July 23
| Done – at 8 am this morning we completed our last station in the first high-intensity study area! After going “off duty” when having finished the station, I feel like I can start breathing again: it has been a crazy couple of days. Actually, I had to look at my last blog entry to see how many days have passed since we entered this area: On one hand, days passed so quickly, on the other, it seems ages since we first started! I have really trouble telling the days apart, it’s all a blurry memory of sampling, analyzing samples, taking quick decisions of where to take more samples, preparing for the next station, falling exhausted into bed, waking up for the next station…in total, we have completed 24 stations until now, 10 of them in the hotspot area. We are extremely lucky with the weather: the sea is ice-free and so calm that you wouldn’t think the ship is moving when you don’t look directly in the water next to it. And then there is all those seep sites and interesting areas – where to start? Can we get a bit of everything? Should we sample at this site or is there maybe something more interesting coming ahead? In any case, let’s just grab as many good samples as possible as long as we are here and the conditions are so good... Still, there is always decisions to make, especially for our methane team: Each station starts with a CTD cast and we are the first to run to the bottles and do our “quickies”: quickly measure the methane concentration at key depths to get an idea where to take our large GoFlo samples (here the question is rather “which depth” and not “if”, because it is clear there is a lot of methane almost everywhere) So, the first member of our team runs into the lab, analyzes the samples (14min time from start of sampling to the result!) and calls to the chief scientist to organize a time window for GoFlo casts, and to the sediment team to make sure that we get a corresponding sediment sample. And while the rest of the team continues the sampling from the Niskin bottles to get a high resolution profile of methane concentration (8–12 depths, that will be analyzed directly afterwards) and stable isotopes, the “quick analyzer” already gets the GoFlo ready to deploy, grabs the radio to communicate with the bridge – remember, everything that goes in and out of the water has to be checked with them, especially if several things are in the water simultaneously – and also get some extra people to operate the GoFlo cast (this involves driving the crane, checking the depth on a meter wheel and actually pushing the GoFlo and its weight on the bottom over the reeling, so you need 2–3 people). Well, grabbing people is not so easy, since many people are just now sampling from the Niskin bottles as well, or busy with taking sediment... So the first days our 2shift-system doesn’t really hold. We all try to help the other shift as much as possible, so sleep is low priority (“everything for science”, as my colleague Ksenia puts it). And it is not only the sampling, there is the analysis of concentrations – we want to have the results as quickly as possible, to make good decision on how to proceed in the next days and get as much as possible out of this area. Then there is the “stripping” of water and sediment samples, I am running the 4 stripping boards in parallel, almost around the clock, and need to be extremely concentrated to connect the right sample containers together (one sample = 2 beer keg containers) and keep track which sample ends up in which trap, when which stripping started and should be finished. Methane stripping is also a battle against time, i. e. it should happen soon after sampling. First, we would like to extract the methane before any bacterial reaction takes place in the sample and might change our source signatures (keeping the samples outside in the cold helps to keep them stable) and then there is another fight against time: Two of our three liquid nitrogen tanks are already empty, so we are afraid that the last one doesn’t hold long as well. Fortunately, it has now “behaved” a bit better in the last days, the evaporation rates are more according to specifications/expectations, so probably there was some problem with the first two tanks. Connected to the stripping is the annoying “beer keg preparation”: the sample containers need to be flushed with Helium before sampling and evacuated, and also leak-checked - this is a simple task, but takes quite some time and energy, and we need a lot of these at more or less the same time: at high-intensity stations we take these samples from up to 4 depths, each requiring 2 kegs, and then we also want duplicates. Stations are also really close to each other, 0.5 to 3h steaming apart. So, with trying to perform the more brain-intensitive activities like analysis and stripping, and preparing for the next station’s CTD casts (which depths to take, can I get enough water from that cast, where to place the “quickies”, label making, organizing our sample kits…), this low-brain activity costs a lot of energy, since it also has to be done in time for sampling, and we have to stop our other activities to get this ready. Keeping the concentration up when switching between all that different tasks is really on of the main problem, and even with being really organized, we realize after a while we have problems to keep the pace. So we need help – and we get it: other people in the main lab and our teacher onboard become “professional beerkeg evacuators” when they have a spare moment. The ship’s doctor helps to drive the GoFlo winch, sometimes even with support from the chief scientists himself. For two days, we also get Emma and her teammate Martin temporary assigned to our work package, and that is a big relief. We catch up with our backlog, we have a huge pile of beerkegs ready to go and some time to focus on the more complex tasks and actually take a closer look at the data we measure. And also time to sleep - now we actually manage to go into the shifts. We still allow each other to call for help in emergencies, but we also learn to let go a bit – to allow ourselves to breathe calmer, to sleep when we are off shift and to leave the others in control. The last thing is a big step for me: I usually like to have things under control, and have a better feeling when I take care of important things myself... for example my stripping boards. But now I just can’t do everything by myself, and I realize that it is a good feeling to be able to rely on others. And I also realize that by giving my team and our helpers the chance to step in, I discover that there is a lot of potential around – I knew that we had a bunch of great people onboard, but I am really positively surprised by many of them, both by how many people are so supportive and willing to help and what everyone seems capable of doing, many hidden talents seem to evolve! Also on the emotional side, I am really happy about the support – of course, some angry words and arguments are unavoidable in such an intensive time, with people being tired and stressed, and a few times people just start crying because they are exhausted and there comes the last little droplet that gets you off balance at the wrong moment – a small thing to go wrong, an extra task or an angry word. But there seems to always be someone to cheer you up, to give you a hug, to stop an argument by calming down both sides – or to just tell you to take it slow for a moment, to breathe or to go to bed and leave your task to him/her. Our team in the main lab really takes care of each other, but also some of the PIs really have an eye on who is getting tired and starts looking stressed, and the crew also has great interest in us being in a good shape – and they keep reminding us that safety goes first, and with all the excitement about the great scientific discoveries we also need to slow down sometimes and get some rest. In general, I have the feeling that I have learned a lot in these last days – not the least scientifically: it is a different thing to read papers with pictures of multibeam and sonar images than to actually sit and watch them life and get a better feeling for the different features (unfortunately there was not so much time for long sit-ins on the bridge once we got started for real), and also to put our observations here into the bigger perspective of what our Russian colleagues have seen in earlier expeditions (again, it is a big difference to just read their papers than to intensively talk to them). On the other hand, the whole actual work part and its organization is a huge learning experience – I think not only for me, but also for many others here. Working together has improved a lot in these days – not only our team optimizing our work by finding many small things to get even better organized, to find our specialties and being able to rely on each other, also the CTD sampling gets more and more effective, the swarm of people sampling has started to function like an organized beehive, starting to get a feeling of how the sampling order and each team’s needs are, and helping each other out when parallel activities is ongoing. Organizational communication has improved a lot – the worst thing in the first days was the uncertainty when we would have a station: as the surveying was ongoing, we never knew when we would stop, what the features (and thus the exact sampling program) at this place would be - what depth it would have (that also influences the CTD sampling program), if it were to be an anchoring or a drifting station... so we tried to be ready any minute (as station preparation also take some time, and some things can only be done close to station). Sitting on the bridge could of course been a solution, but there was always a backlog of things to be done between stations, and then it was decisions again – start an extensive analysis or a stripping, or better get more beerkegs ready? But after a while a quite good system developed: estimated arrival times and planned program get updated on the information screen, the chief scientists have a wake-up system, starting a phone chain that nobody misses their station. We all also develop a better feeling how long things take – how long time does the CTD take to get into the water and up again, how long preparation time is needed, when is a good time to wake up people, so there is not so much “dead time” of sitting around after being woken up in the middle of the night. And both the “working people” and the “decision makers” start to get a better feeling about urgency: of course, some things are really time-critical (especially for taking samples when drifting over a small feature), but sometimes it is worth to take extra 10 min to take a wake-up shower or to have breakfast before rushing off to work, to just have that little bit of more energy to keep going and to work efficiently. And now – for the first time in days I feel really “off duty” for a while. I am sitting in the sun (that just happens to shine) outside on a bench next to my GoFlo – like home in Stockholm, we are just in the middle of a “heat wave” ...although here that means that we have >4C. I enjoy the time, watching the last station’s activities (for once not concerning me, it’s the small boat going out for surveying and piston coring on the aft deck), writing a long email to my family, and then I go in for a long shower and an hour in the sauna with my colleagues Emma and Barbara, chatting about the last days…and then I am off to sleep. Good night!
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| by Julia Steinbach |
