ABOARD THE JOIDES RESOLUTION, IN TRANSIT TO HOBART, TASMANIA– The work of the ship ended as quickly as it started nearly two months ago. We finished drilling Site 1361 and logged the hole. The drillers tripped 3500 meters of pipe and prepped it for storage as the ship will not drill again until July – off the coast of British Columbia. Everyone on board is absolutely brain dead from the non-stop grind of 12-hour shifts day after day. But all are happy as well. We’ve completed most of our objectives and made some exciting discoveries. When we did not meet with complete success it was always because of weather and ice, either encroaching sea ice or fields of icebergs so thick that we had no chance to pass.

Relaxing with some music after the work is done.

Now we have some days in transit. These days are filled with meetings to design our post-cruise research. We will all spend much more time at home working on the cores than our actual days at sea on this expedition. Some of the methods we will employ are expensive and difficult and we have recovered nearly 2000 meters of core. This means that we must carefully select the intervals we will study, so that we can answer the most important questions about Antarctic climate change as quickly as we can. For some of us, the analytical work will extend over the next 4 years. Then other scientists will work on these cores for decades to come. They will be stored in a vast library of ocean cores in College Station, Texas, at the IODP core repository where they are available to scientists from all over the world.

What I like most about these days in transit is going off shift. I no longer set my alarm to awake at 11PM. The two shifts mingle at meals and in the labs, almost as strangers at first as they have not seen much of each other for more than 7 weeks.

The whole team for Expedition 318. Photo courtesy of John Beck, IODP.

Working groups between the shifts assemble to design research strategies and timetables. I will lead a group that will make oxygen isotopic measurements of the small shells of amoeba-like organisms called foraminifera. Forams, as we call them, live for about 4 weeks during the brief Antarctic summer. They build their tiny shells out of calcium carbonate, the main mineral that makes up limestone. By measuring the ratios of two types of oxygen in the carbonate we can tell the temperature of the water in which the forams grew. We will make these analyses on forams that were living in Antarctic surface waters hundreds, thousands, and even millions of years ago to see how warm the water was next to the Wilkes Land coast. We already know from our microscope work on board that this part of Antarctica has been very warm at times, maybe 10 to 15 degrees centigrade warmer when we go back 35 million years. The foram work will help tell us exactly how warm the waters may have been during more recent periods when we know the ice sheet became much smaller. The results will help us predict the behavior of Antarctic ice in the future.

What a trip it’s been! I hope you’ve enjoyed these blogs. If you live in the Bay Area, please look for a notice about a talk I’ll likely give on this expedition in 6 months or so, after we’ve had a chance to start the shore-based part of the work. As we pull ever closer to Hobart we are very much aware that we are simply reaching the end of the beginning.

Christina and Joerg at the bow at sunset. Photo courtesy of John Beck, IODP.

Music by Synthhead. Courtesy of Beatpick.com.

At Site U1356, Hole U1356A,
Position: 63º 18.6139’S, 135º 59.9397’E
Water Depth: 4003 meters

ABOARD THE JOIDES RESOLUTION, OFF THE COAST OF WILKES LAND, ANTARCTICA– Here we are on the 29th of January, 20 days out of Wellington, New Zealand, and exactly 1/3 of the way through our expedition to the coast of Antarctica. It’s been a fantastic week for everyone aboard. We have now drilled over 750 meters into the seabed off of the Wilkes Land Coast of Antarctica. We are operating far enough offshore that we are in deep water – over 4,000 meters deep. This means that we have 4750 meters of drill pipe hanging from beneath the ship. The entire length of pipe rotates a drill bit and we bring up sediment cores in 10 m sections about every two hours.

Core on deck – 8AM on Jan 29 2010. This core is from 750 meters below the seafloor and will be worked on for the next 10 hours by the shipboard technicians and scientists.

Cutting the Core from IODP Expedition 318 Site 1356 in Antarctica. This core contains rocks about 25 million years old.

The cores get run through a variety of tests on the ship. We measure how much magnetism they have and how much natural radiation they emit (all rocks and minerals on Earth emit very low levels of natural radiation). This tells us how old the cores might be. We then split them using a diamond saw (we are so deep it is real rock coming up now) and run more tests.

Core from 730 meters beneath the seafloor. It’s hard rock but used to be mud that fell down on the seabed 25 million years ago. There is about 7 meters of sediment here.

I am a specialist in sedimentology which means that I describe the sediment – is it mud? Sand? Does it have fossils? Are there features that tell us of past submarine landslides? The sedimentologists get to see all of the sediment cores that come up so it is very exciting. We have seen long intervals when icebergs were dropping off bits of the Antarctic continent as they floated by and melted. We’ve also seen periods when there wasn’t much ice at all.

A close up view of some of the rock we are collecting. Here you can see ancient worm burrows from small animals that lived that the seafloor. The sediment changes color when the oxygen content of the deep sea changes.

Another section of the core. These stones fell out of icebergs that melted and dropped to the seafloor. The scale is in centimeters.

Cathy Stickley, one of our micropaleontologists who tell us how old the rocks are. She is English but lives now in Norway.

The sediment core that just came up 10 minutes ago (photos above) contains sediments that are something like 20 to 30 million years old. We won’t know for sure until our micropaleontologists have a look but we are approaching a horizon beneath the seafloor where we expect to start seeing evidence that it was much warmer here – maybe 10 to 15 degree centigrade warmer than it is now and a time of no or little ice on Antarctica. We should be done drilling here in 2 more days. Then it’s on to the next site. I’ll keep you posted!

The JOIDES Resolution

Assistant driller Fernando “Nandy” Punsalan on the piperacker. Unlike other rigs, the JR stores pipe horizontally. Each stand of pipe is 30 meters in length.

Scientist Howie Scher taking physical properties samples of a sediment core in the core lab.

From July to September 2009, the scientific drilling vessel JOIDES Resolution undertook a nine-week expedition in the Bering Sea. (JOIDES stands for “Joint Oceanographic Institutions for Deep Earth Sampling.”) Led by co-chief scientists Christina Ravelo and Kozo Takahashi, aboard the ship was an international team of about 35 scientists, 25 technicians, and high school science teacher Doug LaVigne, who was the Ice Stories correspondent for the project.

The team drilled more than 600 meters (2,000 feet) into the sea floor to extract sediment cores that will provide the first comprehensive records of environmental and oceanographic conditions in the Bering Sea over the past 5 million years. The scientists hope to reconstruct the history of this shallow sea, which acts as a fence between the North Pacific and the frigid waters of the Arctic Ocean.

So what can be learned from sediment cores? Fossils of microscopic shelled organisms can tell scientists a lot about ocean temperatures in the past, which can help scientists understand climate shifts.

The earth’s climate has alternated between colder glacial periods and warmer interglacial periods. From sediment cores and other evidence gathered from places around the world, scientists have a global picture of the earth’s climate history. What causes glaciation, however, is not understood. While various conditions seem likely to contribute to glaciation, it appears that there must be a number of factors interacting in complex ways.

Learning the local climate history of the Bering Sea and how it may have affected other regions, particularly the North Pacific, may help solve the mystery of why glaciers advance and retreat. And if scientists can understand the mechanisms of past climate change, they’ll be better able to predict what might happen to our climate in the future.

Drill sites for the JOIDES Resolution’s nine-week expedition to the Bering Sea. Map courtesy of IODP/TAMU.

I missed breakfast this morning. It was a deliberate choice though. At dinner last night at Vista 18 on the 18th floor of the Chateau Victoria we had a beautiful view of the JR from the nearly 360 degree windows. As the sun set we could see her light up in the distance. The School of Rockers said their goodbyes, and gave me my final send off. I decided to walk back to the JR since she looked so close at the nearby port of Ogden Point. The night air was cool, but not cold.

As the sun set we could see the JR light up in the distance.

I didn’t get back to my Stateroom until 23:00 (we use military time here, so if that confuses you subtract 12 from all hours that seem too high for you and those will be what we call PM times at home). Sleeping later seemed a good option, so I opted out of breakfast. It was not bad thing, as I was still able to have some orange juice, Cinnamon Toast Crunch and a sweet roll and have plenty of time to get to the first of the days meetings.

We started off with a pretty full agenda. We met the science and technical staff today. Each one gave a short introduction and explained what they could do for us, and assured us that they were here to assist us in making the science happen. Then we went around the room and introduced ourselves to them. We have quite an impressive list of folks on board. This was interspersed with a general overview of the history of this important expedition. This project has been in the works since 1995! After finally gaining approval to begin the trip was rescheduled, truncated and now is finally going to happen. And one of the best parts is that at least 14 different countries are represented by the science staff.

Kozo Takahashi gave a presentation on some background into the research conducted in the area of the Bering Sea.

Co-Chief Scientist Kozo Takahashi gave a presentation on some background into the research conducted in the area of the Bering Sea. This area is special in that it is one of two notable marginal sea areas. Bounded by the Aleutian Islands to the south and the Bering Straight to the north, this sea was almost entirely isolated during the time periods from which we will gather and study the sediment from the ocean floor. With so little flow between its waters and the rest of the Pacific and Atlantic Oceans it should hold some interesting information.

After the first round of meetings we lined up single file to have our pictures made with the ship photographer, Bill. I’d say more about him, but he certainly deserves a blog of his own. Soon we get our own ID cards and can give back the temporary cards that say “Visitor” and have the captain’s name listed as Peter Mowat. He is the outgoing captain, as most of the folks on board rotate every 2 months or so. Alex Simpson is our captain, and we get to meet him tomorrow.

Staff Scientist Carlos Alvarez-Zarikian led us on a quick paced tour of all of the lab facilities. We followed the path that newly drilled core would take and ended with a quick walk through of the recreation areas and the bridge.

The scientists broke into groups for specific lab meetings next. I decided to meet with the core processing and micropaleontology lab folks. I missed the first part of their introduction to the scopes and lab stations they will be using, but was there when they discussed the data entry program they will be using to catalogue all samples. Perhaps I’ll avoid telling them that I used to work with databases, and data warehousing? They might put me to work with the programmers!

After a quick lunch we met again to discuss life at sea and lab safety. Of course we talked about courtesy in sleeping areas, procedures for laundry and maintenance issues. We also learned about using phone cards on the ship. All phone calls out from the ship are routed through College Station in Texas, so if I use a calling card to call home, the caller ID will show a Texas number even though I may be somewhere in the north Pacific!

We learned a little about the network set up here in the JR during the “Introduction to Shipboard Computers, Servers and E-mail” session. After a bit of prepping, our personal laptops will be able to access the internet directly through the wireless network. We each will have a shipboard e-mail address, but also access to any of the internet resources we are used to at home. Although the speed is a little bit slower here, particularly at shift change when everyone is wanting call or message folks at home.

Before dinner I took a short walk to land looking for a phone card at the pier gift shop. It was closed though, so maybe tomorrow? I also found out that I need a wash rag and perhaps even an extra pillow case! But I am not sure the pillow case is worth the effort.

For those of you wondering about the food here on the JR, and who are worried that I might not get enough chicken fingers… I had sweet and sour chicken, mahi mahi, baked chicken in an interesting tomato based sauce and an incredible 5 cheese macaroni. So much for my informal goal to lose some weight on this trip. :)