Chris Beveridge is a Physical Properties Technician on Expedition 323.  He has agreed to share some of his experiences and tell you a little bit more about what he does on board the JOIDES Resolution.

 

Life aboard the JR for a Technician can vary from day to day and from job to job. The start of my experience on the JR was when I first saw the JR pulling into Port in Victoria Canada. Before I go into my job as a Technician and life on the JR I will give you a short background about where I came from in terms of the Integrated Ocean Drilling Program (IODP).

 

I currently, when not on the ship, work in College Station as a Curatorial Technician (an unofficial position) in the Gulf Coast Repository (GCR). There I am in charge of processing and distributing all sample requests that are submitted to IODP for all Deep Sea Drilling Program (DSDP), Ocean Drilling Program (ODP), and IODP cores for all types of research. Along with processing these requests I over see several other students like myself in the process of sampling and fulfilling these requests and seeing that they get to the requesting scientists in a timely manor. Once all samples are taken for a given request I ensure they were properly uploaded to the JANUS data base and ship them off to the requester. With this I also assist the Curatorial Specialist (Chad Broyles) and GCR Superintendent (Phil Rumford) in every day GCR running.

 

So, as the boat pulled into Victoria, Canada I had no true understanding on what I was getting myself into; all I knew is I was overwhelmed with excitement and anticipation to visit new regions of the world and work with some of the greatest minds in Science. When the JR docked we were stuck waiting for them to clear customs where I got to meet some of the other Technicians that do not live in Texas.

 

Once we were able to board the ship the ‘fun’ started. The main goal for port call was getting all supplies from the previous expedition offloaded and the new cargo on-loaded in the quickest manor possible. During this time most Technicians were either getting their labs set up and fixing or calibrating their equipment or assisting in the loading/ offloading of cargo. For me I must say I very much enjoyed this as working outside is where i prefer to be as to locked up in a lab. After we got all the cargo loaded the next problem presented, we are on a ship, with this comes limited space so our Lab Officer (LO) had many ideas on what we can do to help maximize our space and we begin working on building different storages and shelves for specific supplies. Towards the end of these projects I returned to my lab (Physical Properties section of the Core Lab) and proceeded with calibrating and learning all the equipment I would be in charge of.

 

Next time Chris will explain a little bit more about the Physical Properties Lab space, and describe what he is responsible for.