drifted apart some 200 million years ago, and it is partly the reason that the Keeling plot looks the way it does. The original Keeling plot was published in 1961, based on measurements taken by Charles Keeling on Mauna Loa. It was the first time anyone had documented the rise of CO2 in the atmosphere, and its revolutionary nature is featured in Al Gore’s /An Inconvenient Truth/. The term “Keeling plot” has since become synonymous with any graph that shows the rise in carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere over recent time. Beyond recording the rise in CO2 levels, this Keeling plot shows that CO2 fluctuates seasonally, and much more so in the northern hemisphere. This is because there is more land, and therefore more plants, in the northern hemisphere. Plants absorb CO2 to photosynthesize, and they release the CO2 when they die in the winter.

Climate change skeptics will try to use this fluctuation against you. They might argue that CO2 levels get higher and lower all the time, and they will point to the fact that we’ve had major ebbs and flows in the atmospheric CO2 content in the geological past (a really, really long time ago). What they won’t do is use exact numbers. You can refute them with the 180-240-370 rule, which they teach you in college: from ice core studies, scientists have determined that the levels of CO2 in the atmosphere have fluctuated between 180 and 240 ppmv (just a measurement label) as far back as we can tell. Our current levels exceed 370 ppmv.^1

It’s not entirely true for me to say we’ve seen nothing but ocean. We’ve seen plenty of birds, mainly albatross, petrels, and sometimes skuas. Tonight there was a squid alert from the winch operator (he sits in a tower outside controlling the wire during equipment launches), which took most of us from the control room out to portside. According to the sea veterans, squids are attracted to the flood lights which illuminate our night-time casts. We leaned overboard, squirting seawater from a hose (the same sea vets say the squids think it might be anchovies). Something white skippered across the waves. It might have been a small squid, but for the while after, every blob we saw disintegrated into seafoam.

Props to JJ Becker, and a shout-out to the school board of San Diego.

^1 Fischer, Gaston. Atmospheric lifetime of carbon dioxide. Population and Environment, 10:3, March 1989.

Public Perception of Science

2007-03-07T05:38:00.000-08:00

I was informed today that, thanks to the power of Google, an 8th grade class is learning from my blog—Hi kiddos, welcome to Danparktica!! ... so if I seem stilted in tone, forgive me; I am afraid. I’m sure I’ve done more than enough irreparable harm. Sorry, kiddos.

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The closer we get to the Equator, the more Internet access we have... so I’ve been doing a little reading up on papers and stuff. As you know, reading leads to thinking, and thinking leads to blogging. Here we go:

What makes us believe what we believe? Do you believe in global warming? Do you believe in God? Well, do you believe in your neighbors? I wouldn’t say that I believe in Gaurav, my former roommate, but I can say with at least 95% certainty that he exists, or did exist. Let’s say I were to find a current phonebook from Tucson, AZ, a place I’ve never been to, and in it I found an entry about an Ernie MacTaggart. Would I be right in believing that such a person existed and lived in Tucson? What if, instead of personally seeing the phonebook, I was separately told by 20 people that they had found similar phonebooks and that each of them had come to the conclusion that Ernie MacTaggart really did exist and that he lived in Arizona? And then what if on top of those 20 accounts, I was then approached by 1 other person who told me that they had seen the phonebook and that they had concluded that no such person existed? What if those people, including the 1 dissenter, all held PhDs as evidence of their competence in gathering and interpreting data? Who would you believe? How much certainty is required of belief?

According to a 2005 survey in a paper by Jon Miller (“Public understanding of, and attitudes toward, scientific research: what we know and what we need to know”), scientific literacy, as defined by knowledge of basic terms and understanding of the nature of scientific inquiry, among Americans is under 20%. I personally wish this number were higher, but it’s also understandable: the average person is busy, so he or she directly or indirectly hires specialists to take care of gathering and interpreting scientific data. For example, by paying your taxes, you assume that the government will provide grants for relevant scientific research. But then you see a statistic like this, found in a 2006 ABC poll: “64% of Americans perceive ‘a lot of disagreement among scientists’” regarding the existence of global warming.

I can say from personal experience that the existence of global warming is not a point of contention among the majority of scientists; it’s rare that you’ll even find anyone on the Revelle even casually mentioning it in conversation. It’s a moot point. One of Al Gore’s favorite statistics—a statistic which is now undisputed—is from Naomi Oreskes’s 2004 paper that found that of 928 reviewed scientific articles, none were in disagreement about the existence of global warming. The IPCC’s Fourth Assessment Report, released in February, is the official document representing the opinion of thousands of leading scientists, as approved by 113 countries before its release, and it reiterates that agreement. Some simplified conclusions from the report (with some of my added notes):
1. Global warming is unequivocal. Temperatures have been rising. Even so-called “GW Skeptics” admit that this is happening.
2. The large majority of the scientific community is at least 90% certain that the recent trend in global warming since the 1950s is due to man-made greenhouse gas output.
3. Human influences are now visible in other climatic aspects, notably temperature extremes and wind patterns.
4. Ramifications of global warming include a rise in sea level, melting ice cover, increased intensity of tropical cyclones, and acidification of the ocean.
(This is an extremely brief summary of what already is a summary for policy-makers, so I’d recommend checking out the PDF file yourself, it’s quite interesting.)

The point I’m making is that the scientific community as a whole sees data that points to a troubling situation, and yet they are faced with a dilemma: how do they get the word out? The natural instinct is to turn to the media; after all, people watch TV! People read newspapers, they listen to the radio, they listen to people who watched TV. It should stand to reason that if the scientific community is largely aligned in its opinion then the public, as informed through the media, should also be aligned in its opinion, or at least aligned in thinking that the scientific community is mostly in agreement.

There are a few skeptics out there, however, whose main claims are that global warming, while evident, is due to natural causes such as fluctuations in solar radiation and cosmic rays. Then there are a few scientists who contend that global warming will have consequences that are mostly beneficial for mankind. Frankly, their opinions have been refuted by the larger scientific community, and yet they receive special media attention. Why? Because they’re the stubborn underdogs, and underdogs sell. The media attempts to present a ‘balanced’ opinion of global warming by giving equal coverage to the skeptics, thereby overrepresenting a minority. Just open up the Drudge Report and chances are you'll find a few main-page articles about global warming skeptics, and none about affirmers.

But not only is coverage ‘balanced,’ it’s also being reported by a media replete with journalists who don’t have clear knowledge of global warming. A study of 249 environmental reporters found that only 30% correctly identified nitrous oxide as one of the most important greenhouse gases. Only 14% knew of the almost total agreement that precipitation would increase due to global warming (Kris Wilson, “Drought, debate, and uncertainty: measuring reporters’ knowledge and ignorance about climate change”).

It’s no wonder that the public is so confused. You even have 12% of the American population seeing ozone depletion as the main negative consequence of global warming (Anthony Leiserowitz, “American Risk Perceptions: Is Climate Change Dangerous?”). CFCs are indeed a greenhouse gas, but their role in creating the ozone hole above Antarctica is not directly related to their heat trapping effect. Relating the two is like making a false link between Iraq and Afghanistan.

What can be done about this? Clearly Al Gore is making some headway through film, but even then he may just be preaching to the already-converted. And then you have sites like The Drudge Report that, immediately after An Inconvenient Truth won its Oscars, reported to the effect that Al Gore was a hypocrite and spending too much on his utility bills, or that he should eat less meat if he’s really environmentally conscious; they’re shooting the messenger to kill the message.

I was talking to a post doc here on the Revelle about what he thought was an ideal situation for scientists and public policy, and he said off-handedly that scientists should be making environmental policy; they know the most, after all. In a way, this is already happening: scientists are finding themselves in the difficult position where the public is not listening, or is not able to listen due to media blocks, and where they are standing witness to some pretty scary things. Scientists are human beings too, with families and concerns for their society. Some of them might do something simple like tell their families to move to higher ground, but many are finding that they are feeling obligated to take an advocacy approach. Some in the scientific community are struggling to find a political voice in order to inform the public directly of some of the dangers we will likely be facing.

This is scary. In an ideal world, science is apolitical. In an ideal world, the enlightened policy-makers listen to the scientists and then make judgments based on the given information... hard to imagine such a world, but that’s no reason to abandon the ideal. Politics and science must be separated. Scientists who are actively performing research should not be politically motivated. Why? Because of the basic nature of scientific inquiry. One of the important tenets is that a hypothesis must be discarded if it is contradicted by evidence, and a scientist-advocate whose career has become staked on their hypotheses can no longer make objective measurements and deductions. In the unlikely event that evidence is found proving that global warming is not man-made, we should rest assured that the IPCC would report its new findings.

Shortly after the release of the IPCC summary, reporters interviewed Dr. Susan Solomon, one of its two lead editors and one of the scientists famed for linking synthetic chemicals to the ozone hole. The New York Times reported on this:

When a reporter asked Dr. Solomon “to sum up what kind of urgency this sort of report should convey to policy makers,” she gave the furthest thing from a convenient sound bite.
“I can only give you something that’s going to disappoint you, sir, and that is that it’s my personal scientific approach to say it’s not my role to try to communicate what should be done,” Dr. Solomon said. “I believe that is a societal choice. I believe science is one input to that choice, and I also believe that science can best serve society by refraining from going beyond its expertise.
“In my view, that’s what the I.P.C.C. also is all about, namely not trying to make policy-prescriptive statements, but policy-relevant statements.”

I’ll close here. I’m no Dr. Solomon, so I will present you with a prescriptive statement: read the IPCC report because that comes directly from scientists, read but beware media reports that do not provide citations, read but beware scientists who are also advocates, and form an educated opinion. And then do something about it. Watch for informed politicians, and watch for politicians who make vague or moralistic statements about global warming. And find out what you can do to reduce your carbon imprint. After all, as the mandatory Scripps vessel safety video morbidly informed us last Sunday, “The alternative to being prepared is to panic.” Oh, and don’t watch and worry about the movie The Day After Tomorrow, as the IPCC report states that such a situation is “very unlikely.”

Working Out

2007-03-05T19:59:00.000-08:00

(by Pien Huang)

We work out from 4-4:30. First the Boatswain, then the 2nd Mate, then me. We complete three cycles each, isolating the biceps one day, and the chest the next; back, shoulders and triceps come later. The bench and the weights are in a cozy den. But the hatch opens to a private deck, and we bench looking onto the ocean.

We're on the “Endothil” program, minus the supplements, Jim’s program where we max out on each set. The two of them do, at least. They watch me carefully, pushing me, spotting me. "One more," Jim yells. "I lied. Another one!" But when I say stop, it is enough.

Jim is the motivator. "Let's go, Big Joe," he shouts. “No pain, no gain.” When he's up, his grunts are heard on the science deck. At first, I make the mistake of helping him count. Joe puts his fingers to his lips. "He likes to count double sometimes," he says. "Like seven, seven."

There’s always the Lebanese tape playing in the background. It cuts short of the workout, so we pause twenty minutes in to turn it around. The tape is Joe’s. It is one of the few physical things he has picked it up in his myriad travels; the rest exist in memory, as stories and photographs. There is a picture of Joe posted on the wall, sporting a cowlick and a leopard-print thong. “For motivation,” he laughs. He fell briefly into male-modeling in Mexico. He was a movie extra in China, where his character was killed off by a prosthetic elephant trunk. Eventually, he wants to settle in Colombia.

Jim’s favorite is tricep day. When I struggle on my fifth rep, he shouts, “Come on, now! No arm flab in the future!” Working out is always personal for him. He talks himself up and beats himself down. “I said I can’t,” he yells. “I should never say I can’t!” But the next moment, he is philosophical. “No pain no gain,” he says, bouncing lightly, taking jabs. “We’re like gorillas!”

He deflects on cardio day, smoking cigarettes while Joe and I jog laps on deck. We can only run on half the deck, and the rest of the loop is spent walking around cables and scientific equipment, climbing up and down stairs. Even so, I am winded by the third lap. We take a break, stretching in the salt spray, looking at the birds. “I was going crazy,” Joe shouts over the clamor of the engines. “I had to go outside.” He got serious about working out when he hit thirty last year. He is teaching himself Spanish, by workbook and podcast. In his off-time, he reads Borges.

My arms are sore, but they yield a satisfying firmness. They insist that the regimen builds tone instead of bulk. Even so, I'm told that I'll be benching more than my weight when we're through. Joe lends me his Buddha Balm, a tingling salve from Cambodia. “The scientists aren’t this much fun, are they?” he asks.

We are not alone

2007-03-02T20:01:00.000-08:00

The crew has discovered my blog! I guess I better stop posting mean things about them! I'll continue posting from my 'rather disturbing view' however. haha~ Anyway it turns out that Joe Ferris, the Second Mate, keeps a blog. He's a real life adventurer, and he's full of great stories. It's a funny blog, and you can also read all the Chief Scientist's weekly reports there. Definitely worth checking out:

The Nuclear Powered Whaling Vessel Blog

Some other interesting links from Joe:

Shellback Ceremony
Red Nose Ceremony
Potty Mouth Sailor Adventure #1
Potty Mouth Sailor Adventure #2

A wog is someone who has not yet made an equator crossing, and they have to do a few things to become a shellback...

Contemplation

2007-03-02T08:32:00.000-08:00

It’s been a little while since I last updated, or it feels like it anyway: time passes a little strangely on a boat. Sometimes I feel like a minute is about 4 minutes long, and sometimes I feel like an hour is about 63 minutes long. Anyway, I’ve been busy. Too busy to post! Why? Because I’ve been contemplating things!

With only 2ish weeks left on our voyage, it’s time to start putting it all together. What’s the meaning of all this stuff? So I’ve been doing a lot of contemplation, and contemplation, as they say, is 1% inspiration and 99% napping. That being said, the whole contemplation thing only works if you have something to contemplate about. Actually, the search for something to contemplate is not at all contemptible; it is a contemplatible thing in itself. It took me a while, but I eventually found my contemplatee, and it’s everything.

So I’ve started to put together a larger picture... what is my purpose on this research vessel and what is the purpose of this research vessel? Well, I’ve decided that my purpose is to do my job. I’m pretty lucky in that my purpose is aligned with what I’m paid to do: film and stuff. Public Outreach. I wasn’t able to clearly state the purpose of this research vessel, which made me realize that I have a lot to figure out. So to help me wrap my head around all this stuff, I’ve started writing a bit of an essay. Page 1 is about how I got on the boat, but you don’t need to see that. Here is page 2 of the essay:

It is an odd circumstance of nature that advanced scientific understanding is often based on factors invisible to the unaided eye; there is a certain amount of trust that the public must put into the work of scientists. Wise old fogeys frequently say we know nothing at all, but that is misleading. Knowing even just a little bit is a world apart from knowing nothing at all. We certainly know enough to require high degrees of specialization among scientists in different fields, and enough to render that degree of specialization arcane to the average person. There is a distinct problem, however, in the channeling of information from specialized scientists to the public; distortions occur.

Popular understanding of global warming depends on the public hearing about the work and words of a small scientific community. I do not imply that—against all scientific evidence—global warming does not exist; after all, the sky being intangible hardly disproves its existence. Nor do I imply that even given the existence of global warming it is largely inconsequential; all we have to do is look at the rather obvious and deleterious side effects, which include the aggravation of extreme weather patterns and the endangerment of climate-dependent animal and plant species. There was a recent stir about polar bears found drowning for the first time in recorded history as a direct result of warmer temperatures melting their ice floe homes. The trying circumstances of the warming phenomenon, however, are not considered immediately apparent or serious enough to enact swift policy change; the media and politicians have claimed that not enough is known, or that nothing is yet proven. Those are blatantly false statements, as global warming is readily observed, but it is still true that there is much left to be investigated. The climate is a giant, complicated mix of processes: air and sea gas exchange, oceanic transport, heat transfer, cloud formation, rainfall patterns... the list goes on. Ultimately, however, the study of climate variability depends on the detection of minute changes in the chemical and physical properties of the air, water, and land. And prior to this cruise, I had no clue what that meant.

So when I think about it, I have been an extremely privileged person to have witnessed the workings of a research vessel first-hand, and so I consider it as much an honor as a duty to report even the little I’ve come to understand. It’s like being at an exotic zoo, or better yet in the natural habitat of exotic species. I can finally see the scientific process at its source, before it gets dissolved and diluted in a two-minute news blurb. I’m getting close to the beast, for a scientist is a rare creature: often pale, often shy, sometimes noisy, and sometimes brilliant.

Pages 3 to 20 are about me, the things I like to do, and the things I will like to do when I get older. I’m still working on it. Anyway, thought you’d want to know what I’ve been up to.

Squit! cable kinks

2007-02-28T02:55:00.000-08:00

There were some mysterious kinks in the cable for a few of the CTD casts last week. The cause was not known, but the working theory was that it had something to do with the rough weather causing the ship to roll, thereby introducing slack into the line. A slack line combined with deep ocean currents jerking the CTD package around probably created these irreparable kinks in the cable... but no one could figure it out for sure. There were no indications of unusual ship rolls or CTD movement.

It was my opinion that the kinks were caused by marine life. So I stayed up late one night and watched a rosette cast from start to finish, and I saw with my own eyes what caused the cable kinks. With my handy Nikon D70s, I produced this image:

Dave, my bunkmate

2007-02-25T21:22:00.000-08:00

I have just been informed that Dave’s parents are reading this blog. Well, I might at times seem like just an average mild-mannered blogger, but I’m a nasty muckraker at heart. So here it is: all the dirt on my bunkmate Dave.

1. He looks 6’3” or something, but he’s not as tall as he looks. How does he do this? Well, have you ever seen the movie Gataca? The main character—-a genetically deficient short man—-really wants to look like an overachiever, so he gets his legs surgically elongated. But the moral of the story was: bad genes can still go a long way. I say: shoot for the moon, Dave, shoot for the moon.

2. Yesterday was hump day, the midway point of the voyage, so Dave forced me to switch bunks. Now I’m in the top bunk. He did this completely out of spite, but he didn’t realize that hot air rises and the top bunk is actually warmer and preferable. I’ll let him go on thinking he’s won a vicious little victory, but the truth is, Dave is too incompetent to even be mean. Poor upbringing, I say. Possibly bad genes too.

3. The joke Dave likes telling the most is a long winded story about a brick-throwing contest. It’s very long and stupid—-I refuse to go into more detail. If you’re curious, try googling it, I guess. Anyway, where did he get this joke from? Most likely from deficient childhood experiences.

4. Dave has been reading The Life of Pi for the past week, and he’s still only 50 pages into the thing. I’ll admit, I thought that book was one of the hugest, sloppiest turds ever, but still, what a slow reader! Combination bad genes and poor upbringing. Double whammy.

There you have it, Mr. and Mrs. Ullman... the truth about your son Dave.

Fire Drills

2007-02-25T21:20:00.000-08:00

(by Pien Huang)

Sundays are for fire drills and steak. They used to be for wine too, but that was axed with the UNOLS (some category that encompasses all university research vessels) Prohibition some four months ago. Everybody still talks about it, but it’s more for conversation than for spirited discussion. It’s one of the few things we have in common. Three weeks in and we are still wary of offending each other, as we’ve got three more weeks to go. The only affable insult is to trash-talk in card games, so we play a lot of cribbage.

We’ve had three fire drills and one abandon ship drill so far. Fire drills are preferable, as they are indoors and less involved. You grab the life jacket from your room, and muster to the main lab. You have to wear a hat, and sometimes the forgetfuls pile sweaters on their heads. I played victim in one of the fire drills, which involved sitting in the bowels of the ship with a fog machine. It was misty and I imagined gorillas. Then I heard footsteps and remembered to call for help.

The weather is warmer, even as the wind and the waves are getting stronger. Our cables are kinking, but nobody knows why. This might be logged into the Captain’s binder of Non-Conformity Reports on the R/V Revelle, which date back to the unfortunate year 2004 when an overloaded winch “frisbeed” across a room, and the main cook stuck his hand in the industrial mixer. Most of their findings prescribe common sense.

The ocean makes me sick, but it comes and goes. Foul weather is coming on. We’re losing time because of cable kinks. At breakfast this morning, Anthony from Helium observed that nothing from his personal list gets done. Procrastinating without Wikipedia is just as easy, but less validating. I live inside my head. Every midnight I crave Ramen, and there is an endless supply. Overall, life is not bad, but never great.

Hump Day

2007-02-24T22:30:00.000-08:00

Today is hump day, which marks the midway point of the voyage. It’s sort of a sad thing: from here on out, it’s just science science science and no more icebergs. In a week or two, we’ll have passed far enough north to hit warm waters and shorts weather, but for now it’s a grind: a 3-hour cast followed by a 3-hour transit to the next station, and repeat. Breaks are made only to accomodate bad weather or equipment failure; everyone is on one of two 12-hour shifts so casts and the labs can run round the clock. I no longer see much of the midnight-to-noon ‘night sprites.’

It’s sort of like the famed “sophomore slump”: the weather’s poop and presently there’s little to look forward to but more of the same. We’re back in the rough seas of the Roaring Fifties, which really is not like going to Starbucks, which I’d sure like to do.

Of course, as some guy in The Life Aquatic DVD extras was quoted as having once said, ‘an optimist is someone who sees the opportunity in every challenge’ (while a pessimist sees the challenge in every opportunity). And I’ve discovered a sort of awesome opportunity: there’s a neat option in computer Solitaire that lets you tally your $ winnings over multiple games. Vegas baby! It’s really really fun and I consider myself a lucky person for having found it.

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

Here are a few photos taken during our exit of the Antarctic region.

Anthony’s Helium/Tritium collection procedure is pretty cool. The final step is to seal off a sample in a glass bulb (by using a torch).

The CFC sampler wears crazy gloves.

The crew blast ice off the deck with seawater.

This is the optical device that’s cast once a day; it measures the spectrum of light absorbed at different depths, which give information about the types of organic matter present.

The water near Antarctica was very calm, being shielded from currents by ice and the continental shelf.

During our exit of the Antarctic region, we would often find ourselves surrounded by dozens of icebergs. The crew found it rather stressful.

The neatest iceberg we saw.

Another neat one.

We were told to look for splashes on icebergs; they’re bigger than they ought to be.

During some relatively calm water, we sent a Zodiac rescue boat out with Chief Engineer Paul and 3rd Mate Favi. Why? For the scenic opportunity, of course:

(courtesy of JJ Becker) Iceberg! Dead ahead! Yup that’s our boat. We’re within 80 yards of the iceberg.

(courtesy of Jim Swift) ’Guins!

Potty Mouth

2007-02-24T22:27:00.000-08:00

FOR MATURE READERS ONLY (Skip the following post if you are not mature):

I’ve been told that I have a bit of a potty mouth. I guess I have some older and well-mannered readers who don’t much appreciate my use of naughty words... but you better get used to it because it’s the language of the future. After a while, folks will become acclimated to words we currently consider vulgar, and the vulgar language of the future will be way worse by comparison. For instance, remember how "poop" was the grossest thing ever? And then it became "crap"? Now I can say poop and crap all the time—poop, crap, poop, crap. And remember when "bitch" was a bad word, back before female dogs were discovered? And 50 years ago, people didn't even fart. Well, everyone got used to those concepts, and now they’re pleasantly incorporated into our everyday lives. It just takes time. So here I am, ahead of my time, bringing you New York Times headlines from the near future:

"Three Explosions Totally Goddamn Destroy Resort In Egypt"
"Where The Bloody Hell Is Osama Jr.?"
"Shit! 2024 Summer Olympics To Be Held In North Korea"
"President-Elect McCain Smells Like Piss, LOL"

CONCLUSION OF MATURE CONTENT

Musictarcticplaylista

2007-02-21T23:38:00.000-08:00

My friend Peter asked that I share my current playlist... I guess there’s a little something to be learned about tastes in music. Well here it is... it’s in randomized order, because I don’t like to imply favoritism among my most-listened songs. They are all great but equal.

-- Danny Boy (Harry Connick, Jr)
-- Why Don’t You Get A Job? (The Offspring)
-- Hm! hm! hm! hm! (Mozart’s Die Zauberflote, K. 620)
-- Haven’t Got A Clue (The Flaming Lips)
-- Don’t Know Why (Norah Jones)
-- Do You Want To (Franz Ferdinand)
-- Take Me Out (Franz Ferdinand)
-- Come On Let’s Go (Los Lobos)
-- Yeah! (Usher feat. Lil’ Jon & Ludacris)
-- The Yeah Yeah Yeah Song (The Flaming Lips)
-- Bye Bye Bye (N’Sync)
-- Gone Till November (Wyclef Jean)
-- The Ring Goes South (The Lord of the Rings soundtrack)
-- Let Me Tell You About My Boat (The Life Aquatic soundtrack)
-- Float On (Modest Mouse)
-- Sweetest Thing (U2)
-- Amazed (Lonestar)
-- A Whole New World (Aladdin soundtrack)
-- What a Wonderful World (Louis Armstrong)
-- Until the End of the World (U2)
-- Vertigo (U2)
-- Ice Ice Baby (Vanilla Ice)
-- Frozen (Madonna)
-- Numb (U2)
-- Unwell (Matchbox 20)
-- The Lonely Goatherd (The Sound of Music)
-- Show Me The Meaning of Being Lonely (The Backstreet Boys)
-- Help! (The Beatles)
-- Crazy (Britney Spears)
-- All I Wanna Do (Sheryl Crow)
-- Get Back (The Beatles)

Anyway that’s the music I’ve been listening to! I’m having a great time. I hear we’re approaching some rough water soon, with 45 knot winds. Not quite a ‘storm’ but should be entertaining!

A thought I had

2007-02-21T20:18:00.000-08:00

The moment they wake up, I'd say about 80% of all people ask themselves, "What the hell is going on?" Well, I'll tell you what's going on: crazy things!

Lesson #1

2007-02-21T02:38:00.000-08:00

The last time I wrote, I said I’d go into some of the particulars about research on the cruise. Well, after talking to Chris Measures of the Trace Metals team (and the University of Hawaii), I thought it’d be worth summarizing a conversation we had about something called the Gaia theory.

I’ll start from the basics: Captain Planet. Captain Planet, as you may or may not remember, was a nineties cartoon superhero powered by the combination of Earth, Fire, Water, Air, and Heart. He saved the world every Saturday morning, usually from the threat of ugly, fat adults. The Captain’s kryptonite was pollution, so plots usually centered on a group of five kids hosing slime off the Captain so he could get his powers back. Well, another less-well-remembered-but-interesting aspect of the cartoon was Gaia, the beautiful blue-green lady who hired Captain Planet in the first place. Actually I don’t remember what colors she was, but she was definitely pretty! Her name was a reference to the Greek goddess of the Earth, and also to Lovelock’s Gaia theory of the 1970s.

The Gaia theory was a popular theory that said the world is a vast, self-regulating organism: that nature is completely in harmony, and when something goes a bit out of whack (ex. global temperature goes up), then natural feedback loops correct the problem (ex. an ice age). The main concept was that a moralistic higher power oversaw the natural balance. It’s a pleasant theory, but has frequently been discredited as even more ridiculous than Captain Planet.

I mentioned this in an earlier post, but phytoplankton in the ocean have a large impact on carbon dioxide levels (by photosynthesis) in the ocean and thus the atmosphere, as limited by the amount of nutrients and micronutrients (such as iron) in the ocean. Well, iron is crucial to the respiratory processes of many living things. What’s interesting is that the oceans are relatively iron-deficient; it’s generally provided from dust blowing off continents and from the minerals in continental shelves. But there’s generally a lot more demand for iron than supply. So why do the phytoplankton have such a thirst for iron, when there’s not that much around? The answer is that there used to be a lot of iron, and that the plants originally evolved in an environment abundant with iron.

Iron has two oxidation states: a low-oxidation state and a high-oxidation state. The former is very soluble, the latter not. Only soluble iron is biologically useful. There used to be a lot of low-oxidized iron in the environment, and not a lot of oxygen: the world was anoxic back in the day. Well, then came the phytoplankton, which burned up tons of iron and converted tons of CO2 into oxygen, and by doing so created an oxygen-rich atmosphere. While humans would eventually appreciate this change, this process caused several planet-wide crises because all the surface iron reacted with the abundant oxygen into a high-oxidation state, which subsequently meant a lack of available, soluble iron for living things. This punches a hole in the Gaea theory: the phytoplankton wiped out the balance that had been in place in the anoxic world. Life changed in a big way, and hasn’t really returned to that original state. Was this a good thing? A bad thing? It’s not really for us to say.

Now this is not to say that negative feedback loops do not exist in nature. There’s an interesting one that came up a few years ago: when the sun strikes the ocean surface more (ie under warming conditions), the phytoplankton—being excited by ultraviolet light—release DMSP, which is a precursor to dimethyl sulfide (DMS). Dimethyl sulfide is related to cloud formation, which of course begins a cooling process by reflecting light and causing rain.

Actually, one of the main blocks to understanding climate are the clouds. You know how weather forecasters are always trying to tell you what to expect, and how they’re often wrong? Well, the fact is, no one really knows all that much about cloud formation. We know the basic concept: evaporation of water, or something, but they’re still a mystery. And they’re a key link: understanding clouds would tell us more about weather patterns, rainfall, and also about the amount of sunlight that’s getting through and warming the surface of the earth and the oceans. It’s all connected. It’s not necessarily in service of some all powerful Gaia force, or any other higher power; there’s no good or bad attached to these processes. They just are.

The Southern Ocean Thus Far (in photos)

2007-02-21T01:38:00.000-08:00

Sorry this took a while... it's quite challenging uploading this quantity of photos from our spotty satellite link. All but 3 of these are stills from video footage... I'm putting together video clips, but I'll have to upload them later when we've got better satellite connectivity. Anyway, enjoy:

It snowed on my last night at school.

One of my favorite views of Cambridge.

Winter in the northern hemisphere...

... is summer in the southern.

Driving on the left side of the road is dangerous, pretentious, stupid, and fun!

Point your camera at practically anything in New Zealand and you get a masterpiece.

The New Zealand flag on the topmast of the R/V Roger Revelle.

Capt. Dave Murline giving a safety briefing to the scientists.

Loading took a few days.

Etc.

All aboard! Cast off the lines! Anchors aweigh!

Adventure!

A last glimpse of land.

Just doin' my job before it gets too windy... recording 'room tone' for background noise.

They're tossing an XBT into the ocean (explained below). The ocean is much rougher here in the 40s.

The ship's rolling and pitching, it's cold and windy, the deck's wet, but...

Overexposed, whoops! It's snowing anyway.

What's able-bodied seaman Joe on the lookout for?

Icebergs! AHh!!! This one looks like Moby Dick.

Some are bigger than others. This one's the size of Muskogee, Oklahoma.

There are endless shades of grey south of 60 degrees. Also, the water is fairly calm there, since it's south of the Antarctic Circumpolar Current. Infinite fetch does not apply.

Let's not forget the scientists... that's George with his alkalinity setup.

The Ocean Data Facility group.

Chris Measures describes the trace metals program; did you know that the amount of iron in the ocean is closely related to the amount of CO2 in the air? It's because phytoplankton need it for photosynthesis (they eat CO2 and poop oxygen with an iron pathway).

JJ and Gene explain the XBT (eXpendable Bathy-Thermograph). It measures temperature and salinity at various depths; the data are used to calibrate the multibeam sonar, which maps the ocean floor. They toss one of these suckers overboard every day.

The yellow thing is an Argo float, which is an autonomous set of sensors that can dive to 2000m, collect data, and transmit via satellite. It's revolutionizing hydrographic data acquisition. The flying thing is a petrel, which looks suspiciously like a flying penguin.

Joe, the second mate, showing off his tattoos. The continent is just off the port side (not visible), and a freezing wind is blowing like crazy. Crazy cold.

Dave, my bunkmate, is a particularly photogenic grad student. He's wearing a Mustang suit, which are toasty bright-orange survival suits for deck work.

This is the first official CTD rosette cast.

CTD casts take a few hours to complete, since it descends thousands of meters and on the way up has to stop periodically to collect water. The sun set while we waited for the first cast to complete... we waited for an effect called a 'green flash,' which is supposed to occur right when the sun hits the horizon, but we didn't see one that day.

The trace metal team has their own rosette for sampling; they have different contamination concerns than the carbon studies group.

This is about as dark as it ever gets this far south... the sun slips under the horizon, slides along for a few hours, then pops back up. Auroras are still visible if you look hard enough.

Captain Dave fishing for Antarctic Toothfish (aka Chilean Sea Bass). He didn't catch anything but he still had fun!

It's cold and colorless here, but there are signs of life (aside from the abundant phytoplankton in every photo of the ocean here).

This was the most charismatic seal I've ever seen in my entire life, and I've seen five.

Sunset is my favorite. I hear dawn's a real eye-catcher, but every time I wake up early for it, it's super cloudy. One of these days...

The Shape of the Iceberg at left reminded me of my favorite building in Cambridge.

The Big Problem

2007-02-19T06:06:00.000-08:00

I haven't really written very many serious posts about the material being researched down here. That's not because it's not interesting; I spend much of my day helping monitor the CTD casts and roaming around seeing if any scientists or technicians need any help. It's all really neat stuff… I’ve just been lazy. But I also think that basic scientific processes are misunderstood by the general population, through the fault of myriad 6th grade basketball coach/science teachers. It's not a crazy, complicated thing that's going on out here; it may a complicated problem they're working on, but each small piece of the puzzle can be easily understood by anyone.

So what exactly is the problem? Many people ask themselves: If global warming is so bad, why does everyone draw the sun with a smiley face? Will our kids and their kids draw the sun with a frowny face? I guess the sun in Super Mario World would sometimes dive-bomb you, but that was only if you weren't careful.

Well, the real problem is that the whole global warming thing is complicated. We all know that global warming is occurring; that is a measurable fact. We also know that global warming is accelerated by anthropogenic processes (man-made influence). This is also measurable. There is a team of three scientists on board the Revelle who are dedicated to calculating the level of freons (CFCs) in the water. CFCs are an industrial by-product that simply is not found in deeper water (older water). So oceanographers can easily identify which water is older than the industrial era, and can calculate carbon levels and things like that. Long story short is that man is, quite obviously, putting enormous amounts of carbon into the air.

So what do we do about it? It seems that there is sometimes an attitude of “let’s just sit back and let the scientists figure out a cure.” Basically, people expect a simple solution to a complex problem. Recently, for example, there has been a lot of buzz about some research into the effects of dumping iron into the ocean. Iron is one of the limiting factors in phytoplankton digestion of CO2 into O2. Dumping loads of iron into iron-deficient water has proven to lower CO2 levels… a ‘quick fix.’ While politicians have been elated to hear about this, much of the scientific community remains skeptical: the boat that took the iron dumping experiment to sea put out as much CO2 as was removed. And what will be the long-term effects of dumping iron? And where will we even get enough iron to make a difference, especially if CO2 emissions continue to rise?

While it’s probable that there is no single, simple answer to global warming, there is still a whole lot of room to learn more about the problem. Nobody would have ever known about the phytoplankton depending on iron if research hadn’t gone into trace metals. So what’s happening on the Revelle is a series of repeated measurements of trace metals, dissolved organic and inorganic carbon, nutrients, salts, temperature, depth, alkalinity, chlorophyll, dissolved organic matter, and a few others. Nobody expects a breakthrough, just a slight clarification of the existing ocean/climate model. Small steps.

In future posts, I’ll elaborate a bit more on each of the separate processes being measured. Trust me, it’s interesting!

Superhero Global Warming A-Team

2007-02-19T00:10:00.000-08:00

After two weeks at sea, I've learned a lot more about the whole global warming problem. Here's the superhero team I'd form if I were in charge of the effort:

Iceman – This guy would be on the A-Team for obvious reasons.
Storm – She could alter weather systems to positive effect, such as to blow a little more dust from the Sahel and Australia into the oceans to introduce more iron into the system.
Aquaman – His cooperation would make gathering climate-related hydrographic data a lot easier.
The Beast – You can't fight global warming without a genius.
Mr. T – Without optimism and proper motivation, superheroes aren’t “super” at all.
Superman – This pick is a no-brainer: he’s got it all. He could fly to Pluto, gather ice, and cool the tropics. He could gather hydrographic data at super-speed. He’d use super-strength to enforce the Kyoto Protocol. Next!
Yoda – Is there anything this little green guy can’t do? A-Team. But we’d want the 800 year old Yoda... not the decrepit 900 year old in Empire Strikes Back.
Wonder Woman – I don’t know what her super powers are, but I’m putting her on the A-Team just in case. I don’t want to be accused of misogyny.
The Silver Surfer – He’s an alien, and aliens are useful.
The Terminator – Robot
Magneto – Could practically single-handedly solve the problem by destroying all SUVs and factories. But you can never really count on this guy...
Professor X – To keep Magneto in line, duh!
Pyro and The Human Torch – To burn Republicans.

Photos from down South

2007-02-17T01:12:00.000-08:00

Blogger's acting up, so I posted some photos to my facebook account. They're stills from video footage I've been taking. Check them out...

http://harvard.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2065820&page=1&id=980

Dispatch from a Former Pastry Chef

2007-02-16T17:58:00.000-08:00

(by Pien Huang)

The ship's kitchen, the galley, has a giant convection oven which cooks anything in half the time. This oven belongs to Dax, suited in a white coat, brass buttons, with shorts; and his assistant chef Ding. They form an odd pair: Dax, clean-shaven with a tattooed leg, towering over Ding, a retired, trash-talking Filipino in flannel whose Anglicized name is Paul. He's bitter about that. He joined the Navy at a time when Filipinos could only enlist as cooks. He's bitter about a lot, but it passes quickly. "I lost $120 at the Casino tonight," he said, in port. "Then I figured it was time to go to sleep."

I imagine Dax's tattoo to be relics of a former self; nowadays, off-ship, Dax is settling. "I have a dog," he says. "It's like a baby." He keeps a photo of it on his desktop, a toy poodle garnished in pink ribbons. He dabbles in real estate and cooks for a living, but would like to swap those priorities. He's started home remodeling in Seattle, and he really misses the dog. Her name is Lambchop, and he tells me this on an evening they're serving lamb.

The lamb is marinated, stewed, decadent. Every night they exceed themselves; last night was steak. The dinner before that was blue-lipped mussels. But the clincher is the dessert, and for this he enlists my help. I am more of a taste-testing mascot than a chef - Honeybear, Sugarpea, he calls me - but I graduate to using a wire whisk. On Monday, I stir melted chocolate with heated cream for garnache, a topping for chocolate mousse pie. I sidestep Ding, at the flounder-frying station, to drizzle caramel over the pies. "Dollops are ugly," Dax coaches.

On Wednesday, I quarter strawberries for a lemon whitecake swathed in cream and berries, arranged individually in souffle dishes. For this, I am honorary "Pastry Chef." Over Ding's muttering, Dax waxes on his past work in restaurants from Alaska to Bermuda, and also at sea. He cooked for a commercial fishing boat on the Bering Strait, where he saved octopuses marooned on deck with blasts from the fire hose.

On Friday, I formulate a strawberry compote to dress Callebaut milk chocolate cheesecakes. They contain an estimated five pounds of chocolate and ten pounds of cream cheese; they’ve sunk on cooling, for which Dax curses New Zealand cream cheese and the metric system. With caramel glue, we fix slices to plates we've polished, and for this I am named Sous Chef.

My promotion lasts for half a day. Then I am banned from the galley. It caused tension between the chefs.

Overheard

2007-02-14T23:05:00.001-08:00

Here’s a conversation I overheard today. Names have been changed to protect my friends:

Greta: “I keep hearing these weird clanking noises, like a heavy chain.”
Hansel: “Where?”
Greta: “In my room. At night.”
Hans Christian Anderson: “Maybe it’s a ghost!”
(everyone laughs)
Yom Kippur: “It’s just old Roger Randall Revelle!”
(more laughter)
Greta: “Yeah, I guess it’s not a big deal.”
Hans Christian Anderson: “No, Old Roger really does haunt the ship.”
Euripedes: “Yeah. He mostly hangs around the engine room, but sometimes he roams the lower decks.”
Gregory Peck: “He’s sort of creepy.”
Greta: (looking nervous) “Wow. Really? Gee...”
Amelia Earhart: “Boo!”
(Greta jumps, everyone laughs, Greta laughs too)

That’s all that I overheard, because I took a bathroom break and then watched Galaxy Quest, which was hilarious!

Final Approach

2007-02-14T22:59:00.000-08:00

Everyone’s been going a bit stir-crazy here at the end of a two week steam with little else to do but eat, sleep, and watch movies. But we’re making our final approach to the shelf and our first official station. The bad news is: satellite images show ice extending much further out than previously expected, and the Revelle is not an icebreaker. You know how in the movie Apollo 13 Tom Hanks and his buddies had to abandon the moon landing and instead slingshot around the thing? And there was that touching moment when Kevin Spacey and Nicholas Cage reach out and stare teary-eyed at the moon passing by... it’s so close, yet so far? Well apparently I’m about to become the Nicholas Cage of Antarctica, reaching out to the Ice Continent but not being able to touch it because of ice conditions. I guess I should rename the blog “The Danparktic Circumpolar Current” or something since I won’t actually be touching land. Oh well!

CTD Rosette Test Cast

2007-02-14T22:54:00.000-08:00

Today I finally figured out how the scientists and technicians actually take the measurements I’ve mentioned before... carbon levels, trace metals, alkalinity, helium and tritium levels, nutrients, etc. It’s a simple concept but the execution is quite involved: they lower a machine to great depths, and then they extract samples of water and bring them to the surface for testing. The goal is to obtain a large number of data points at different depths along the ship’s path in order to produce a large transect, a graphical cutaway of the ocean.

The CTD Rosette, as pictured, is a series of tubes, like the Internet. Also like the Internet, it weighs a lot, but unlike the Internet, the CTD rosette conveys water from ocean depths up to the surface. It weighs about 600 lbs. and can hold about 1500 lbs. of water. It’s quite an ordeal winching this behemoth up and down the water column, as you can imagine, but it’s also a pretty entertaining sight. After we perform this cast and recovery a hundred or so times, it might get old, but for now it’s great. ‘Great’ as in ‘large.’

The CTD rosette—CTD stands for Conductivity, Temperature, and Density, which are measured by on-board sensors—is designed to go down to 2000 meters below sea level and then draw water samples at regular intervals up to the surface. The procedure is difficult and is rigorously policed, since slight mistakes can contaminate water samples, or worse, damage the rosette. Jim Swift says the worst case scenario is if someone got hurt, but personally, I think that would sort of depend on who it was. Hm... it would also depend on how badly he or she got hurt, and whether it was his or her fault. For example, if a head-banging dude was banging his head to some heavy metal, and then banged his head on the rosette and broke a spigot, and if he was usually a jerk, and if banging his head didn’t cause any permanent damage, then I’d tell him: “You stupid idiot! I hate you!”

Icebergs

2007-02-14T22:51:00.000-08:00

I’ve seen more icebergs in the last couple of days than I have seen Ferraris in my entire life. That being said, I’d still much rather ride an iceberg than a Ferrari.

Valentine's Day

2007-02-14T22:50:00.001-08:00

Yesterday was Valentine’s Day. In celebration we had some candy hearts, but I’ve never liked them much despite a forcible predilection for confections. So I proposed that we throw them at the albatrosses, especially the lonely-looking albatrosses. If I were hungry and lonely and a dumb albatross, I’d definitelyh want some candy hearts for Valentine’s Day. But the crew reminded me that international law protects the waters south of 60 degrees latitude—nothing foreign can be put into the water. So I laid a few candy hearts on the aft deck... and when I checked this morning, they were gone! I guess I made some albatross very happy! Suffice to say that was the best Valentine’s Day ever.

Internet

2007-02-14T22:48:00.000-08:00

When I was a young boy, I said to myself: “I promise I will never again be without Internet for more than a week.” Well shucks, I came really close to breaking that age old promise when we passed out of Pacific satellite coverage last week, but here I am, back in the future, ready to update my precious blog. I have a couple of updates saved up from the last few days, but you should read them very slowly... it’s unclear when I’ll get my next chance to update. As soon as we turn northward again, the ship’s superstructure will be directly between the antenna and the Indian Ocean satellite. :(

Day, Night, Pitch, & Roll

2007-02-08T21:31:00.000-08:00

The Roger Revelle is steaming southwest; we're still about a week away from our first station, which will be as close to Antarctica as sea ice will permit. That's when all the action/science begins. Until then, I'll continue to assume that scientists and sailors are only different in that scientists look and behave like nerds.

As we travel further south, the craziness of the polar regions becomes increasingly apparent...
-- Days get longer: by the time we reach our first station, the sun will set for only 4 hours a night.
-- I've already mentioned the rough seas, but when I wrote that post, we were experiencing only 5 to 15 degrees of pitch and roll. These days we typically roll about 20 degrees... about half an hour ago we hit a big one (best guess is 25 degrees) and everyone fell over. Haha!
-- The pictures below are of the Aurora Australis, or the Southern Lights. Forgive the blurriness; the ship was rolling and long exposures were necessary. In the third photo, a star traces the roll of the ship. I don't know what causes auroras... I used to think it was because of charged ions from solar wind being drawn by the earth's magnetosphere crashing into the atmosphere... but it's probably just caused by the Russians.

Oh another amazing thing: in the city, it's easy to forget that moonlight and starlight are significant sources of illumination... being on the bridge at night is sort of a fantastic thing. At first you can't see anything at all, and then you think you see something, but no it's just your watch, and then all of a sudden you can see for miles and miles around.

Aurora Australis

2007-02-08T21:24:00.000-08:00

Booyeah! I saw it!

More on Albatross

2007-02-06T16:39:00.000-08:00

(by Guest Blogger Cassandra)

I think Dan takes the Rime of the Ancient Mariner too lightly. The Albatross is easily the only visible sealife outside the ship. I like seeing them glide along on the currents hunting for their next meal. Perhaps they’re tired of being alone on the vast Southern Ocean and they tag along with our ship for the company. I have been disappointed in the small size of the albatross that we have seen so far, I expected to see a much larger creature that could stay aloft for hours without even flapping their wings. Perhaps we’ll see the giant albatross as we come across ice bergs in the next few days. A little information on our friends thanks to Wiki: there are 21 recognized species of albatross, which are related to the petrals we see out there as well. They can be found from the Southern Ocean to the North Pacific and tend to form colonies on remote islands. They are monogamous birds- a pair bond takes several years to form. Rather than being regarded as unlucky, sailors often used to kill them and eat them, although I’m sure they taste like chicken the thought of eating one seems rather barbaric, considering that these same sailors also thought that albatross were the souls of lost sailors.

Gumby and the Birds

2007-02-06T01:45:00.000-08:00

Here are a few photos of Cassandra, Pien, and myself trying on “Gumby suits,” which is a sturdy survival suit that promises tip-top insulation and flotation, good enough to survive for days even in chilly polar waters. Hopefully we’ll never have to wear them again, as that’d mean the ship was sinking, but if we do, at least we’ll look cute!

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

You know how when you’re on the beach and you stare out at the ocean, you see a straight horizon extending forever? It’s hard to tell from the size of the photo here, but the horizon in the Southern Ocean is actually jagged due to the sheer size of the waves. It’s one of the most amazing things I’ve ever seen... the ocean is such a deep blue—it’s hard to describe, but the color of it just gives the impression of incredible depth—and the sky is filled with circling albatross and petrels. I suppose they think we’re a fishing boat.

Oh look! My 6th sense monitor is picking up some signals. Let’s see what it’s got for me:

Gee, I’m so bored. I think today I’ll fly in circles round and round that there boat. Twenty hours, yes, I think I’ll fly round and round that there boat for the next twenty hours. If only I could play Trivial Pursuit or Monopoly or something... but nope, no hands, small brain, and I’d need a table too. (sigh) I’m just an albatross, a bored albatross.
-- Albatross #2034

Gee, I think I’ll shoot one of them albatross. Who’d care?
-- Dan Park, renegade mariner

Seasick

2007-02-06T01:44:00.000-08:00

(by Guest Writer Pien Huang)

Last night I used the Stairmaster in the After Science Hold.* The Stairmaster is isolated from the Rowing Machine and the Stationary Bike, which share a room with the Ab Roller and the magnet-activated Treadmill. Twenty minutes of Intervals, pitching and rolling in industrial fumes, elicited near-vomitous results. Denying seasickness, I was certain that laying prostrate on the floor was the first step towards a hamstring stretch.

This morning we set the clocks back an hour. Twelve hours of lulling should have prepared me to stand. Instead, I was nauseously dry-heaving after two sets of stairs. Seated on a doormat just inside a hatch to the outside, breathing what little fresh air was leaking in, I tried to will open the six latches barring the door. It was some time before I stopped sweating, but when I finally stood up, I ate a bowl of cherries and congratulated myself on staying drug-free.

Moral of this story: I’m convinced that seasickness is a state of mind that can be thought out of. Seasickness results from a disparity between the signals that your brain receives from your eye and your inner ear. Scopolamine, a patch stuck behind the ear, slows the sloshing of your ear liquids by floating a layer of oil on top. In effect, it fools your brain into thinking that you’re standing still. But why be outsmarted by a sticker? If monks walk calmly on hot coals and naked mole rats feel no pain, I can certainly convince my brain that I am actually moving.

* NB: Cassandra and I were feeling great last night (at least before the workout), whereas Dan was not. Don’t let him kid you; he has been amiss.

My Personal Seaworthiness

2007-02-05T14:54:00.000-08:00

I seem to be unaffected by seasickness, thank goodness! Annie Wong, the co-chief scientist, told me that 99% of all Asians she's taken on cruise tend to get sick. Luckily, I'm not just Asian, I'm Dan Park. I wrote a poem:

Pien has been up and down,
Cassandra is nowhere to be found,
and Dave has been reduced to a sack of potatoes.

Yesterday, we passed through the Roaring Forties--a seafaring term referring to the constant storms at that latitude--and sure, the ocean was rough, but that was nothing compared to the Roaring Fifties. I don't know what the Sixties are called, but I have a guess.

Let's see if I can describe the general sensation of being at sea:

From my bunk, which is located on a lower deck at the very front of the ship (for maximum discomfort), I can hear splashing and foaming as the Roger Revelle cuts through the water, and over that a consistent booming that sounds like cannon fire. That's caused by the waves crashing against the hull. The booms are unsettling, but the resulting creaks and rattles are terrifying. Dave's moaning is no good either. And my rat makes a little "chirk chirk" sound.

In the Roaring Forties, the motion of the ship was mostly that of pitching, or up-and-down motion. In the Roaring Fifties, rolling, or side-to-side motion, was added to the mix. Between the two, it's an awesome roller coaster; your body constantly feels either pressed against the deck or pulled to the ceiling. I'm told that we experience 0.2 Gs out here, meaning when we're cruising down the big waves we feel one-fifth of sea level gravity. The big ones, by my count, keep us falling for at least two seconds, maybe three. An interesting effect is you can feel your organs shifting about as well. My brain has been doing jumping jacks for about two days straight now.

Seasickness is generally caused by a mismatch between what your eyes see and what the balancing fluids in your inner ear feel. This is why staring at the horizon is as good a cure as any, and why staying inside is such a trip. It's quite fun, being inside: bouncing off walls, lurching around, hanging on for dear life while showering...

Usual forms of medication for seasickness include dramamine, scopolamine patches, acupressure wrist bracelets, and ginger candy. The ginger candy is tasty but bullshit, the acupressure bracelets are a hoax, and I'm scared of taking dramamine or scopolamine since they'll turn me into a zombie. That being said, I'm not scared of using the dramamine as a rat poison. I'll have to warn Dave not to eat the little pills in the corner.

Really, I highly recommend going to sea. The best part is: you constantly feel like you and everyone around you is drunk. The worst part is: no alcohol on the boat.

I met a rat

2007-02-05T14:48:00.000-08:00

At 0300 last night, I met a rat. I awoke to a gentle rubbing motion on my neck, and as I sleepily groped around to see who it was, I felt little teeth clamping down on my thumb. My first thought was, "A rat!" My second thought was, "I can feel its fear." With my other hand, I grabbed hold of its ear and pinched as hard as I could. I guessed the monster to be about a foot in length... truly a Rodent of Unusual Size. This would have frightened me more had I not been so sleepy. Anyway, the rat and I were locked in a silent squeezing match; its teeth biting my hand, my fingers pinching its ear, and we held this for about two minutes, after which I fell asleep again.

My alarm buzzed at 0730, and the rat was gone. My hand seemed in good condition but for some tenderness near the knuckles. I scrubbed my hands thoroughly to wash away the plague, and then I told Dave, my bunkmate, the story of the rat. Together we searched all the seams and corners of the room for possible points of entry. The only potential entrance was from underneath my mattress, but Dave was convinced that I had only been dreaming. I know better... I just wish the rat had actually broken skin. For proof!

T minus 19 hours

2007-02-02T23:20:00.000-08:00

We depart at 1600 tomorrow. Tonight is my last night on land... maybe ever.

A lot of things are going through my head. Most of these things have to do with Jack Bauer, the greatest American hero since Abraham Lincoln, but that's only because--when last I stopped watching--he was about to infiltrate the terrorist camp under the pseudonym Dr. Rossler. What happens next?? I feel much like a Jack Bauer of the ocean... with my pseudonym being "Dan Park" and my terrorist camp being "CO2". I am here to defeat CO2 with minimal civilian casualties.

Chief Scientist Jim Swift informs me that I require extensive briefing regarding the CO2/terrorist cells. I will debrief you with further information as I receive it.

--Jack "Dan 'Jack' Park" Bauer-Park

Day 2 of Loading: A Review of the Cadbury Chocolate Factory, Dunedin NZ

2007-02-02T23:19:00.001-08:00

(by Guest Writer Pien)

Loading is one of the busiest times on the ship. However, if you're not a crew member or a technician or, in lieu of that, very obviously well-muscled, your main job is to avoid being underfoot. We were assigned to help build the Hydro Lab, but they were overstaffed as it was. After two hours of observing and filming, we were instructed to clean up a mild tritium spill in two refrigerators, but they needed at least another day to thaw. We participated in a human conveyor belt to move an entire truck full of food into the freight elevator: boxes of broccolini, tomatoes, strawberries, shrink-wrapped duck. It turned out to be the wrong delivery, so we formed another human conveyor belt to move it all back off the ship. All of this took us to noon.

Faced with the prospect of spending an entire afternoon watching other people sweat, we instead went to town for a tour of the Cadbury Chocolate Factory. Their royal purple brochure, adorned with orange swirls, heavily advertised its free samples and chocolate waterfall in a rather misleading evocation of Willy Wonka.

0. After using our expired student ID cards to procure a $2NZ discount, we were instructed to wander through the self-guided area for ten minutes before our factory tour began. There were marionettes and a viewing deck onto the reception area, from which you could observe other people buying tickets. It was pretty empty, but not empty enough: the man-sweat of one stranger overpowered any scent of chocolate we were instructed to detect from the old-school churn in operation.

1. Joe, our guide, was a former factory worker. He provided us with shower caps, which we donned to watch a frightening claymation featuring Mel the Cadbury Man. Joe was big on surprises. He chortled when he handed us our first bar of candy: a "Chocolate Fish," which resembles a strawberry Charleston Chew. "Get ready," he intoned.

2. We stopped outside a nondescript building, shutters locked. Here, apparently, thousands of liters of milk a day are mixed with sugar and turned into "crumble," the basis of chocolate production. There are three giant silos adjacent to the building, in which summer-crumble is stored. Joe says that in winter, the cows produce milk that is less creamy. When full, each silo weighs 600 tons.
Surprises: This one we didn't find out until later. One of these silos is not a crumble holder. Please refer to #6.

3. We clogged the entrance to the factory by stopping at a flow-diagram depicting what goes into milk, dark, white chocolate. Petite Asian women, also wearing shower caps, squeeze behind us pushing large laden carts.
Surprises: Joe was surprised that no women admitted to knowing that cocoa butter was a popular ingredient in face cream. He was, however, unsurprised when the petite Asian women nicked the corner trying to make a turn through the narrow space we'd left. "Women drivers," he quipped proudly.

4. Joe paused in front of the guy who collects Cadbury chocolate buttons into a cardboard box. "Every hour, he measures the size and weight of a button to make sure it's uniform," he said. "This is the most boring job ever." We proceeded upstairs to the Crunchie bar manufacturing area, where Joe explained that the assembly of this product is particularly damaging to the wrists. "We have to rotate workers frequently in this division," he said. Otherwise, the repetitive motion could cause irreversible injury.
Surprises: The chocolate factory really sucks.

5. We head to a platform for a birdseye view of storage, a cavernous warehouse filled floor-to-ceiling with pallets on pallets of Cadbury chocolates in every variety. Joe appeased us with a fishbowl of chocolate bars, from which we are instructed to take one.
Surprises: Dan was impressed by the magnitude of storage. It was, however, only half the size of your average Costco. I was surprised when a reserved, unassuming couple lit into the candy bowls and grabbed not one, but two fun-sized bars each. "You're not supposed to do that," Joe admonished. At the next candy station, Joe distributed the samples by hand.

6. We enter a silo renovated to contain a staircase that spirals around a giant funnel. Joe starts a machine that pours chocolate into the funnel. Over the industrial din, he explains that this quantity of liquid chocolate is reused for an entire year, exclusively for the "waterfall" display. "Once a year we dump it," he says.
Surprises: There is something anticlimactic about a 20-second deluge of chocolate that is turned on for your viewing pleasure. Also, I didn't die from eating chocolate splatters scraped from the railings in the stairwell. I attribute this to the fact that the year is young.

It was kind of like trick-or-treating, except that we paid for it, and there was far less consumable candy.

Politics of the Mess Room

2007-02-01T21:10:00.000-08:00

Guest Blogger Cassandra praised the quality of the food offered by the resident chefs of the Roger Revelle. The chow is good, veritas, but in my post I am concerned not with the taste of food but with the politics of eating it. I will analyze daily meals from a political scientist’s point of view mainly because I just took a class on the subject, and also because I did very poorly in the class. I’m appeasing my guilty conscience... plus, who knows, maybe it’ll be fun tackling meals with rational choice theory, heresthetics, and the Gibbard-Satterthwaite Theorem on my side!

There are two categories of people on this boat: the chefs and the non-chefs. Some of the non-chefs occasionally prepare their own snacks and drinks, but I classify them as non-chefs because they are not paid to cook. Being paid to cook, in my most humble opinion, opinion though it may be, is the definition of being a chef. Not being paid to cook is illegal.

Meals proceed as follows: first, our two chefs, Dax and Ding, prepare the meal. I don’t know if those are their real names, but that’s what I call them anyway. Possible comedy! Second, the fifty-odd non-chefs line up, fill their plates buffet-style, and sit down to eat. Third, the non-chefs eat their meal. Fourth, the non-chefs bus their dishes and thank the chefs.

Ok, I think I’ll take a nap now, I’m sort of tired :(

Napping
To be honest, I find napping a lot more fun than politically sciencing. There are few things more satisfying than a gaping, sucking yawn, one of those big big yawns that, after yawning, induces a second, smaller aftershock-yawn. Example: YAAAWWWN - yawwn. Or: yaw—yaw... yawww--- huhhhh... YAWWWWWN Yawn smack smack hup! ... And then, after the body is loose and soft, there’s nothing quite like flopping over and closing one’s eyes. It is in that brief state of post-yawn and pre-nap flop that many of the world’s mysteries reveal themselves--the meaning of life and all that--and it is during the subsequent nap stage that all that burdensome bunk is forgotten. Hup!

Guest Blogger Cassandra

2007-02-01T21:08:00.000-08:00

Introducing... Guest Blogger Cassandra! Here we go:

The removal of hazardous materials
Yesterday we had a nearly indecent proposal. Not the fun kind, however. Because of our low position on board, several people thought it would be a great idea to have us clean two fridges contaminated with tritium. For those of you that haven’t encountered this substance before, it is radioactive. The person in charge of the clean up and disposal of hazardous materials, Sandy, must have seen the concerned look that crossed our faces, because she readily assured us that at the low levels we were encountering, it was almost not worth mentioning. Geochemists seem to be the only ones who might notice tritium at these levels, since they often measure the amount of ambient tritium in seawater. Therefore, it was vital that we scrub the fridges to remove these miniscule amounts of tritium. Of course, in order to do this, we needed special disposal bags, dozens of paper towels, sponges, and lots of special cleaning solution, as well as gloves and special instructions.
Before beginning this tedious task, we gave Dan the honor of being the dirty person, while Pien and I stayed clean by handing him his supplies and holding the contamination bag. Things were going quite smoothly until Dan disgraced our good name by dropping a dirty paper towel on the ground, possibly spreading the radioactive tritium to the ground, and then dropping the towel in our clean bucket of solution. Of course, this happened to be the only bucket available on the ship for this purpose, and of course the bucket was now contaminated. Sandy suspected we might mess up and wasn’t mad-- apparently students are often careless when cleaning up hazardous materials. We labored on, demoting Dan to errand runner and fridge door holder while we completed the rest of the fridge ourselves. Today, at least, we earned our lunch on board the ship.

Ship food
Gone are the days when seafaring people had to rely on dried biscuits and other food-like substances while at sea. These days, at least on the two research ships I’ve had the pleasure of eating on, meals are a gourmet affair, at least until the fresh produce runs out. At breakfast, the offerings range from fresh fruit and bacon and sausage to fried and scrambled eggs. At lunch, there are often several choices, from salad and soup to seafood dishes. The chefs are so good you might wonder why they choose to work on a research vessel instead of applying their skills elsewhere. As one veteran of the ship put it, one former cook on another vessel was asked that very question. He responded that he had a wife in California and another in Louisiana, and he needed the time to himself! The chefs on board, at least, have the honor of being the most popular members on board for good reason. We plan on doing a cooking show on the ship with the star chef-- I’m sure it will premier on the food network following Giada’s Everyday Italian-- these chefs can hold their own against her.

On board the Roger Revelle

2007-01-31T00:25:00.000-08:00

We build my new home with the sweat of hairy men and hoary women: loading of the Roger Revelle has commenced. Yesterday, the ship put into port after two months at sea, having just finished traversing the South Pacific. During today’s loading frenzy, I harrowed the hairy men with constant filming, and they would say to me, “Where are you from?” And I would gently offer back, “Los Angeles!” And they would say, “Well, we just came from San Diego.” Long story short: out with the old scientists, in with the new scientists, calloo callay.

I have been assigned a modest cabin on the lower deck of the ship. It’s a good bit roomier than my expectations, and, more concretely, than my freshman year dorm. It’s also much less smelly with the regrettable absence of Mr. Banka. Man that guy poops a lot! Plus, I’ve got my own toilet—on boats they’re called ‘heads’—it’s to the left of the photo. Cabin 2-22-3 is quite nice, overall, with the main drawback being the neighboring sonar, which generates a zesty ‘ping!’ noise every few seconds.

This is the main corridor, facing the front of the ship. To the right (starboard) is the main lab, to the left (port) are a series of smaller specialized labs. I’m still getting accustomed to seaman’s lingo. I will have to ask what the ‘larboard’ side is.

Here are a few photos of the ship; first from the port, second from the gangway (in the lower left corner you can see Joseph, the second mate), and third from aft deck facing Dunedin, New Zealand. As you can tell, the boat is rather large and luxurious; I am reminded somewhat of that ski resort in The Shining. Just wait until I post some photos of the kitchen and mess hall, the huge food storage locker, and the humungous ballroom. And if I went crazy to boot, that would be such a creepy coincidence.

I will update with more photos and words over the next few days; we set sail on Sunday. I will be rather busy these next few days drinking as much liquor as possible. SIO vessels do not allow beer, ale, wine, vodka, rum, champagne, whiskey, smirnoff ice, hypnotiq, white russians, or long island ice teas on board. In fact, no alcohol at all is permitted.

And a last thing... just something I’ve noticed about New Zealand: I’ve never before seen a sky so cliche.

Guest writer Pien weighs in

2007-01-31T00:18:00.000-08:00

This update comes from Guest Writer Pien Huang, or "Pien" as she's known down south. Anyway, here is her post, verbatim, for which I take no responsibility. If you have a beef with it, or her, then whatever:

Everybody knows that there are more sheep than people in New Zealand. What they don’t tell you is that there are NO (native) people in New Zealand, only millions of sheep eating flowers at the base of dramatic avalanche-ridden landscapes (tree-, rock-, or snowfall), a few cows and a giant pigeon (the second biggest pigeon species in the world, says Cassandra) sprinkled here and there. There are, at least, no people on the route we took through the southern South Island, from Queenstown to Te Anau to Milford Sound and west to Dunedin. All of our waitresses were from the American mid-west, and the crowds we encountered were predominantly Japanese.

On our return boat trip from the glowworm caves in Te Anau (pitch dark like I’ve never seen before, illuminated by a thousand glows from the butt-end of hungry fungus gnat flies-- Arachnocampa luminosa --larvae; they entangle insects in suspended lines of mucus, reel them up, paralyze them, and feast) we had a nice chat with a retired schoolteacher from Yorkshire, who regaled us with stories of pitching his friend’s car off a Kiwi cliff (he was grateful for missing the crash barrier, because that would have really damaged the car; he’s still driving it, after several thousand dollars in repairs), digging sandfly bits out of his skin, and getting rollicking drunk and sleeping it off, all over the world. He also imparted evidence of early Chinese feats and their impact on world history from his newest read, 1421, and told us about the underground power plant he’d toured earlier that day. He was having a grand, if lonely, time, and he might have talked forever if he hadn’t had to pick up a tomato at the grocer before it closed, to complement the can of sardines he was carting around. The tab had fallen off, and he was planning to pierce it with a fork. In less than an hour, we learned more about Jim than about any Kiwi we’d (n)ever encounter (and maybe even more than we knew about each other).

So: in all of our driving, we’ve seen thousands of, maybe millions, of sheep, in various shades of white. When it rains, the shaved ones (the whitest ones) cling miserably to the property lines, delineated by a single row of trees, for shelter. I vaguely wondered whether there were any black sheep, and on the stretch of road from Queenstown to Te Anau, I saw a whole trio of them. Nobody else saw it. It was as if I had willed them into being through my mild curiosity. Relegated to the backseat on subsequent stretches of road, with Regina Spektor on repeat, I developed the insatiable urge to repeat that experience, as if recurring would make it more valid, or real. There were several fruitless days. On the drive west to Dunedin, a huddle of sheep seemed so familiar that I suddenly realized that the trio I’d seen had been merely gray. Not only were they typical, they were incredibly dirty, which made them sub-typical. I came to be convinced that, in my desire to see them, my senses had deceived me. I came to doubt that I had ever witnessed the real thing; meanwhile, Cassandra confirmed that a bird we saw on the first day was indeed her extremely large pigeon. Black sheep seem specifically to elude me.

From Te Anau...

2007-01-28T22:35:00.000-08:00

I am writing from the Te Anau Laundromat/Internet shop on main street. Just returned from Milford Sound, a fancy little fiord with millions of waterfalls. The best part was when we briefly reached the end of the fiord, where the Tasmanian Sea begins. Quite rough water! Was like riding one of those Viking boats at a rollercoaster park. I think I can handle 30-foot seas.

Yesterday we went to the Aurora Caves... inside is a place called the Glowworm Grotto, quite amazing! Very dark inside, ceiling speckled with thousands of glowworms, like looking at the night sky. That's their evolutionary advantage, actually; insects lost inside the caves try to get out when they see the stars, but get trapped by the glowworm's sticky threads. The glowworms make food come to them... the tour guide said they're some of the laziest creatures in the world. If only I could make pizza come to me.....

The Carbon Cycle

2007-01-27T13:06:00.000-08:00

Repeat hydrography surveys measure carbon, hydrographic, and other trace elements. The data gathered supports the development of an ocean and global climate forecasting model. The types of studies conducted on I8S will include carbon system studies, heat and freshwater storage and flux studies, deep water mass and ventilation studies (tracer measurement), and calibration of autonomous sensors for developing technologies.

In the next few paragraphs, I’ll cite and summarize part of a statement of purpose written by Jim Swift, the chief scientist and organizer of the first leg of the I8S study. I don’t fully understand all this stuff, of course, but I’ll further clarify the purpose and methods involved in obtaining these data.

The carbon cycle, like the relatively well-known water cycle, describes the exchange of carbon between the atmosphere, oceans, and the biosphere (freshwater systems, living organisms, non-living organic material, and sediments). It’s pretty complicated, I guess, but being able to measure the change in carbon content of the oceans over time tells a lot about the air-sea CO2 flux, helps predict long-term climate change, and furthermore describes man’s influence on the rate of change by comparison with pre-industrial data, and by tracking CO2 measurements in newer versus older (deeper) water.

The carbon system studies on this vessel offer a useful diagnosis of oceanic carbon transport, particularly through interhemispheric carbon exchange to model for large scale effects of global warming on the ocean’s biogeochemistry, whether due to changes in stratification, circulation, or perturbations such as a change in the dust eposition on the ocean’s surface. Additionally, the study will measure partial pressure of CO2 in surface water to assess air-sea CO2 exchange, which is an indicator of changes in the function of the biological pump in surface waters.

One of the major findings of CLIVAR/CO2 is the acidification of the oceans. This is caused by the introduction of carbon dioxide to the ocean; carbon dioxide reacts with water to produce carbonic acid, which is a forward and reverse reaction in equilibrium. But when CO2 is introduced in excess, carbonic acid breaks down into hydrogen ions and bicarbonate, which lowers the pH.

The acidification of the oceans results in all sorts of hell breaking loose, notably including the destruction of the corals. But I personally wonder whether sushi tastes even better as a result? Tangy!

Why go to Antarctica?

2007-01-27T13:01:00.000-08:00

Some of you may be wondering why a skinny guy like me would dare creep about the Southern Ocean. A certain Jacob K. speculated that I chose to go to Antarctica just for "Danparktica." Not so, Mr. K! I chose the blog name post-facto. Although it may seem like more than just a coincidence that my name rhymes with "Ant-arc," it's not merely fate. Aisha M. noted that I could work my name into any pun, a "surprisingly impressive talent." She's right, it is impressive. In fact, though you may have thought I'd explain why I chose to go to Antarctica, I will instead provide a list of blog titles I considered before choosing "Danparktica":

Pun Considerations
-- Antarctiblog
-- Dan's Arctiblog
-- Danparktiblog
-- Dance Parktiblog
-- Dance Parky!!!
-- Master and Commander: The Park Side of the World
-- The March of the Park-guins
-- An Inconvenient Trip

Sandflies

2007-01-27T12:59:00.000-08:00

What is a sandfly? I hadn't heard of them until Pien told us a story about how they lay eggs in your skin... and when the eggs hatch, they leave behind permanent gashes. No thanks! So it's long sleeves and pants for me. Except I want a tan... perhaps I will vibrate.

Cassandra thought she saw a sandfly in the car, and so she killed it. Except we couldn't find the corpse, which leads me to believe that sandflies cannot be killed.

Getting to New Zealand...

2007-01-27T12:55:00.000-08:00

...was a tribulation! It involved:
-- LAX, the worst airport ever
-- a twelve hour flight made bearable only by watching 'The Departed'
-- NZ Customs seizing our bags
-- NZ Air trying to send my bags to Dunedin and not Queenstown with me... although I wouldn't have been able to correct this had NZ Customs NOT seized my bags
-- a fire alarm that emptied the airport 5 minutes prior to boarding

The nice part is that I get to drive on the left side of the road! The rental car is fun: everything is backwards. The wheel's on the right and the turn signals are on the right of the wheel, so every time I turn, I activate the windshield wipers. Also different here: the toilets flush clockwise and the windshield wiper spray shoots bird shit and not soap.

Infinite Fetch, and other things

2007-01-25T02:26:00.000-08:00

About a week ago, I traveled to the Scripps Institution of Oceanography at La Jolla (San Diego), along with Pien and Cassandra. While there, we met with some of the chief scientists and trip organizers for I8S. Jim Swift, Lynne Talley, Joe Reid, etc etc the list of oceanographic rockstars goes on and on, but I'm no name-dropper. Andrew Dickson, Steve Diggs. Etc. These men and women are giants in the field, sure, but that's not a big deal. What's more important is that they cared about me. Worried, even. See here:

Things they said to me:
"There is no safe place on the boat. At any time, a cable could snap and you'd be sliced in two. This one time, I thought I was standing in a safe place, but I almost got sliced in two."

"We're dealing with equipment... it's like a Volkswagen hanging on a string."

"We're going to be at least 7 days from the nearest hospital at any given time. One time a guy had a detached retina, and although we immediately recognized the symptoms and turned around, he still lost his vision."

"There was this one girl who never got over her seasickness... I'd look in on her every day just to check for vital signs."

"If you fall overboard, we only have a few seconds to try and locate your body. No, there's not much of a chance of living if you fall overboard, but it's nice when we can recover the body."

"There's a famous saying... 'The worst thing about seasickness is that you don't die.'"

"There was one scientist who wore those seasickness ear patches every day. You're only supposed to wear them for 4 to 6 days, but he wore them for weeks. He was never the same again."

"One guy did die of seasickness... he starved."

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Another thing I learned about is fetch. Fetch, in oceanographic terms, is the length of water over which a wind can blow. Fetch, along with wind speed, determine wave size. For example, on a lake, the length of the lake is the fetch, and that is not very large compared to, say, the Atlantic Ocean, and as such, the waves produced on a lake are smaller than those in the ocean.

In the Southern Ocean, winds circle west-to-east in an uninterrupted loop around and around Antarctica. It is the only place in the world with infinite fetch. That's where you get "thirty-foot seas" and some of the roughest waters in the world.

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All of this stuff I learned prompted me to start making preparations... just in case. I will present my last Will and Testament shortly.

Welcome!

2007-01-22T13:35:00.000-08:00

Hi friends, hello strangers, and welcome to Danparktica, the official blog of my travels to the Southern Ocean and the Ice Continent... it's of me, by me, and for you!

Today I'll introduce you to the cruise--the purpose, the vessel, the people--and a few other tidbits. But first, an itinerary... think of this as a table of contents:

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Itinerary
25 Jan 2007 -- Fly out of Los Angeles.
27 Jan 2007 -- Arrive in Auckland, New Zealand. Immediately fly to Queenstown, NZ.
27-31 Jan 2007 -- Explore Queenstown, Te Anau, and Milford Sound.
31 Jan 2007 -- Arrive in Dunedin, NZ, and begin loading operations.
4 Feb 2007 -- The R/V Roger Revelle sets sail!
18 Mar 2007 -- The R/V Roger Revelle docks at Fremantle, Australia.
19 Mar 2007 -- Fly back to Los Angeles via Sydney.

The meat of the blog, of course, will be cooked during the 6-week cruise from Dunedin to Fremantle (which is near Perth). The ship will steam south to Antarctica before looping around and heading north to the west coast of Australia. I'll be updating via satellite.

The cruise is a part of the United States' contribution to the World Climate Research Program CLIVAR (Climate Variability) Repeat Hydrography Program (http://www.clivar.org/carbon_hydro) and the UNESCO International Ocean Carbon Coordination Project (http://ushydro.ucsd.edu). This particular cruise, called I8S/I9N, will perform a "repeat hydrography" transect from Antarctica to Bangladesh along 95 degrees east longitude. I'll be participating in the first leg of the cruise, I8S, which docks in Fremantle before continuing on to Bangladesh.

I8S is organized by the Scripps Institution of Oceanography (http://sio.ucsd.edu) at UC San Diego, and is funded by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (http://www.noaa.gov) and the National Science Foundation (http://www.nsf.gov).

This program is called "repeat hydrography" because it is performed regularly to determine patterns of change over time of the physical properties of water. I8S concerns one part of the Southern Ocean; every year, a different section of the ocean is studied. My cruise is repeating measurements made about a decade ago.

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There are 36 scientists, grad students, and Dan Parks on this cruise, along with 20 additional crew. My job will be to observe, assist, and document (video, still photography, illustrations) the scientists for a public outreach program; I will be working with Pien Huang and Cassandra Lopez, who are concerned with writing articles for journals. I'm just there for a good time! Actually, here:

Dan Park's Mission Statement
1. To put on a few pounds of muscle
2. Convince a few scientists and crew to act in a murder mystery
3. What if a polar bear somehow got lost in Antarctica? I'm going to turn this into a children's book which ends in a penguin-feast
4. Alert the world to the dangers of global warming!!!!!!!!!!!

Check back soon for another update. :) :)