Troubleshooting
February 6, 2011 
3 Comments
Things never go right all the time on an expedition.
It started with heavy snow on Saturday morning. Visibility dwindled and the wind built snowdrifts on the upper decks. Then Dr. Chris Measures’s trace-metal CTD rosette (see Jan. 26 post) stopped collecting water. And, as you read yesterday, glider RU26 came home early with what Dr. Josh Kohut called “an attitude problem.”
The ocean is a harsh environment—cold, wet, salty, corrosive, deep, and forceful. When oceanographers put equipment over the side of a ship, they try to remind themselves that the ocean has no obligation to give it back. They carry spare parts, and they try not to get too attached. “If you put stuff in the ocean long enough, sooner or later something will go wrong with it,” Dr. Measures said. “It costs so much per dip, that’s the only way to look at it.”
Fortunately, as long as things don’t go badly wrong, the ship’s crew and scientists are good at finding creative ways to fix problems with just the limited materials they have on board. Read on through the slideshow to see how our day went:
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- Heavy, wet snowflakes drift down past the bridge and pile up on the deck of the Palmer. Heated strips help keep the deck clear, but this morning’s snow quickly covered them over.
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- Dr. Chris Measures and Dr. Karen Selph of the University of Hawaii talk to senior electronics technician George Aukon about their trace-metal CTD rosette, which after a couple of days of intermittent errors has stopped collecting water entirely. If they don’t figure out what the problem is and fix it, they won’t be able to do any more research. George, a native of Riga, Latvia, has lived in Flagstaff, Arizona, for the last 20 years, where he guides whitewater rafting trips in the Grand Canyon and on other rivers.
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- On the green lower deck the trace-metal scientists talk to marine technicians about the CTD rosette’s problems. Meanwhile marine tech Alan Shaw readies the zodiac to go out in the snowstorm. He’s carrying a ‘high-flyer’ buoy (see Jan. 28 post) so that if the ship slips out of view, we’ll still be able to find the zodiac on our radar.
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- It was a good idea to bring the high-flyer buoy along. This isn’t a picture of two Antarctic petrels flying in a snowstorm—it’s a picture of the zodiac almost hidden in the snow behind them. See it in the distance, with three orange float coats in it? The zodiac went out to deploy a third glider called RU07, and everyone came back safely. We’ll pick up the glider in about a week.
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- Back at the trace-metal CTD, the problem seems to be in the electrical connection that tells each bottle when to close at depth. George and another electronics technician, Sheldon Blackman, are helping Dr. Measures and his graduate student, Max Grand, replace the main firing unit, called a pylon. Sheldon has a spare ready to go in a wooden crate by his feet. It’s built for the main CTD rosette, which has a different number of bottles. So there’s a little shoe-horning to be done, but it looks like the new unit will work.
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- After looking at the broken unit, Sheldon quickly saw the problem. An electronic component called a capacitor had worked its screws loose and was no longer passing current to the mechanism that closes each bottle. A quick retightening with a screwdriver and the pylon should be back in service—better news than Dr. Measures had expected. Sheldon spent his first season on the ice in 1979 and has been working on the Palmer since 1999. He has an electrical engineering degree and says he enjoys the practical engineering he does on the ship—the four different soldering irons lined up on his desk are proof. He lives on Maui, Hawaii, when he’s not on the ship.
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- Eli Hunter prepares for glider RU26’s last dive on this expedition. He and Dr. Josh Kohut want to check the instruments on the glider to make sure they are still measuring accurately. Since this glider can’t dive on its own anymore (see yesterday’s post), they got the idea to strap it to the main CTD rosette. It’s a little awkward looking, but it will let the scientists compare the glider’s readings directly to the same data being recorded by the CTD.
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- Time is precious on a research voyage, and oceanographers often do several things at once. So while the glider went down to check its instruments, we collected water at several depths in the big gray Niskin bottles around the outside. When the CTD returned, biologists streamed into the room holding flasks, glass bottles, plastic bottles, filters, funnels, syringes, and plastic tubing, and set about gathering the water they need for their measurements. Clockwise from top: Ana Filipa Carvalho, Menglei Chu, Dr. Angelicque White, Dr. Walker Smith, me, Lora McGuinness, and Dr. Cecile Mioni.
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- Out on deck, an albatross came coasting over the ragged ocean waves. I had just read the Rime of the Ancient Mariner, a long poem about a sailor whose luck turns bad when he shoots an albatross with a crossbow. Sailors of old regarded these seafaring birds as good luck omens, so it was obviously a pretty bad idea for the Ancient Mariner to shoot the one he saw. Maybe seeing this species, a light-mantled sooty albatross, just as we were solving our equipment problems, is a good sign for the coming week.
Read more in the following posts:
- A Little Iron Goes a Long Way (Jan 26)
- Looking Back, Looking Forward (Jan 28)
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