7

It's raining!! For some reason, it never occurred to me that it rained on the ocean. I always thought that the clouds got their moisture from the ocean, then floated to land THEN dumped all their moisture on the continents. Of course, silly, why WOULDN'T it rain on the ocean? I don't know. Just never occurred to me. Now, it does and I understand that it can rain anywhere - even the middle of the Pacific Ocean.

Well, the drill crew have their parkas out today and the science crew not directly involved in deploying the CORK are indoors watching the operations from the TV. We had the first of several "wrap up" meetings today to inform us all of our post-cruise obligations - to do our science, to attend meetings and to publish our findings.

It's amazing how much time the science on this boat requires. Just to get this expedition scheduled on the JR took 12 years and multiple proposals. And the post-cruise work will take us all the way to 2014 and beyond. Wow, thinking about that just makes 2 months seem like a drop in the bucket.

Today, we're installing our last CORK and I was able to take video of the process from the loading of the CORK to the deployment of the ROV platform. Beth, the other microbiologist, made a better video that I will try to get so I can show you.

Later, we'll take a 5 hour ride to our last study site, Grizzly Bare! At GB, we're coring some more. This time, we're getting sediments! Very exciting for the microbiologists and water chemists on board! This also means we'll have samples on deck every 1 1/2 hours which doesn't seem like very often. But when you think about the crew needing ~2 hours to process each sample beginning to end, it means we're all going to be running around like chickens with our heads cut off! But we'll worry about that tomorrow. :)

Guess what, though! We still have lettuce! :)

Answers to Food!!

I hope you all had fun calculating how much meat, milk and eggs the catering crew packed for our expedition. Here are the answers to the math problems:

1) We have around 100 people on board and everyone eats 2 pounds of meat every day for 65 days. How many pounds of meat is that?
(For those of you that calculated it based on 2.15 pounds of meat per day per person, you should have gotten 13, 975 pounds. 2 lbs per person per day is the actual number. Sorry I didn't update the entry before posting it.)
Well, 100 people x 2 lbs of meat per day x 65 days = 13,000 lbs of meat!! Here are the actual numbers. The catering crew packed 12,984 lbs of meat on board! We started with:
3,510 lbs of beef
2,891 lbs of chicken
3,622 lbs of pork
2,484 lbs of fish
477 lbs of lamb
Whew! That's a lot of meat!

2) And how many gallons of milk would you need if everyone drank a half a gallon every week. (Hint: We are at sea for 8 weeks.)
100 people x 1/2 gallon of milk per week x 8 weeks = 400 gallons of milk!!! Can you imagine how big of a refrigerator you would need for all that milk?

3) And how many eggs would you need everyone consumes 18 eggs a week?
100 people x 18 eggs a week x 8 weeks = 14,400 eggs!! Let's see, 14,400 divided by 12 would be 1200 cartons of eggs!! Wowzers! Those chickens must have been working overtime for us!

Now all of that is just the tip of the ice berg. We also have:
620 lbs of cheese
375 gallons of fruit juice
1890 lbs of flour
~1000 lbs sugar
boxes and boxes of fresh fruit and vegetables
lots of crackers and cereal
Soda, snacks and candy
Tea, coffee
Baker's chocolate , oats and cake decorating ingredients

So, where do we hold all of this food when we still have to store all the fuel, our paper supplies and the rest of our gear? The campboss (the guy in charge of our food and living situation) let me in on their secret. They have 2 huge dry storage areas where they keep all their dry goods like flour, cereal and sugar. And they have 3 *huge* ozonated refrigerators that keeps things fresh much longer than the refrigerators we have at home. And, yep, you guessed it, a HUGE freezer!

Check out the dry storage area to the left. Now, imagine this room filled TO THE TOP with food on every shelf and imagine this room is as big as your mom and dad's bedroom. Then imagine that you had two of these rooms just for dry goods. And that you had 3 of these rooms for refrigerators and another room for a freezer. That's a TON of space. ~1200 square feet to be exact. That's bigger than my house! And it's all stored on the JR. How do you fit all that on board, you might ask? Very carefully!

8

A week from today we will start our transit back to Victoria, Canada and a week from tomorrow, we will be stumbling around the port as we struggle to find our land legs. In the meantime, we have 7 1/2 more days to complete our science. Our tracer experiment went well yesterday. We should get results later in the year. Cross your fingers!! 12 years of planning has gone into this experiment so we're really hoping it yields some great results! Today and tomorrow, we are putting together the CORK and deploying it. Exciting!!

We have also started to pack up the microbiology lab. There are some materials going to Denmark, others going to Los Angeles and still others that will remain in the hold on the JR until our next cruise in the Fall of 2011. Several of our colleagues have already packed up huge crates of supplies and that's only a fraction of their total load. They've got a lot more to pack. Geez! There's a lot of planning and supplies that go into a 2 month expedition!

Food!!
Speaking of large loads, do you know how many pounds of meat the catering crew had to bring on the ship to feed all of us? We have around 100 people on board and everyone eats 2.15 pounds of meat every day for 65 days. How many pounds of meat is that?

And how many gallons of milk would you need if everyone drank a half a gallon every week. (Hint: We are at sea for 8 weeks.) And how many eggs would you need everyone consumes 18 eggs a week? Now, it would be silly to think of us all eating 18 plain eggs a week. Most of the eggs we eat on board were put into baked goods like desserts, into fried rice and other cooked dishes and into quiches we had occasionally for dinner. Though, some of the eggs are fried up for us for breakfast or made into omelets. So, how many eggs do we need for that? If every carton holds 12 eggs, how many cartons of eggs would you need?

I'll give you the answers in a few days after you've had a chance to calculate them yourselves. I think you'd be surprised by your answers!

9

Another busy day in paradise. The experiment went well yesterday and now we're pushing on to CORKing the hole. We are spending today cleaning the hole and making sure it is deep enough for our experiments before we deploy the CORK. But that all happens on the drill rig floor. Today, I'm going to be busy in the lab preparing our microbiology experiments.

Since today marks the start of the single digit countdown, you can now hear people say "8 more wake-ups" and "less than 9 days 'til land" up and down the halls. We're starting to talk about how we're going to budget our time so that we leave when we need to and still get as much science as we can get done done. Totally different mood on board today. Our science is still in full swing but we're most definitely talking about how we're going to wrap up this expedition.

Everyone can tell we're toward the end of our cruise when we go for meals because the cooks are getting very creative. We apparently have an over-abundance of raisins and eggs because both ended up in our meatloaf this morning. It wasn't bad - just strange. But whatcha gonna do? What meal would you make with carrots, raisins, meat and eggs?

But we've still got lettuce, so who can complain?

10

WooHoo! The countdown to the end of the expedition has started! Having only 10 days until we reach port, though, is both exciting (for we'd like to be home already) and distressing (because we have so much to do still!) Despite how tired we are at this point, we're still in the full swing of science. Today, we're starting an experiment in a borehole to test pressure and fluid flow before we install the last CORK. That experiment will take 24 hours then we'll start putting together our microbiology experiments and get them ready to go down in the hole. Busy busy busy!

We've started to prepare for the end of the cruise already - 10 days is going to fly by before we know it and we need to have all our paperwork ready when we reach port. So, packing boxes are out and our inbox is filled with all kinds of forms - customs, shipping, and accounting - to close out our shipboard work and get ready to ship everything home.

As for my personal things, I just recently did my last load of ship laundry! Ship laundry can be harsh on clothes and I'm very pleased to report that my garments are neither threadbare nor are they too small - both of which were worries of mine when the expedition started. I've already packed a few things too - stuff that I know I won't need in the next 10 days. (How many hours is that?)

We're all very ready to come home but we still have 9 science days and 1 transit day to finish it all up so we're going to be very busy down the home stretch. That includes all our cruise reports! Eek!! The catering crew on board has been awesome at keeping us nourished with a variety of foods so that morale doesn't plummet in the last few weeks. For instance, we still have lettuce and tomatoes!! We ran out of fresh and canned fruit around week 6 (much later in the cruise than we all expected) but we still have a few fresh veggies in the salad bar. This is absolutely astonishing! I guess that special refrigerator is living up to its reputation of keeping veggies fresh for a long time!

I'll try to write an entry every day up until we reach port to give you an idea of what we're doing to finish up our work here and get ready for our land legs. Stay tuned as the days fly by! Who knows, we may still have lettuce when we reach port. No, wouldn't that really be a shocker?! :)

Stay tuned.

Reflection on SciMath Career series

What started as a simple project to excite my mom's 7th and 8th graders into learning math and science turned into one of the most inspirational activities I've done to date. My task was to go around the JOIDES Resolution and interview colleagues in different careers about the science and math they use in their career. I started with those usually in close proximity to myself and ended by interviewing someone I hardly see on the ship even though the JR is only 470 feet long. The aim was to engrave into the brains of my mom's students how important math and science are to various careers but I actually engraved it into my own brain. Funny how that happens, isn't it?

I had no idea how much math is flying through the heads I walk past everyday on the ship. I knew about science, obviously, because I'm immersed in it all the time. But math! My goodness! This whole expedition is math in action! I got really excited talking about 3D calculus and differential equations in the interviews. I remembered all my classes and how much I regretted not having the time to get a minor in math. I remembered how much fun it was to solve complicated problems even though I tore my hair out crunching the numbers and rearranging the equations. I had forgotten how rewarding math really is.

It was also a social activity I probably would never have initiated myself. I am naturally curious about what people do for a living and what they happen to be doing at the moment. But I'm also naturally shy. It usually takes me awhile (and more often than not, a catalyst) to break me out of my shell. There had been a few catalysts prior to this blog series (Wii nights, card games, etc) but none that went any further than light conversation. While researching for this series, I had to ask (relatively) personal questions like "did you always want to do what you do?" and "do you wish you would have taken more math?" - questions that, if it weren't for this series, I would have left this boat pondering. More importantly, though, I learned that a number of my colleagues stumbled on their present career through trials, tribulations and random chance opportunities. This, in itself, was a catalyzing experience. Throughout this process, I have felt myself open up and socialize more and when you're on a boat with 90 other people for 2 months, socializing is very important for sanity's sake.

I learned about them as people too. One of my colleagues reloads bullets as a hobby. Another likes to organize things like Legos. All of the sudden, they become more than the "Staff Scientist" or "Engineer" in the photo line-up in the hall. You now see them as a person and new friend and will for the rest of the cruise. It's true what they say about people you've been to sea with - they're friends for life. You'll see them on future cruises or at conferences and because you sailed on that one boat on that one expedition that one time, the next time you see them, they'll be an "old friend".

I didn't expect to gain anything in this experience. I expected only to gather facts to put into colorfully written passages to make kids go "Ooo, awww, math and science are cool! Mrs. T, what math and science are we doing today?" I didn't expect to get myself excited about math and science - I always considered myself ALREADY excited about them. I didn't expect to discover that art and photography use math and science. I didn't think I would enjoy being a reporter and I certainly didn't expect to finish the series wanting to interview everyone on the ship. In the end, the series sparked a lot of interaction with the students and a lot of excitement amongst my colleagues. Seems like I wasn't the only one who pondered the careers of their fellow sailors or the hobbies of their friends. Everyone loved the series but it was me who fell under the spell intended for the students. I am more excited than ever to study math and science and to never forget it. I am even MORE excited to hear the life stories of my "old friends" and to meet "new" friends. Perhaps, I engraved more into my brain more than I thought I did. Delightfully so! After all, learning the things I did writing this series made my heart smile!

Thanks, Mom, for the assignment! Even if the kids get nothing out of it, it was still a wonderful experience that I am likely to initiate in the future! :)

SciMath Career #8: Mechanical Engineer

Kevin Grigar is a very important man for our CORK operations. He's a mechanical engineer who helped design some of the key elements on the 3 CORKs we plan to install on this expedition. In the picture, he is fixing some wiring as another engineer looks on. After years in industry as a Mechanical Designer, he went back to school for Engineering to better his position and to encourage his kids to pursue higher degrees. Kevin uses math and science not only for his job but for his hobbies which include marksmanship and building things around the house.

MATH
Kevin is a master mental mathematician! As a student, he took a class called "Number Sense" that taught him how to solve several types of problems without writing anything down except the answer. To this day, he uses this very handy skill to design tools for temperature and pressure. He also does quite a bit of math by hand - geometry, algebra, and arithmatic....It's these basic skills that allows him to do very important back of the envelope calculations as well as draw up schematics to get his tools made by the manufacturers. Can you imagine where Kevin would be if he didn't know how how to use a mathematical formula? Eeek. Can't be pretty! So, what is Kevin's advice for us math novices? "Take as much math as you can!" Will do, gumshoe. You can never have too much math! Especially in engineering!

SCIENCE
Much like the tool designers we've already met in this series, Kevin needs to be able to speak the scientific language in order to communicate with the scientists who need the tools he is making. He needs to understand the conditions for the experiment (the temperature, the pressure, even the types of metals he *can't* use like if he were building something that can't contaminate a microbiology sample.) Aside from all that, he needs to know his metallurgy, which deals with the strength of a metal and how easily it is to bend and break. Having the right material is important to every tool. You don't want to have a tool bending like an eraser or breaking like a pencil when you're trying to do your job. Kevin knows his science, though, so we rest easy knowing the tools he made for us are up to the challenge. Boy, are we glad he knows his stuff!

ABOARD THE JR
Kevin helped design the bottom part of our CORKs - you know, the part that actually goes into the borehole. That's him in the gray (second to the left). Since our expedition out here in the Pacific hinges on the success of these CORKs, we're really thankful Kevin is a master Mechanical Engineer. He has also designed some tools to measure pressure and temperature WHILE we are drilling out our core samples. Since we know so little about the sediment at the bottom of the ocean, it's very exciting to be able to see what conditions are like down there then be able to see the cores from the same area. SO awesome! Of course, none of this would be possible without the expertise of our Mechanical Engineer. And Kevin's job would not be possible without math and science! WooHoo! Go Math and Science!