Langseth Photos

Here are some sample photos of the boat:

"The Bridge" where the captain and co. control the ship

The main deck where the OBS's are deployed. The right side of the deck is only ~6 ft above the water, so this area gets very wet during storms.

The Marine Mammal Observers (MMO) tower. Also not a good place to be in a storm, especially if you're prone to seasickness. It moves more than anywhere else on the boat.

A part of the gun deck. The rubber float is the large black cylinder in the top left and you can see two of the guns hanging down from that. The curved metal rails allow for easy deployment off the back of the boat. Another place you don't want to be in a storm as the edge of the deck is nearly level with the water.

My bathroom (shared with one other guy). The shower is out of the picture to the right.

The common room between the other student's rooms (to the right) and my room (off the picture to the left).

My humble quarters, prior to moving in. You can't see the whole room, but there really isn't much else to it.

The R/V Marcus G. Langseth. It was hard to get the whole ship in one photo. The bridge is on top and the "house" containing all of the living quarters, mess hall, movie room, etc. are below the bridge. All of the equipment decks are barely visible on the right edge of the photo.

The beautiful blue of the South Pacific.

Olga, me, and Erica on the MMO tower, just after launch.

The movie room, complete with ~42" 1080p flatscreen and surround sound. Unfortunately, you have to compete with engine noise if you watch a movie, but it's still nice to have.

The main science lab, where I spend most of my waking hours.

Tonga Photos

Here are some selected photos from Tonga and on the boat. I have many more, plus a number of movies, but this computer is way too slow to put everything up. I'll put a larger selection on facebook at some point, but it may not be until after the cruise.

Keleti Beach in Tonga, near the phantom "resort" (see the first blog entry). The water was warm, but it rained and the beach wasn't that great. The reef was also very close to shore.

Beautiful downtown Nuku'alofa

Fruit "stands" (more like piles) along Vanu Road in Nuku'alofa (Olga in foreground)

Beautiful wood carvings sold along Vanu Rd in Nuku'alofa

The other grad students and the 3 OBS guys from Woods Hole at a Luau-like dinner at the International Dateline Hotel in Nuku'alofa

From left: Olga, Regan, and Erica on Atata Island (where we went snorkeling in Tonga)

Atata Island again, the water is crystal clear but a dark-brown sea-grass causes it to turn dark as you go out from the shore

The "Flying Fox" on Atata Island

1/30/09 Update

Well, we officially experienced the first (and hopefully last) cyclone of the trip. It was named Tropical Cyclone Hettie and it lasted for about three days or so. We avoided getting hit by the worst part of it by sort of skirting around the edge, but it was still rather unpleasant. The boat was pitching and rolling quite a bit more than usual, occasionally things would fall off desks or slide around, and sleeping was much more difficult. We've had almost 24 hours of relative calm now, and we've actually begun shooting the air guns and collecting data. The air guns are in 4 rows of 10 guns, towed about 200 m behind the boat, all suspended a few meters below rubber tube floats which kind of look like giant snakes in the water when they move around on the waves. Only 9 of the 10 guns in each row are active at a time (the other is a spare), and they all fire off at once every ~3 min (450 m in the water). In each row, there are guns with variable pressures that produce a variety of sound frequencies. The sound waves are what travel to the ocean bottom and penetrate the crust. Thankfully, we don't really hear the guns on the boat; from what I've heard, on other boats or in shallower water the sound can be pretty brutal and make for a hellish experience. While shooting the guns, my job is to log the start and end of the lines that the boat travels along (a grid pattern over the study area), and to log any problems with the guns (of which there are many so far). Apparently, we're going to be shooting for almost 2 weeks on the current area, after which we retrieve some of the seismometers from the seafloor and place a smaller number of them in a location just north of where we are. As you might imagine, watch duty during shooting is pretty boring, but it's nice to actually be doing what we came to do. Unfortunately, we can't see the data in real time, it's all stored on the instruments and has to be processed extensively before it's of any use. The marine mammal people are constantly listening for any signs of marine life while we shoot as well.
I got a chance to go out before my shift at 11:45 pm or so and see some stars, which was pretty awesome. The milky way was visible in a big swath overhead, although to be completely honest, I've seen stars just as well on camping trips in California or Oregon before, I was hoping for a little better being this far from civilization. I try to get outside for an hour or so every day and just stare at the ocean, it's very peaceful and helps keep me sane. Although there are a few bright spots here and there, overall I think it's pretty safe to say that life on a boat is not for me, I'm definitely ready to get back to solid ground, especially since I have 4 days on a resort island in Fiji to look forward to, and then back to good old Hawaii. I still have a long way to go though; I'm interested to see what my opinion will be by the end of this trip. In the big picture, I'm glad I'm getting this experience and seeing this side of the geologic spectrum, but for me this simply doesn't compare to being out in a beautiful place in the mountains somewhere where I can actually see and touch the geology. There are some really cool things going on out here geologically (see the "Science of it All" post for details), but seeing it filtered through a computer monitor is just not the same. Oh well, for all the Calvin and Hobbes fans out there, I guess I can just chalk it up to "building character." Until next time...

Life on the Boat

My watchstanding shift begins at the brisk hour of midnight and ends at noon. Needless to say, this takes some getting used to, but I am actually doing better at adjusting then I thought I would. Having breakfast (dinner??) at 11:00 pm is pretty strange (normal dinner time is when I am asleep). So far, my watch duties have consisted of logging the activities that are going on and any problems with the equipment, as well as helping to deploy equipment. Right now, we are in the seismometer deployment phase, so every so often I go out on deck and man a tag line (for stabilization) as they lift the seismometer over the edge and into the blue abyss below. On that note, the color of the water is absolutely beautiful, I've never seen a blue quite like it. It matches my favorite color perfectly, which I had no idea actually existed in nature. It's not a tropical turquoise like you might find around Hawaii or other tropical islands, it's more of a deep steely blue with a hint of green in it, hard to describe without a photo. If you just sit and watch the ocean for a while, it really starts to feel like it's alive, like it's breathing with every swell. Anyway, back to the topic at hand. I haven't had a whole lot of free time to just wander and do whatever I want as of yet, most of my off time is spent sleeping (or at least laying in bed). There is down time while on watch, but I generally have to stay in or around the lab area in case I'm needed. This is better for reading a book or something portable rather than exercising or watching movies, etc. I've already finished one book, one of my old favorites, and one of the few books I read in high school that I actually liked. It's called The Killer Angels, a historical novel about the battle of Gettysburg (the movie Gettysburg which is also great, was based on it). It tells the story from the perspective of various generals and commanders on both sides and really puts a human face on the war; many of them were fighting friends and even brothers on the other side, and they all had reasons for fighting beyond the slavery issue. Anyway, the deployment phase is apparently busier than when we are shooting the air guns, so I imagine I will have some more down time in the future. However, I do have work for classes and some data processing type work to do for my advisor, so it looks like I'm going to be staying busy most of the time. The food has been pretty decent so far, although it worries me that the fresh fruit and veggies are already starting to go bad and we're barely two days in. I imagine it's going to get progressively worse as we go. All right, I have to go, to be continued...

The Boat

This post is meant to give some information on the boat that I am on. Some of you may have already seen pictures of the boat and info on this website: http://www.ldeo.columbia.edu/res/fac/oma/replacement/shipyard_progress.html
It is owned by Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory (LDEO) affiliated with Columbia University, and is funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF). It is ~230 ft long and is a converted military ship (details and photos of the conversion process are on the above site). The ship has three main decks loaded with all sorts of equipment and various cranes to move it around: there is a huge ~10 ft diameter sphere on the top deck which gives us our satellite connection, a ~50-60 ft tower in the middle where the whale-watchers (Marine Mammal Observers or MMO's) set up camp, all sorts of winches and spools of cables and ropes for various purposes, and many other things which aren't particularly exciting to mention. I spend most of my time while I am on watch in the main science lab, which is basically an array of ~30 screens and computers monitoring various pieces of equipment and even showing video feeds of various parts of the ship. There are a few computers around that we can use for the internet or various other purposes. The living quarters are quite small as you might expect, mine consists of four small rooms (~5'x8') with two bunks each around a central common room with a couch, a table, and a mini fridge, and two adjacent rooms share a bathroom. Thankfully I have my own room, which is nice. There is a mess hall (dining room) nearby, a movie room with a nice HD flat screen, some couches and a fair number of movies, a library room with some novels and other random books, and a small exercise room with a treadmill, rowing machine, and a few free weights. There are many other labs, equipment rooms, laundry room, and other random rooms around, but those are pretty much the highlights. I have some interior photos, but it's kind of a pain to post them and the connection is a bit slow, but I may get around to posting them here or on my facebook at some point. Despite being a pretty big boat it still pitches and rolls quite noticeably, even in waves that are relatively tame. It hasn't been bad so far, and I think my legs and stomach have mostly adjusted, but I'm really not looking forward to experiencing a storm, which may be as early as tomorrow (1/26 for me). All right, enough about the boat for now, if I think of anything else interesting, I'll post it later...

The Science of It All

This post is for those who are interested in some of the details of the actual science experiment that is going on. I'll try to keep it in language that non-scientists can understand and I'll try to explain what various things are, but if there are any questions, feel free to leave a comment on the post and I'll answer when I can.
Here goes: The area of interest is in the Lau Basin, located between Fiji on the west and Tonga on the east. Here's a brief geologic history of the area: it all started when the Pacific plate started to subduct underneath the Australian plate north of New Zealand. The overall tectonic forces are pushing the two plates together in a roughly east-west orientation, causing one plate (the Pacific) to slide under the other. As the water-rich subducting plate descends, it begins to be compressed and heated, squeezing water out as it goes down towards the mantle. Once it reaches a depth of ~100 km, the plate begins to melt, releasing water-rich melt into the base of the overlying crust. This magma is less-dense then the surrounding material and buoyantly rises to the surface to form a chain of volcanoes. Over time, these volcanoes build and become an island chain above the ocean surface (e.g. Japan, Indonesia, the Aleutian Islands...). If this subduction process occurs under a continental plate, you get the Andes in South America or the Cascade Range along the west coast of the US. Due to various forces that are very complex and still not entirely understood, these chains of volcanoes often rift apart and split. In this case, the Fiji Ridge and the Tonga Ridge were once part of the original volcanic arc. Rifting occurred between the volcanic arc and the subduction trench (called the forearc), splitting the arc into two pieces. The Tonga ridge is the forearc portion of this system and hence is much flatter than the Fijian portion, which contains the arc volcanoes and has much higher topographic relief. Over time, this rift develops into an organized spreading center, similar to what is happening along the Mid-Atlantic Ridge, where new crust is emplaced at the spreading center axis, creating new ocean floor. As long as subduction continues, the downgoing plate will continue to melt and form a new chain of arc volcanoes in a similar position to the original arc (this chain is currently the Tofua Volcanic Arc, just west of the Tongan islands). Most of these volcanoes are small still and only a few have actually breached the ocean surface. As spreading continues behind the volcanic arc, you end up with a new ocean basin (the Lau Basin) bounded on the west by the Fiji ridge and on the east by the newly formed Tofua arc, with the Tongan islands just east of the active arc, and the subduction trench just east of that. This type of basin is called a backarc basin, because of it's position relative to the arc. This basin and the spreading center that created it are the focus of both my Master's thesis work and the current experiment.
The experiment: the goal of the experiment is to look at the crust and upper mantle below the southern portion of the backarc spreading center and try to image the magma chamber underneath the spreading axis. This will be accomplished by setting up a rectangular grid of ocean-bottom seismometers (OBS's) on the seafloor, centered around the spreading axis. After the OBS's are deployed on the seafloor, we zig-zag over the area in a grid pattern (both horizontally and vertically), shooting specially designed air guns at the seafloor. I'm not completely familiar with how the air guns work, but essentially they cause small seismic waves to propagate through the seafloor to the base of the crust and even into the upper part of the mantle (~8-10 km deep). Different types of material (i.e. sediment vs. rock vs. magma) reflect and refract these waves in different ways, and the waves move through them at different speeds. The seismometers can pick up these differences and create a cross-sectional image of the crust and upper mantle. The main thing we are looking for in this case is the magma chamber below the spreading center and its variations as you move down the axis. The southern end of the spreading center is closer to the arc volcanoes then the northern end, so we are expecting to find much larger magma chambers in the south, and smaller, if any, magma chambers in the north. We will also be collecting other secondary types of data while in the area, including: bathymetry (the surface of the ocean floor) from a multibeam echosounder (multiple beams of sound bouncing off the seafloor, like sonar), magnetic (different types and ages of rocks have different strengths and orientations of their magnetic fields which can be measured from the boat), and gravity (different densities and thicknesses of material produce a stronger or weaker gravitational pull). These data are what my advisor (whose on the boat but not in charge of the cruise) is interested in and will be more directly related to my thesis.
Complications: Many things can go wrong and slow us down while collecting this data. The one I'm most concerned about is cyclones or large storms. It is cyclone season in the southern hemisphere and it is entirely possible we could encounter one in the 45 days that we are out here. If this occurs, apparently we have to move the boat behind the nearest island to give us some shelter from the waves. Obviously, this is not something we want to experience, the boat moves enough on flat water as it is. The other complication is from marine mammals (mostly whales) which may venture close to the air guns. There are 5 biologists on the boat who are constantly on the lookout for any sign of whales and they could potentially shut the experiment down if a whale gets close enough. It's unclear how much harm the air guns do to whales, but it seems to affect their ability to communicate and may possibly physically harm them as well. I for one, would not mind seeing some whales, but it would definitely wreak havoc on our plans.

Fiji and Tonga

This is a slightly modified version of the email I sent to my parents, which many of you may have seen already...

We left Honolulu at 7 am on Jan. 18th and arrived in Fiji at 11:55 am on the 19th (Fiji is 22 hours ahead). We didn't have a whole lot of time to explore Fiji, mostly we drove around town (Nadi, pronounced Non-dee, on the main island of Viti Levu) and saw the pretty extensive flood damage from last weeks storms. It was pretty bad, most of the downtown area was completely closed and the roads were in horrible shape, fences and walls knocked down, houses with muddy destroyed furniture and all sorts of junk outside. Apparently the water level was 15-20 ft above the river level (which is close to the town). Fiji felt much more like a foreign place than Hawaii, it is a mix of polynesian-looking people and Indian-looking people, who were apparently brought in to be workers many years ago. We were pretty much the only white people around with the exception of a few tourists at the hotel (mostly from New Zealand or Australia), and a few occasional people around town. Everyone pretty much speaks English and all of the signs are in English, so that helped. The same way there is American influence in Hawaii, there is a New Zealand/Australia inluence in Fiji. I'm sure I'll have more to say about Fiji once we go back there at the end of the cruise, and I will be staying on a resort island for a few days.
On to Tonga (where this was originally written): we are on the island Tongatapu, which is the main island, in the capitol Nuku'alofa. Tonga is one of the last true kingdoms on earth. The king owns the entire island and has multiple palaces, his coronation was just 5 months ago, so he is still new. We saw his house and the main palace (from a distance). The house looked like something out of Hillsborough, but the palace was actually a bit less impressive than I expected. Nearly everyone here looks like what you'd expect of Tongans, and they all speak English as well (Australian influence here too). There is a sizeable Chinese population as well (similar to Indians in Fiji), although we haven't seen too many around town. The Chinese tend to own these little cinderblcok shops stocked with a bunch of cheap crap, as you might expect. As you walk down the main road through town, you find many Tongan families selling fresh watermelons, pineapples, Taro roots, bananas, as well as some beautiful wood carvings of whales, fish hooks (a symbol of strength in Tonga), and other animals.
The Kingdom is very conservative and Christian, the Tongans wear shirts in the ocean and dress very modestly, which was a bit strange. Also, I've never seen so many coconut palms in my life (even in Hawaii), they actually have farms with rows and rows of palm trees which I saw when we flew in. Yesterday, we went out to what we thought was going to be a resort on the beach. But after a half hour drive, with most of it on dirt roads, we found out from the cab driver that the resort doesn't exist anymore. So we stopped at the end of this dirt road and walked down to a beach while the cab driver waited for us (we had no way to call another cab). There was probably 10 Tongans at the beach and every one of them wore a shirt in the ocean except for one guy. They looked at us a little funny, but not in any sort of hostile way. One of the girls offered me some watermelon that she had been munching on. Overall, the people in both Tonga and Fiji were pretty friendly, so no bad experiences with that. Every time we walked into town from the hotel, almost everyone we passed would smile and say hi, or bye to us, and people in cars would honk and wave (it probably helped that I was always walking with a group of 3 or 4 girls, all 4 of the other students are female). We are planning on going out to one of the small nearby islands tomorrow for some scuba diving or snorkeling. The ship is already here, we can actually see it from a balcony at our hotel. We are getting on board on Friday (Thursday for you guys) and leaving the next morning.
Update (1/25/09): we made it out to Atata island on Thursday (1/23) (40 min boat ride from Tongatapu), which contains the Royal Sunset resort and we got to do some snorkeling. The scuba diving was going to be too expensive and I'll be diving in Fiji in March anyway, so we decided against that. It turned out to be a good decision, because the visibility wasn't fantastic (from the storms) and I doubt we would have seen much more than we did snorkeling. Probably the most interesting thing we saw snorkeling were these clam farms that the Tongans set up. Basically there are these nice neat rows of hundreds of humongous clams on the seafloor (1 to over 2 feet wide). There was some decent coral and a few colorful fish but nothing spectacular. The island itself was interesting, there are a number of people that live there in rundown houses, many were raising pigs. Also, there are lots of wild to semi-wild dogs that run around the island, sort of like the cats in Hawaii, but surprisingly no roaches. We even saw a bat hanging in a tree right by the restaurant at the resort, I took a bunch of pictures of it. I didn't think bats could be cute, but this one definitely was, it had a furry face like a little fox, not a stubby pig-nose like most bats (they call them flying foxes). Oh, and we did see a pod of dolphins on our trip out to Atata Island which was awesome. One disturbing thing I saw on that island and on the main island is the amount of trash. You would think tourists were bad, but the Tongans don't seem to be too concerned with trashing their home. There were pieces of trash strewn along parts of the beach, and even dirty baby diapers on the beach we went to the day before, worse than most beaches I've seen in the US (except maybe a really crowded beach in LA or something).
We boarded the boat on Friday morning at 10:30 and got our stuff organized, I'll talk about the boat in the next post (that's where I am right now). We had one last night in Nuku'alofa on Friday night, and a bunch of us and many of the crew went to a bar in town. When we first arrived it was pretty slow, but by the time we left it was like a packed nightclub in the US, I really did not expect that. Some of the Tongans were actually drinking at the bar, but I never saw any other Tongans drinking in other restaurants that we went to. We spent our first night on the boat on Friday night while it was still docked, and then set sail at 8 am on Saturday. More details on that in the next post. Overall, I definitely enjoyed the experience in Tonga, although I don't know that I would make a vacation trip out there again. If I did, I would go out to one of the smaller island groups north of the main island, which I imagine would be much nicer.