Amusing Signs

From the New Zealand part of the trip.


A bar in Lyttelton, New Zealand.



Teehee! They call their shopping carts "trundlers" in New Zealand. Isn't that adorable?

Goodbye, Punta Arenas

I leave Chile today. I'm going to miss all my friends from the Palmer, the science-ing, watching movies in the afternoon, eating greasy food (especially when we ran out of fresh fruit three weeks out), even the 25 degree rolls. Until next time!

Sagrado Corazón Cathedral

One of my favorite things to do when traveling is to go to church. This sounds bizarre because most people skip church when they're on vacation, but I love seeing local customs first-hand. You can only get so deep into a culture by shopping in tourist-y stores. Chile is predominantly Catholic, so it seemed like an especially good idea to go to mass.

I stopped by the cathedral near the Plaza and took a leap of faith that a sheet of paper on the bulletin board saying "Masa Domingo 8:00, 10:00. Masa Diario 16:00" meant that I should show up at 4 PM. Much to my surprise (have I mentioned that I don't speak Spanish?), people were actually gathered for mass when I came back.

Since Catholic services follow the same order everywhere, I was able to follow along and mumble English responses. That's another beautiful thing about going to church in a foreign country, knowing that everywhere across the world people are going through the same rituals, reading the same Bible passages all in their own languages.

Once mass was over, two old men stopped to talk to me. Our conversation was basically them talking in broken English and me attempting to make Latin sound Spanish-y. It must have worked because I figured out that they were thanking me for stopping by their church and telling me "peace be with you" (one of the responses during mass). We managed to work out that I was about to meet a friend at the Plaza. They also told me, "You look, to my eyes, very good." And now I can say I've been hit on just outside church by guys three times my age.

Punta Arenas

That's pronounced "Punta Arena," by the way, because final s's are silent in the Chilean accent. My (non-existent) Spanish is ruined forever. The next time I visit Mexico I'll go around saying "Gracia" and everyone will think I can't even say "Thank you" correctly.



This is a statue of Magellan in the Plaza. Sailors are supposed to rub the big toe of the guy sitting down for good luck before a journey. I rubbed it for retroactive good luck on the Palmer.

The Plaza itself is adorable with a few stands set up selling souvenirs. Apparently Chile is famous for its wool. Guess what you'll be getting, guys back home! Because the ship sure didn't have a souvenir stand.

Pisco Calafate

The first night in port we went to a restaurant (with meat! lots of meat!) and then to a pub. It turns out sailors like to get REALLY DRUNK their first night back after a cruise with no alcohol allowed. I think this photo captures the spirit of the night. (No, parents, I didn't get drunk.)



The regional drink is Pisco Calafate, similar to Pisco Sour but with Calafate ("Magellan barberry") juice. And don't ever get Chileans started on the "Is Pisco from Peru or Chile?" debate. It turns out Pisco Calafates are really good, which is sad because they don't exist outside of Southern Chile.

Oops

When we first arrived at the port, I was astonished by the number of boats from Texas. Almost every boat had a Texan flag.



Turns out I need to study my flags.



I think the mistake was understandable.

We've Arrived

We got into Punta Arenas this morning. I woke up briefly at 6:30 AM and went up to the bridge to see the sunrise. We were hanging out in the harbor for a while since they weren't expecting us until later. I've been out to see the city, but it's not nearly as photogenic as Christchurch was. I'll try to find some good pictures to post, though (now that I have internet!).



(originally posted on Livejournal)

Land Ahoy

Things are slowing down on the boat. Turned out there wasn't a ping editing party this morning since most people finished their edits beforehand, so when I woke up we had stopped collecting data and land was in sight.



That rainbow has been following us all day. :) Ironically, the land we're seeing to either side of the channel looks a lot more like the LotR scenery than the stuff I saw in New Zealand. (The picture above isn't actually an example of this.)

It's funny how my subconscious has gotten so in tune with the rocking of the boat. When I woke up this morning I opened my door and didn't close it or latch it open right away and just left it hanging. This is amazing because after about the second day of the trip I learned never to leave a door open because it will just slam shut or attack you when the boat rocks. But my subconscious had noticed that we weren't rocking any more even if my mind didn't.

The next few days:

Monday: Get in to Punta Arenas in the morning (4 AM?). We're free to get off the boat as soon as customs is done with us (9 AM?), explore! and spend the night on the boat.
Tuesday: More exploring, possible trip to a penguin colony. Spend the night in a hotel.
Wednesday: Begin making my way back, Punta Arenas to Santiago, Santiago to Lima, Lima to Los Angeles (Lima being in Peru, which I didn't actually know.)
Thursday: get to LAX in the morning :)
Weekend: work like crazy

(originally posted on Livejournal)

Ping Party

Tomorrow is going to be an exciting day. Once we reach the continental shelf we finish collecting data. And then once the ping files are ready we'll have a giant ping editing party so that Marcel and Chris can finish processing all the data before we dock. Rumor has it we'll be able to see land pretty soon, too. :)

(originally posted on Livejournal)

Only one week left

Yesterday we had really strong headwinds that slowed us down to 5 knots from our usual speed of 10 knots. :P The view outside was cool because the wind kept blowing back the water on the crests of the waves. Unfortunately, the strong wind meant we had really lousy data and had to throw out a few hours worth of data for the first time. But in general we've been lucky - the last cruise Marcel headed only had about 4 days of good data.

It's hard to believe there's only a week left until we get to Chile.

(originally posted on Livejournal)

More Iceberg Excitement

Last night we had an iceberg that didn't show up on the radar. I was asleep already, but apparently it was about 100 feet long and we came very close to it without noticing. The rest of the night we slowed down to watch for more icebergs. The Palmer may be an icebreaker, but it probably wouldn't fare so well against an iceberg. (Rumor has it there's a dent in the front from when the first captain tried it.) All these icebergs are probably breaking off of something bigger that somehow made it pretty far north, but I doubt we'll see it.

We're also heading into rougher weather. The isobar map shows a big low pressure spot in the middle of our path, which is apparently bad. I woke up twice last night because of big rolls. R.G. and C.H. said that the homemade "Roll-o-meter" showed about 25 degrees of roll. We might get into 30 foot high waves later on in the trip. I'm looking forward to it, but it'll be bad for the data.



(originally posted on Livejournal)

Iceberg!

Yesterday we saw an iceberg! I would be excited about seeing an iceberg any day, but I was especially excited after being on this ship for 14 days with nothing out the window except for ocean. No one expected to see any icebergs because winter is just starting and we're not that far south (just ~50 degrees), so this was a special treat. And then later when I was outside taking photos of V. and S. doing a Argo drop, we spotted another, smaller iceberg. The photo doesn't really show how humongous this thing must have been - at least as big as the ship, if not several times as big.



While we were watching the iceberg from the bridge we saw a cardboard box with "bomb" written on it. We thought it was odd, but it turns out it was for a drill today. About once a week we have one of these drills, and all of the passengers (us) have to go to the conference room with our life vests and immersion suits to prepare for boarding the life boat. This week the crew got to practice finding a bomb. Unfortunately, they didn't find it before it blew up. It turns out the captain himself was the evil guy who planted it on the bridge, and when the crew members went to sweep the bridge he told them he'd already done it, and they left. So we're all dead.

(originally posted on Livejournal)

Roll-o-meter 2000 v.2.0

The shipboard inclinometer only updates once every second, so unless the ship happens to be at the top of a roll at exactly the right time, the maximum angle doesn't get recorded. Obviously, I had to make a Roll-o-meter. It updates continuously and so is obviously superior to the "fancy" electronic instruments.



(The photo is staged, I don't think I would be able to hold on to a camera and take an in-focus picture if the ship were actually in a 25° roll.)

0-10°: M.C. falls over when standing on one leg
10-20°: chairs and drinks fall over
20-30°: drawers open, science falls on the floor
(referring to our first big roll when all the unsecured maps and log books fell)
30-40°: blub blub

Hail, Hail

We just had a brief hail flurry! I heard a weird noise outside my cabin window and looked outside to investigate. I thought it might be snow at first because V. and C. saw a snow flurry when they dropped an argo probe a few nights ago. I went outside to take pictures (the captain thought I was crazy), and I really like how this one turned out. The flash caught the hail right in front of my camera. The reflective crosses on the lifeboat don't usually appear like that, they were just caught by the flash, too.

(originally posted on Livejournal)

Rock and Roll

I got to help V. (the biologist) reload the XBT autolauncher the other day. The conditions were pretty good - the waves weren't too big and the boat wasn't rocking much - so I was safe. Even so I had to wear the ridiculous looking orange suit. When the conditions aren't very good it can actually be pretty dangerous. If you're knocked off the ship then you have about three minutes before you go unconscious, which probably isn't long enough for the ship to turn around. But there are safety precautions to make sure nobody goes overboard. If the waves are really bad the captain closes down the deck, like she had to yesterday.

We've arrived at our area of study, the Vacquier fracture zone. Brief geology lesson: spreading centers (such as the Mid-Ocean Ridge in the Atlantic or the East Pacific Rise in the Pacific) are offset by perpendicular transform faults in order to compensate for the spherical geometry of the Earth and make all the plates happy. The transform fault is the active part and the fracture zone refers to the entire structure - both currently and historically active.



We've started zig-zagging to get data for a wider area. The ship motion has been relatively small up to this point in our cruise since we've been traveling with the wind (the winds go clockwise around Antarctica) and therefore with the waves. But now that we're zig-zagging, we're going against the waves, and the ship's been rocking a lot more. We had one 19.94 degree roll last night, and we've had a lot of rolls over 10 degrees.

(originally posted on Livejournal)

This is where science happens

Science! Continued

V. and C. reload the XBT launcher. In funny orange jackets.

(originally posted on Livejournal)

Science!

Some people have been asking what I do on the Palmer. (My parents forward me any comments left on the journal, in case you were wondering.) We collect magnetic, gravity, and multibeam data as we sail. Unfortunately, we're not doing seismics, which would have been a blast (literally...). We also do XBT launches. The XBT (Expendable Bathy Thermograph) looks sort of like a missile with a copper wire extending back to the ship. It collects temperature data as a function of depth.

The multibeam works like sonar. A "ping" is sent out from the ship, and instruments on the bottom of the ship record when it returns. Based on the temperature data from the XBT, the distance to the bottom of the ocean is calculated. The instruments record data from an array of angles, so for each ping we get a line of data. You can hear the ping from most parts of the ship, and the first time I noticed it I thought there was a bird sitting outside the window. You can hear it from the bedrooms... once every few seconds... all night long... Grr.

There are 6 watchstanders, and we each have 4 hour shifts, so that one of us is on duty at any time during the day. C.H. is midnight - 4 AM, R.G. is 4 AM - 8 AM, me 8 AM - noon, M.C. is noon - 4 PM, R.A. is 4 PM - 8 PM, and I.M. is 8 PM - midnight. So it ends up that R.A., I.M. and I hang out together during the day, and C.H. and R.G. hang out together at night just because of how the shifts worked out.

We have to make sure all the instruments are working correctly and recording data. Every 15 minutes we record everything in an Excel spreadsheet and in a written watch log. We also have to watch the multibeam and adjust the angles constantly. When the weather is good and we're getting good data, we set the multibeam at a larger angle, so that we collect the most data we can given the conditions. Just right now the data is lousy, and I keep having to decrease the angle.

When we're not on shift, we edit multibeam files. This mostly involves deleting bad data points. If the temperature data doesn't match the actual ocean temperature, we get smilee and frowny pings (it looks like the topography curves up or down at the edges, when that's not what's actually going on). When the ocean is rough, air mixes with the water, which completely messes up the multibeam, so even though the instruments account for the pitch and roll of the ship, the data's still bad.

That's about it. I'm going to watch V. and S. do a XBT launch this afternoon, so hopefully I can post some shots of them getting drenched on the back deck. (V. does her own XBT launches to collect data for the National Weather Service and for Scripps, and S. is the representative from Raytheon.)

(originally posted on Livejournal)

The Wave

Last night was pretty rough weather, and no one I spoke to had a good night's sleep. There's just something about being thrown against the headboard and then the footboard of your bed that makes sleeping difficult. But, again, the experienced people say it's nothing. The ship's maximum roll last night was about 19 degrees. When I came down to the lab this morning, it looked like a destruction zone with chairs on their sides, papers and odds and ends all over the floor. There's no point in putting them back because everything will just fall over again (it's still really bad this morning). I was looking out the window in the lab and saw a wave that looked just like the famous Japanese print, The Wave. The navy blue was the perfect shade, with foam on the crest.

For reference:


Yesterday was Easter. I celebrated by... doing my shift as usual. I did get a visit by the Easter Bunny (myself) and got a slightly melted chocolate bunny. I thought of my mom as I ate the ears (the Foxtrot mom always steals the ears off of her kids' bunnies). We did have steak and shrimp for dinner, which I guess is pretty good for being in the South Pacific.

(originally posted on Livejournal)

The Bridge

Photos from when we were in port at Lyttelton, which is why there's no one, say, steering the ship.

Some captains won't let you on the bridge when the ship is moving, but the Palmer's captain is nice and lets us up there about anytime. We can also go out onto the upper dock if the weather's alright. Which is great because, you know, getting fresh air a few times a month is recommended, I hear.