Some yellow in the fog

Tadaaaaa!!! :D

Here I am again! I haven’t been able to update the blog in these last few days, as I had a reeeeally busy time and had to use those few free hours to get some rest (although they didn’t protect me from being called “Zombie girl” by Tom hahaha!!).

Anyway.. a lot of exciting news from the Indian Ocean!! 

First: I’m sure that all the students from the John Witherspoon (JW) Middle School will be very thrilled to know that.. their first float, JW, has already sent its first profiles (which you can see below)! Another success!!! Whooohoooo!!! 

JW’s is well and has sent us it’s first data!

The excitement has not finished yet: another SOCCOM float (the third of this voyage) has begun its journey! The JW students called the Apex 9757 Nemo. I love it! :) Our artist-on-board Annalise drew the Disney character on the yellow skin of the float:

  

Annalise draws Nemo on the float (that’s impressive: I don’t really know how she can do that on a curved surface)

The float has been named Nemo not just for the cute and brave clown fish with a foreshortened fin, that we all fall in love with (I confess that when I went scuba diving in the warm waters of the Great Barrier Reef, I searched for him). Nemo is also the enigmatic captain of the Nautilus, the 20000 Leagues Under the Seas submarine born from the wild imagination of Jules Verne. As Captain Nemo, the float will indeed be in an underwater tour of the world, in a mission risen from our scientific thirst for knowledge. Will it have to battle against a school of giant cuttlefish, too?

For the next 5-7 years (depending on how long the battery will last) JW and Nemo, while collecting data, will drift with the currents. Where will they go? Well, this is a hard question, as their trajectories will depend on the type of circulation they’ll encounter. JW has been deployed inside the core of an eddy, so it might be trapped in the eddy for a while (months or more, sometimes). Or, maybe not. Predicting the exact path it’ll have in, let’s say, years is not really possible, due to the nature of the ocean: currents and eddies mix waters around, in some places as strong as a a giant blender. Existing data, such as previous Argo floats that have passed close to the location where the JW and Nemo (and Jose' before, of course) have been deployed, can give us an idea of possible trajectories. Also, with numerical simulations we can model the circulation and test the possible pathways that a float could take. To do so, we can release some float-like-particles in our model and see where they go. And we can put thousands of them in the model, so that we can have a better estimate of where they most likely be in 1 year, 2, 3… etc. Have a look at the movie below, which shows where some of these float-like-particles are transported by modelled currents: in every colored point there are hundreds of them and the lines show their paths.

Modelled trajectories

I guess that if you really wanna know where these floats are, keep an eye on the SOCCOM website ;-)

My last surprise for today is Nemo’s first profiles!!! :D All the sensors are working perfectly and I cannot be happier to see that! As you can see from the temperatures close to the surface, Nemo has been deployed in colder waters with respect to JW and Jose', as we are heading south, and we are closer and closer to Antarctica (we won't go that far, though, this time). Nitrate concentration is also higher in the surface waters, compared to what JW has found. Every 10 days we will receive data like this, which will allow us to unravel new stories to tell.

Nemo’s first profiles!

I haven’t been out much in these days, unfortunately. Apparently, we had an astonishing sunset, a beautiful sunny day, whales, seals and penguins (uhm. I think that at this point my ship-mates are just making fun of me..). Oh well. All I could see from the porthole in the past few hours was fog. Very thick. Very bright.. fog.

The world around the ship has disappeared.. 

A long exciting day in the Southern Ocean

I got up yesterday morning at 10 am, after 6 hours of sleep. I did my 55' of run and my boxing drills, which gave me some energy for the day to come.. a long and with lots of excitements day !

I gave my talk, which went spectacularly well :-) Usually we have talks lasting more or less 30', question time included. Mine took a whole hour!! I think I never got so many questions and so much active discussion.. haha!! It was awesome!! And what a beautiful day, too! The sun pushed us to spend a longer and much more pleasant time outside, even under a chilling wind, which froze our fingers in the attempt of taking photos. We all waited with great expectation for the sunset (which happened around 9.30 pm), as we knew it would have been spectacular.. And quite rare, as clouds usually cover the sky at these latitudes. 

An albatross, master of the wind, flying free around the ship.

 

Sunset view from the bow

Some relaxing time at the bridge

We then deployed an Argo float (similar to a SOCCOM float, but with only temperature and salinity sensors) for the Argo program, an international collaboration that collects profiles of temperature and salinity from ice-free global oceans (if you want to know more: www.argo.ucsd.edu). The lauch was super easy, as they are deployed inside a cardboard box which opens in just few minutes once in water. Pete Harmsen from CSIRO/MNF got a very nice video of the operation, which I post at the end of the cruise as we have a very limited internet connection.

As we were heading towards the next station, I got the second SOCCOM float ready: sensors cleaned and new "look" prepared.. This float has been named John Witherspoon, as it is the name of the Middle School in Princeton (NJ) which I am in contact with (Hi guys!!! :-D ). The history teaches me that John Witherspoon (1723-1794) had quite an interesting life: he was the only active clergyman among the singers of the Declaration of Independence, elected to the Continental Congress and then to the state legislature in New Jersey and finally president of the College of New Jersey from 1768 to 1792, which is now known as Princeton University (!!!).

To this man and the John Witherspoon Middle School, this float is dedicated to! The next floats will be named by the students of the school ..and I have a special surprise for them, as I got Annalise Rees, a very talented artist that we have the pleasure to have aboard, involved in the decoration of the floats! (If you want to know Annalise's work, have a look at her websites: www.annaliserees.com and www.annaliserees.blogspot.com.au).

 

Annalise on the left, John Witherspoon float in the middle and me, on the right, wearing a wolf-ewok-teletubby-koala (open to interpretations) beanie that I knitted myself ;-D 

Float #9645 waits for its dive outside on the back deck, while curious albatrosses and petrels fly around.

 

Deployment of the float from the back deck (..it was roughly 4 pm, local time).

I haven't slept much in the last 30 hours and won't sleep much for the next 30 as well, but we have a great coffee machine, which is my best friends in these days (in perfect italian style, I drink MANY espressos!).

Of course during this long day we didn't just deploy the floats, but many different operations have taken place (1 in particular regards the calibration of our float), but I think I'll talk about them another time, as I have to go prepare the next float and maybe have a nap before the next action. Till the next time, Ciaoooooo!!!

ps: we are taking drawing classes with Annalise and both the ship crew and the scientists got very excited. I think we all have an hidden talent.. somewhere.. I hope I'll find mine by the end of the cruise ;-)

First drawing class creation.. I'm not really sure where I left my talent.. maybe I sent it away with the first float.. ha! ;-)

A message from the abyss

Float #9749, the first SOCCOM float launched from the RV Investigator (yes!, the one that carries Jose' as name :-) ) has spoken!! The first profiles have been sent via satellite to the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute (MBARI) lab, where they have been interpreted and plotted. And here is what they look like:

 

The plot shows depth profiles (depth is on the x-axis) of pH, oxygen, temperature and nitrate. Look at that peak in oxygen (red curve) at about 100 m: that's due to phytoplankton using CO2 and releasing oxygen. pH is also indicative of the biological activity. Temperature and high values of oxygen in the first 400 m are indication of a water mass called "Mode Water". While below that depth, we have the Antarctic Intermediate Water, with a minimum in oxygen. 

What an exciting moment!! Yesterday I received this plot on my email and I almost (well.. I actually did) screamed for joy! :-). I was so nervous, waiting for the first sign from the float. "What if the sensors did not work? What if the float has hit something?".. that kind of stress. You feel responsible, you have a mission to accomplish, that you've been planning long in advance.. everything must be perfect! We want data, we need them. We wanna know what's happening below the surface of the ocean, understand what the occurring physical, biological and chemical mechanisms are, how the oceans are changing. Especially here, in the Southern Ocean. Due to many reasons (one for sure is the brutality of the weather and ocean conditions, that make any operation very very difficult), observations have been minimal here compared to other parts in the world. But we are getting more and more of them, as the scientific community has recognised the importance of the Southern Ocean for the whole climate system.

What's so special about the Southern Ocean? This ocean, located south of, let's say 30 deg S, connects the Indian, Pacific and Atlantic oceans, stirring their waters and mixing their properties. It also serves as link between the surface and deep waters (note that, the circulation of the oceans around the globe is very complicated: waters that flow at the surface can sink in different locations, which are then transported at depth to different parts of the world and finally rise again to the surface, somewhere else.. after a time scale of up to thousand years!). While transporting waters up and down in the water column, different dissolved gases are exchanged and transported too. For example, in the Southern Ocean there are places where the water sinks and, by doing so, transports down to depth the atmospheric gases that the ocean has been in contact with, through the ocean surface. For example, carbon dioxide. But there are other locations where the waters are upwelled, and those dissolved gases brought back to the atmosphere. Recent studies found that, of the total amount of carbon dioxide due to human activity absorbed by the global oceans since 1750, the Southern Ocean alone may have absorbed up to a half. Carbon dioxide can enter the ocean also via another process, which is due to the enhanced solubility of carbon dioxide in cold water, rather than warm: so, surface waters flowing towards Antarctica get colder and uptake carbon dioxide; while waters going towards the warmer tropical waters release it. We also need to add the role of biology in the Southern Ocean, which I talked about in a previous post, to this picture, as it's a fundamental process in the uptake of carbon dioxide. Adding carbon dioxide into the ocean cools the atmosphere, while releasing it into the atmosphere warms up our climate. So, to wrap it up, because of the physical circulation, the biological activity and the solubility in the Southern Ocean, it comes that this ocean has a pivotal role in the climate system. Any changes to either the physical or the biological or the chemical world in the Southern Ocean can have a dramatic impact in the global climate system. 

That's why it's so important to improve our knowledge of the Southern Ocean!

I have other 6 floats to deploy on this voyage and the next one will soon be prepared, as it will be launched 24 hours from now! Fantastic!! The weather has also been nicer today and someone spotted some pilot whales (I was at the gym, so no whales for me :-( ). Tomorrow is gonna be very intense, as we'll have many many activities to do (I'll show you in few days what we've been up to). But, before that, I gotta prepare my talk for tomorrow! Talks on a ship are a really good way to get to know each other's interests and learn something new.. For example, do you know that if a ship sails over a gas leak, because the ship becomes less buoyant than the surrounding water, the ship could sink? That makes me think.. We are looking for an underwater volcanic field.. which releases gas. uhm… just saying… O.o 

 

White horses

The world fades away in front of us..

41° 48' S, 94° 23' E: we are steaming towards the next station. The ocean calmed down just for a small window of time.. and it's now showing us its power again. The horizon looks dramatically grey (one can wonder what's waiting for us behind that grey thick curtain of mystery..). In just few hours we'll go from winds coming from north, to a low pressure system, with strong winds from west to east. The "Roaring Forties", that's how the westerlies between 40° and 50 ° S are called.. you can even hear that roar! We are "dancing" again and even if the waves are not very high (about 5 mt), they are powerful. We had to put the thick and very heavy cover to the portholes, as the waves are violently smashing against the side of the boat.. 

 

From the bridge, I admire this infinite train of waves.. so powerful, so free.

I spent most of the day at the bridge, taking pictures, sharing sailing stories, planning the science operations for the following days and talking about what we are about to experience, in terms of ocean conditions, in the next few hours. I'm particularly excited when the weather becomes rougher (unless it's when we have to do our planned operations). Being at sea reminds me of the long path that brought me here.. 

I've always been fascinated by the power of the sea. As a young girl, the best time of the year was August, which for me it meant being on a Zodiac, in the Mediterranean Sea (I'm Italian), to catch waves, explore the sea in freedom and be surrounded by that deep blue. Few years passed, and I found myself enjoying physics and maths (pretty interesting, considering that till that moment I never liked school so much.. LOL!). I took a year-long break after high school to work and do my sport (at that time, javelin was my passion), then decided to take a degree in Physics.. 3 years later, I had finally my first lesson of "Oceanography". I remember looking at a photo of a rogue wave taken aboard a ship in the North Sea, a "monster" something like 25 mt high (!!), and thinking how magnificent it was (yes, I know.. a normal person wouldn't have had such thoughts.. I never said I was "normal" ;-) ). Rogue waves (also called "freak waves") come like ghosts, out of the blue, completely unpredictable. But their immense power is so destructive that many ships have been sunk because of that.. and, sadly, many lives have been lost..

In 2005 a seven-story wave off the coast of Georgia, appeared out of nowhere and crashed against the Norwegian Dawn.

After I graduated with a master in Environmental Physics, it took me few years full of different experiences, multiple jobs, travels, setbacks, before I listened to the call of the ocean again and decided to do research in Oceanography. I moved to Australia in order to do that, where I took my PhD in Oceanography. My project was about modeling the Southern Ocean and soon I became very fond of this part of the planet. I always loved modeling, but whenever I had the opportunity, I was also very ready to jump on a boat to explore the hidden secrets of our oceans. My path brought me to San Diego, where I have the great opportunity to continue to explore the Southern Ocean, both from behind a computer screen and on a rocking boat!

I never complain to be under strong rain or freezing winds or burning sun, if I can have a 360° ocean view from my office window. Few years ago I had a dream.. now I'm fulfilling it!

Hasta luego, Jose' the float!!

What an exciting and full on day! The first SOCCOM float has departed for its adventure, deep in the Indian Ocean.. searching for secrets to reveal. Our first float has been named José Iriarte, as José (from the Universidad Austral de Chile, UACh) has won last spring's contest launched on the SOCCOM research blog. The contest asked people to guess the maximum chlorophyll concentration a float would measure, and José got it right. Very good job, José! I wish I could put my name too.. hopefully there will be another contest next spring ;-)

José's float and its friend (soon you'll know how it'll be named ;-) ) resting still in the van, waiting for their journey to begin.

I confess I had my hands shaking the whole day.. I've been planning the fate of these floats from almost the very initial phases, as I've been involved in planning the locations of their deployment. Today I got to clean the sensors and.. wish the first float luck! We brought the float on the back deck (well, I got Tom helping me out with that) and once on deck, we passed a long line through it that we used to slowly release the float in the water (have a look at the pictures). I didn't hold the line or the float over the rail of the deck myself, though, as on this ship the procedure is very strict and only crew members are allowed to do it. But I followed it step by step..

Tom is helping Kel to put the line in..

..while I'm friendly asking Kel to be gentle with the release procedure (we're old friends.. no worries ;-)) (photo credit: Pete Harmsen, CSIRO, MNF)

Kel's lowering the float and I'm carefully watching (photo credit: Pete Harmsen, CSIRO, MNF)

It's gone!! Hasta luego!! (photo credit: Pete Harmsen, CSIRO, MNF)

The float is now on its journey..

While we were releasing the float, the ship was moving at roughly 1 kn, as we don't want the current to push it against the boat. Once it's in the water, the float waits few minutes (~3 minutes) before starting its first descent down to 1000 m. And after 1 day, it will send back the first profile, before diving again and repeat the cycle. It will drift, and for 10 days we won't know where it is and what it's seeing.. So, it's a bit stressful at the moment, as I wanna know if it's alright, if its sensor are all working properly, where the currents are drifting it.. Next time that the float will send a signal, we will know its position and comprehend how much it has moved from the initial position… and more importantly, we will know what it has seen!!

If you wanna follow the story of José's float, don't forget to look at the SOCCOM website and search for the float #9749, that soon (next day!!) will transmit the first data!!

Chasing hotspots

On board we have quite a remarkable group of scientists from different institutes of Australia, France and US (me). So, we have people from the University of Tasmania, CSIRO, the Australian National University (where I did my PhD), the University of New South Wales, the Brown University, the Curtin University, ACE CRC, IMAS, UPMC/LOMIC (France) and Scripps UCSD. We have geologists, physical oceanographers, biogeochemists, petrologists and biologists! YAY SCIENCE!!!

So, why are we going there?

The answer is in the interaction between volcanic activity and ocean. Heard and McDonald Islands are among the most active hotspot volcanoes on Earth (the others comprehend Hawai'i and Reunion Islands). Sitting roughly 4000 km far from Australia and Africa, they are basically closer to Antarctica than to any other land. They are placed on a very large plateau (Kerguelen Plateau) which is more or less 1/4 the size of all Australia! Pretty big, uh? The plateau is very old, its formation came with a huge eruption ca. 100 millions year ago (I hope I took the notes correctly today, at the seminar on board ;-) ). 

This is incredibly fascinating and during the cruise we hope to witness and video record some underwater volcanic plume, made of hot gases coming from the mantle, "some" km beneath the ocean floor..

How does this connect to the ocean, then? 

Well, magmas erupted underwater trap more of dissolved gases. And trapped amongst those elements there is iron. The presence of iron is incredibly important in the waters of the Southern Ocean… and here's why.

Bear with me for a moment: in the first 100 m of the ocean, very tiny floating plants (as small as 5 micron, called phytoplankton) live, grow and are responsible for the photosynthetic process, such as any other plant on earth. During the photosynthesis, these tiny plants, given enough light, absorb carbon dioxide and produce organic compounds (basically sugar), releasing oxygen as a waste product (that for life on Earth is fundamental). In order for a phytoplankton to do all this, it needs food (or nutrients), like us. Their nutrients come from nitrogen or silica, and, in smaller quantity, iron. When phytoplankton have all the necessary, they grow, or more specifically, they bloom. We can see these blooms using satellite images: as an example, have a look at the bloom below, which occurred in the South Atlantic Ocean (the image comes from Envisat, ESA).. how gorgeous it is! Look at the incredible structures, streams, swirls, wiggles (the white patches are clouds). These structures are due to the ocean currents, and I will talk about this later during the cruise.

The Southern Ocean is very particular in this sense, as it appears that here the growth of phytoplankton is limited by the availability of iron: this means that not everywhere in the Southern Ocean there's enough iron to allow phytoplankton to bloom. Not everywhere, correct.. but somewhere yes! 

The Kerguelen Plateau region is one of those locations in the Southern Ocean where a bloom actually occurs, and this is because, somehow, iron is present and available in the waters around the plateau! The objective of the voyage is, therefore, to search for iron deriving from underwater volcanoes activity and investigate if it causes the biological (phytoplankton) growth at the surface. In order to do this, the different teams of scientists will work non-stop to provide the first very high-resolution mapping of the sea floor around the islands, look at temperature profiles in search of deep water hot temperature (footprint of volcanic activity), record camera imaging of the water depths, run real-time numerical models in order to identify where the volcanic activity could be present and deploy instruments to collect and sample the waters in search for iron, biological activity, nutrients, etc. From satellite, the chlorophyll concentration (contained in phytoplankton) in the Kerguelen plateau region looks like the image below (MODIS 4 km resolution)

This is such an interesting location (I also based my doctoral research of 4 years on this area.. hehe!), that other 3 research voyages are heading down here, with teams from Australia, USA and Japan!

Super!! 

Before I close this post, I wanna give an exciting update: 

the last night we had our first station completed! 

All the instruments and sensors and deployments went just PERFECT! As it was the first real action moment, there was a bit of tension.. but it couldn't have gone better than that! But, even more exciting for me, 

tomorrow night (estimated local time 8:00 PM, Perth time) I will deploy the first SOCCOM float!!! 

With the help of other 2 people, the float has been secured inside, where it will patiently wait for its mission to start. It was a bit tricky to carry it there, as the waves are big today and the ship move a lot (jus have a look at the photo below: I took that one this morning from the bridge), which throws you easily out of balance. 

Ok, that's all for today's science and update from the Investigator!


                                                                                                                   

"This is Major Tom to Ground Control
I'm stepping through the door
And I'm floating in a most peculiar way
And the stars look very different today
For here
Am I sitting in a tin can
Far above the world
Planet Earth is blue
And there's nothing I can do"...

Space Oddity, David Bowie (8 January 1947 – 10 January 2016)

Ship life while steaming

All the clouds are gone and the sky's particularly blue at the moment. With its reflection on the ocean surface, it blends everything in a monochromatic atmosphere. We are smoothly steaming towards the first station (we'll be there sometime on monday Jan 11), which sets the beginning of this research voyage.

I'm slowing getting used to my watch schedule, which is 2 PM to 2 AM, so it's good that we still have some time before everything starts, as things will get really busy by then. It usually takes me quite "a few" days before I'm comfortable in the right shift (on one of my previous cruises, I never got used to that.. I literally fell asleep everywhere, all of a sudden! even standing up.. haha!!). At the moment, I'm still a little bit jet lagged, so I usually wake up at 3:00 AM, 5:00, 6:30, then at 7:30 I finally give up.

Yesterday night it was a lot of fun with some other students and postdocs: we played ping-pong (you basically have 2 opponents: the human on the opposite side of the table and the waves), watched really dumb tv shows and ate an embarrassing amount of food. Honestly, it's not that bad if you eat a lot (that's what I tell to myself, of course..): I spend most of the hours walking around the boat and up and down the stairs between 4 or more decks. Plus: I do usually spend a considerable amount of time at the gym (yes! we do have a gym on the ship :-) ), running on the treadmill while watching "Doctor Who" (my favorite show), weight lifting, skipping the rope, boxing with weighted gloves or simply trying to gracefully do some yoga (I think I left the grace at home, though..).

So far, I haven't spotted any animals, but I reckon I should ask the marine mammal and bird observers aboard if I missed something out.. Uhm.. I'm expecting to see much more animal activity once we are closer to the islands. I can't wait!!

I claimed a really good spot in the lab where a bunch of us have set up their own computers and cameras: below is a photo I took yesterday of the sunset, seen from the porthole above my desk. What do you think? Did I chose right? ;-)

Ciao from 34 deg 21' S, 110 deg 26' E.