Student Questions from Nashville

Posted on January 6, 2011 by Whitney King

Dear Dr. King et al.

I introduced you to my 5th grade science students by reading your first post and they had a lot of questions:

Thanks for the posts from Nashville.   I am sitting at Logan Airport waiting for my flight to Miami.   Tonight I fly from  Miami to Santiago Chile.   Tomorrow I will fly from Santiago to Punta Arenas Chile to meet the ship.   If you click on the “Where is the Melville” tab your can zoom in on the dock where ship is being loaded.   We won’t leave until next week because we have a lot of unpacking to do.

1. How big is your cabin?

The cabins are about 8×10 feet for two people.   You can get full drawings on the ship from the Scripps web page and I have posted a drawing of my cabin deck to the right.  Your class might have fun calculating the area and volumes of different spaces from the drawings. Continue reading →

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So Much Water – So Little Time

Posted on December 31, 2010 by Whitney King

Great Belt Cruise Track v1.0

We just got an email from Barney on sampling logistics for the cruise.  You would think that researchers on an oceanographic research vessel floating in the middle of the ocean could have all the water they wanted whenever they wanted it.   However, we have limited sampling opportunities while the ship is moving and we only have 36 days to make it to Cape Town.  The map to the right shows the current cruse track.   The dots on the line are the sampling locations.  We are scheduled to sample 120 stations 52 nautical miles apart (6240 nautical miles, 24 days of steaming).  We must keep our average wire time (sampling time) to less than 8 hours for us to be able to get to Cape Town on 16 Feb.  Barney divided up the 8 hours to match the sampling need of all the research groups on the ship.   At this point, this is what a typical day will look like: Continue reading →

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Packing, Packing, Packing – What you leave behind stays behind.

Posted on December 14, 2010 by Whitney King

Preparing for a cruise takes almost as much time as the cruise itself.   Research ships are scheduled 1-2 years before the actual cruise.   The Chief Scientist, Barney, works with the ship operations crew at Scripps to refine the cruise schedule, arrange for ship services, define the lab space, and organize the scientific party.   Each scientist has a pile of medical and personnel forms to complete several months before the ship sails.   Each science party needs to identify every piece of equipment that they will need at sea.   Instruments are carefully packed up in shipping boxes and delivered to an air freight company for delivery to the ship.   If you need a spare part, power plug, or replacement fuse it had better be in the box.   Duct tape and shoe goo will only fix so much – although I packed these items too.  Chemical reagents are sent to the ship in stages.   Acids, bases, and reactive compounds are often loaded on the ship at a US port.   Nonreactive reagents can be sent via FedEx to the port of sail.   Temperature sensitive reagents must be carried in the checked luggage of the scientists. You can’t use a balance on the ship so all reagents need to be weighed before shipping.   Lists of all experiments are prepared, reagent use estimated, and reagent packs prepared.   If you runout of reagents your experiments are finished.   If you forget the pipette tips you can’t prepare your solutions.   Planning is key. What you leave behind stays behind.

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