We’re on the bridge of the research vessel Atlantis.
This boat is a Navy owned research vessel that is chartered to Woods Hole
Oceanographic Institute.
We do scientific research—it’s a global ship—so we do scientific research
all over the world.
It’s home to the Deep Submersible Vessel Alvin
Okay, we talk to them by voice and radio, and we have a heads up when they’re
coming and when they’re due to arrive.
They actually sample different levels, low levels—twenty thousand,
fifteen thousand—they really don’t get below five thousand feet with us and
they stay, let’s say, about a half mile away from us.
They can come closer—they have to say “hi”, we wave to them and they wave to us
but the actual sampling that they do, they don’t have to be right on top of us.
They’ll be near us. They’ll sample on the horizon.
You can see them on the horizon, maybe ten miles out, then get five
miles away, then maybe get close to a mile or two miles away.
Really it’s a study of aerosols in general and that it’s coming from plankton and
that the biggest plume of plankton in the world is off the North Atlantic,
even if you wouldn’t really think that. And as a general mission in itself, the
study of it and where they’re trying to find out and figure out in the research
of it is fascinating, and you should go onto the website and read about it!
Okay, but these are spotting now, right?
Yep, those are verified. Those are concentrations.
So right here they said seventeen of them.
Yeah, Yep.
Here they had twenty eight of them.
So it’s a lot more active than I thought for this time of year.
Than that previous…. That was just the sea ice
All the mates on watch will coordinate with science to achieve what the ship
needs to do in order to support the science whether it’s deployments
and recoveries of equipment or helping to determine areas of operations with
with incoming weather that maybe we have a large enough area where we’re working.
We can work two hundred miles over here and avoid the bad weather—the typhoon
and then come back and come over and work another area.
Or, if the seas might be prohibitive the wind and seas for the conditions
we might have to wait a day for the conditions to abate.
So we’re working very closely all together, the captain, science, and
the mates on watch just to make sure that we can find the most optimal time
and way to get things done.
We’re going to start just south of the tip of Greenland, Cape Farewell,
and practically halfway to the Azores, and then back to Woods Hole.
But it will all be on a north/south transect, roughly along zero four
zero longitude.
Certianly, and as there are ice patrols, aerial patrols, ship reports, there
are general areas of ice reported, and then we make decisions accordingly.
But most of the ice is still either fast. The sea ice boundaries are mostly clear,
we’re in mostly ice-clear areas where we’re operating. We may transit through
areas where there are some known icebergs and growlers and reported ice.
If we’re in a feature that’s on the surface and it’s moving with the
current we’ll generally try to move with it. But if we’re trying to stay over
a feature on the sea floor with an ROV then we’ll stay within ten meters,
sometimes a finer point, but it generally depends on the work we’re doing.