I arrived in Victoria, Canada yesterday - A beautiful little town, by the way. If you get a chance to see it, you should. It's charming. This morning, I met the JOIDES Resolution, the drilling vessel we are living on for the next ~63 days. It's a very nice ship - very clean and homey. See Wiki for images. I haven't gotten a chance to take my own photos yet but I will soon. I'll get some pictures of the inside too. :)
Today has been a pretty low-key day - just setting up my cabin and our lab space, finding the ship phone (that I can use to call home) and setting up my computer on the ship's network. I won't have any cell phone reception out there at sea so if I don't answer, that's why. :) Please don't leave voicemails if you do call - I can't check them using the ship phone so they'll be sitting in my inbox until September. And I'll have a shipboard e-mail soon too - I'll send it along when I confirm that it works. Checking my regular e-mail looks like it will be a little less available.
Tomorrow, the orientations start - talks about shipboard comings, goings, doings and policies - and we'll get a tour of the ship. It's freakin' huge! It has a gym and a movie lounge and a nice mess hall (with yummy food every 6 hours!) and...ok, I'll just post pictures. :)
Looks like my work shifts will be noon - midnight but it looks like it won't be every day - only when we have core on board (probably only 2-3 out of the 8 weeks.) The rest of the time, we'll stagger our schedules so that we don't interfere with our roomates' schedules (showering, etc.)
The science is awesome, though, and it will prove to keep us plenty busy. In addition to drilling new holes in the ocean crust to study how water flows through the crust, we're going to put some new microbial observatories down into drill holes. Basically, these are plastic apparatuses that contain rock materials. We place these containers down into drill holes, seal them off from the ocean water then allow them to sit there for a couple of years. Water flowing through the ocean crust (just like it flows in groundwater aquifers) will flow through our containers. Microscopic bacteria and archaea in the water will attach to the rock materials and start feeding off them. After a couple of years, we go back out to sea, pull up our containers then study the bacteria and archaea that have attached to our rock materials. This allows us to study how the bacteria are feeding off of the ocean crust. Freakin' cool!
Gotta go! Dinner time! :) Will continue tomorrow...
Sounds exciting!!
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