The hula hoops and the chicken wire give the drifter shape.

Early this week, I built a drifter. 

The drifter is a big contraption that hangs from an small buoy and drifts along with the current. It allows me to track the flow of the water.  It is really easy to make the drifter. I build it using hula hoops, chicken wire, blue tarp and plastic ties.  The hula hoops act like a skeleton, giving the drifter shape. The chicken wire is also like a skeleton and the tarp is like a skin. There are some holes so that the water can run through the drogue instead of around it. That way, the water gets stuck in the drifter and the drifter gets stuck in the water, and they both move along together with the current.  So sometimes we use fancy equipment on research expeditions, and sometimes we do science with simple things that we just buy at the store.  

The tarp gives the drifter lots of surface area so it can move along with the water. The holes help the drifter catch the water.

Diving Ops

Today we had a tour of the dive facilities on board the Alucia. The Alucia is very well equipped for scuba diving.

She has a decompression chamber, which is used in case of a diver gets the bends. This is a condition in which dissolved gas comes out as bubbles inside the body and the diver must be recompressed and then slowly decompressed as treatment. The chamber looks like a giant tick-tack with port holes in it.

Surprisingly it has a capacity for 3 people: the patient, the nurse, and a third diver.  Before entering, you must be completely washed, re-clothed in natural non-flammable fiber clothing and stripped of all jewelry. The reason for this is that you will be breathing oxygen and O2 feeds fire.  The whole procedure takes several hours, but it has a little exchange window by which they can pass you a blanket or a snack without de-pressurizing the entire system.  

None of this sounds like fun, so I will be diving very conservatively, and drinking lots of water and sleeping well in order to dive safely.  

To our good fortune, the Alucia also has mixed-gas dive support, which will allows us to dive with air that has 32% oxygen instead of the normal 21% oxygen.  Using this oxygen enriched air with a conservative dive plan decreases the possibility of getting the bends.  

The mixed-air support, plus the chamber make the Alucia an excellent dive platform for a month-long expedition to remote islands.

The Cruise Track and Mission

This cruise departs from Guam and wraps up in Pohnpei, the capital of the Federated States of Micronesia.  Between these two destinations we will be hopping from atoll to atoll, spending a maximum of 2 days at each site. If we are running behind schedule, we will have to bypass some of the sites.

Cruise track from Guam to Pohnpei with one stop in Pohnpei for re-provisioning.

The mission of our expedition is two-fold. First, we will collect long cores of coral skeleton from large boulder-like colonies in order to reconstruct past climate patterns.  Basically, we take a “biopsy” of the skeleton and we look at the annual layers (which are like tree-rings) to count back the years. By sampling and analyzing the mineral from each annual layer, we construct a chemical record which can be translated into a climate record using a calibration that works like a code.  I will explain this science mission in more detail later, but for now, Konrad and Justin will be doing the major drilling on scuba, and Sujata (a recent college grad who has interned in our lab) and I will be assisting and documenting the operation using underwater cameras. 

The second part of the mission is to assess and document the health of the reefs from many different angles. We have one team looking at the microbial communities on the corals. Another team will document the species present and will quantify the presence of disease. And I will be measuring how fast the coral community is growing. I will explain all of these components in more detail, one at a time.  I will also explain why we care about coral reefs and these reefs in particular in a later post.

Why I am writing this blog....

Thank you for encouraging me to write this blog about my field trip to Micronesia. I can’t believe it never occurred to me to write blogs about my earlier expeditions to the Red Sea. I have two goals for this blog.

First, I wish to share this experience with my family. I have been so happy that some of you have been able to visit me at MIT and Woods Hole and come to better understand this chapter of my life. One major part of my grad school experience that I have not yet been able to share with you is the field experience. You have asked lots of great questions. I would like to use this blog to help demystify field work for you.

The second purpose is to practice writing. I have bashfully shared this with a few trusted mentors and family members. I would greatly appreciate your suggestions, comments, and constructive criticism on the blog content, style and layout.  I will be experimenting a bit with some of my posts, so it is good to know what works and what doesn't work. I want to pick up these skills now, as I want to put them to practice in reaching out to a broader audience very soon.

Stay tuned for more details about the research cruise mission and the Who, What, Where, When, Why of this expedition.

Ask questions at any time!

Photo of the almost 100 ft-long wing of the Boeing 777-200 as we touch down in Guam on Tuesday Oct 15 at 6pm.