Assistant Education Director, Consortium for Ocean Leadership, Washington, DC
Sharon Katz-Cooper started at JOI (now Ocean Leadership) in March 2007. Prior to that, Sharon was the educator on the core team developing the Smithsonian's Ocean Hall. She sailed on The JR during the first School of Rock expedition in November 2005.
So as this expedition ends, I am reflecting on three weeks with the JASON ROV. It is a truly amazing piece of technology. It becomes our eyes and muscles on the seafloor as we humans attempt to work in an incredibly harsh and difficult environment.
Today there was much cause for rejoicing on the Atlantis! As you may have read here earlier in our expedition, we fought with the stuck data logger on the head of the observatory (CORK) at Site 1027. We tried numerous strategies to pull that thing out, a task that also went unfinished last summer using the JR.
Today the weather was calmer and JASON was able to go back in the water - to deploy osmosamplers and take water samples at the two sites we were supposed to go to yesterday. So it's been down all day and is expected to stay down in the deep throughout the night.
Today was a great day for video broadcasting live from the Atlantis! We did our first program this morning to the North Museum in Lancaster, PA. This program was hosted by Jim Ringlein, who is a curator there. We had three special guest stars: Katrina and Gus - a scientist and graduate student from the University of Southern California - and Amy, the third mate on Atlantis.
It's not a sled that you might want with you on a snowy hillside. This is a piece of equipment almost like a small wire bookcase with sample collection equipment on its shelves. It has been sitting down at the bottom of the ocean at one of our study sites for a whole year. Yesterday, Jason helped to release it and sent it up to the ocean surface.
This morning we did our first live video broadcast of this expedition! Thanks so much to St. Joseph's Elementary summer school program in Alameda, California. We spoke to about 50 kids for about half an hour about life at sea, the Atlantis, and the science we are doing out here.
This morning I woke up at 4 a.m. eastern time to start my journey out to the west coast to board the R/V Atlantis, the research vessel we will be sailing on for the next 3 weeks. Usually, in our family, my oldest son Reuven (9 years old) is the first one up and out of bed. But today, I was out the door before he woke up!
In preparation for Expedition 329: South Pacific Gyre, the JR is now transiting from Victoria, B.C. to Papeete, Tahiti. But even during a transit, work continues. Staff on the ship are conducting rig maintenance, including replacement of the aft coring line and re-spooling of the forward coring line. New coring line has been rigged up on the pipe racker catwalk.
Happy Earth Day everyone, from a ship that spends its days studying the Earth! In honor of Earth Day, we just wanted to share with you a live web cam link from Ogden Point in Victoria. You can click on this link any time of day or night and see the ship there - at least until it moves to another part of the port in May.
Here's the link: http://www.bigwavedave.ca/webcams.php?cam=10
Hi everyone! You might be wondering why there haven't been a lot of blogs recently. Well, the new JR has completed its first year of operations since the renovation - that's six straight expeditions. And now it is on its way to Victoria for a few months of scheduled maintenance operations.
