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<title>Brian House – JOIDES Resolution</title>
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<link>https://joidesresolution.org</link>
<description>Science in Search of Earth's Secrets</description>
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<title>Brian House – JOIDES Resolution</title>
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<item>
<title>Just swell!</title>
<link>https://joidesresolution.org/just-swell/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=just-swell</link>
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<dc:creator><![CDATA[Brian House]]></dc:creator>
<pubDate>Thu, 18 Aug 2016 06:35:14 +0000</pubDate>
<category><![CDATA[EXP362]]></category>
<guid isPermaLink="false">https://joidesresolution.org//just-swell</guid>
<description><![CDATA[Some people from home have asked us what life aboard the ship is like. Naomi posted about that earlier, and... <div class="read-more"><a class="excerpt-read-more" href="https://joidesresolution.org/just-swell/" title="Continue reading Just swell!">Read more<i class="fa fa-angle-right"></i></a></div>]]></description>
<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p>Some people from home have asked us what life aboard the ship is like. Naomi posted about that earlier, and I’ll use my home-made record of ship motion to do the same but in a (typically) tangential fashion with plenty of digressions.</p>
<p>Cores have been coming up pretty regularly recently, though most of them have been nearly or entirely empty. Seeing the core liner come up sloshing with sand and water or, even worse, see just one person carrying it (the cores should be pretty heavy) while the tail flops along behind is anticlimactic, kind of like opening a birthday gift…only to find out it’s underwear. And not neat underwear with rocket ships. The boring sort. We hear the “core on deck” call and get all suited up (hardhat and safety glasses, so I guess it’s not too big a deal), head up to the core deck…and find sand or water flowing out. I’ve still been taking the so-called “headspace” samples to analyze for hydrocarbons (see my previous post on waiting for core), but without too much else going on, I’ve had a chance to catch up on some other work that needs to be done.</p>
<p>And that is where you, my dear reader, will benefit (I hope). I’ve been weighing a lot of ground up freeze-dried mud/sand recently to prepare it for carbonate and elemental analysis. Weighing things — particularly down to the fraction of a milligram — on a ship is not straightforward. The motion of the ship changes the apparent weight, something you feel when the swell is rough. Our solution is simply to record and average the masses over a period of time. There are more clever solutions out there, but this old microbalance we have seems to do the best at measuring very small masses. It’s connected to a computer that reads 100 masses as the ship rocks underneath and averages them into a decent estimate of the actual mass. But the best part of all that is that the screen gives a depiction of how the mass is changing with each reading, and by the end of the 100 readings, you end up with a pretty good record of the ship’s motion, recorded as changes in the apparent mass of what you’re weighing.</p>
<p>That got me thinking (never a good thing). Older laptops, before solid state memory was used, have accelerometers to detect if the computer falls because a fall could damage the spinning disk and reader. Basically these models are portable motion recorders and can even be used as seismometers to measure earthquakes or footsteps or the like. And because I have one of these old laptops with me, I downloaded SeisMac, a free little program from the IRIS (Incorporated Research Institute for Seismology) website. They have other programs designed to work with PC/Linux as well, and if you get the chance, I highly recommend checking out other parts of their site too. They do an incredible job of making seismology (and earth science in general) accessible with animations and applications and really good visualizations of abstract processes.</p>
<p>Once I had my computer calibrated (I set it on top of the ICP-OES, one of our larger instruments that has a bit of vibrational dampening — I’ll explain why it needs that later), I set it on a lab bench and let it run for a few hours, and after a bit of smoothing and (a lot of) downsampling, I got the image at the top of the post.</p>
<p>I’ll do some processing of the full “boat-grams” (not true seismograms after all) to see what else we can persuade them to tell us, and I’ll be sure to post the results. I’ll also see if I can put up a little animation of what the motion looks like based on my boat-gram. But for now, and for the people who have been curious about what life on board is like, I encourage you to get your hands on either an older laptop or a smartphone/tablet, because I believe these also have 3 accelerometers (to measure the 3 directions of acceleration). Find one of the free apps out there to record acceleration, and have a look at the boat-gram. If you move your laptop/smart-thing to reproduce the boat-gram, you’ll get a good sense of the motion we feel out here on the swell. You’ll have to move slowly though because the swell is long period (i.e. the waves only move us substantially on the scale of seconds, not quicker). And then if you close your eyes (be careful not to lose your balance, although we do that sometimes too) and imagine the hum of the freeze drier, the creaking of some of the wall-mounted instruments, and the incessant shifting of tools in the drawers, you’ll get a good sense of what being in the chem lab is like (minus the whole <a class="glossary-term" href="http://archive.joidesresolution.org/glossary/9#term388"><dfn title="Look up the definition of Chemistry.">chemistry</dfn></a> part).</p>
<p>More on the ocean’s motion to follow.<br />
Brian</p>
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</item>
<item>
<title>Mosquitoes the size of what?!</title>
<link>https://joidesresolution.org/mosquitoes-the-size-of-what/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=mosquitoes-the-size-of-what</link>
<comments>https://joidesresolution.org/mosquitoes-the-size-of-what/#respond</comments>
<dc:creator><![CDATA[Brian House]]></dc:creator>
<pubDate>Sun, 14 Aug 2016 04:21:30 +0000</pubDate>
<category><![CDATA[EXP362]]></category>
<category><![CDATA[mosquitoes]]></category>
<category><![CDATA[mosquitoes scale]]></category>
<category><![CDATA[scale]]></category>
<guid isPermaLink="false">https://joidesresolution.org//mosquitoes-the-size-of-what</guid>
<description><![CDATA[A few of us realized recently that it’s hard to picture the JOIDES (a 143 m ship) lowering a drill... <div class="read-more"><a class="excerpt-read-more" href="https://joidesresolution.org/mosquitoes-the-size-of-what/" title="Continue reading Mosquitoes the size of what?!">Read more<i class="fa fa-angle-right"></i></a></div>]]></description>
<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p>
</p>
<p>A few of us realized recently that it’s hard to picture the JOIDES (a 143 m ship) lowering a drill string over 4 km through the water and then drilling ~1500 m into the seafloor — the scales are just so different between this (relatively) small ship and the huge drill string. So we decided to come up with some analogies to help visualize the difference in scale between our home on the sea and what it’s doing to get us these lovely cores. Because seafloor drilling is kind of like being a big mosquito — we put the huge drill string down to pull up a 2.75″ diameter core — I figured that might be a good way to get a sense of scale.</p>
<p>So for a little math:</p>
<p>-The JOIDES is 143 m long</p>
<p>-Let’s assume we’re putting down 5500 m of drill string counting what’s in the water and what’s in the sediment</p>
<p>-Say a mosquito is about 1 cm long (though I’m told they’re about 5 times that size in the Upper Midwest and Ontario)</p>
<p>Then we have a conversion factor between the length of the ship/mosquito and the length of its drill string/proboscis (science word!) of ~1:38.5</p>
<p>So a 1 cm mosquito could bite you from ~39 cm or about 15″ away (click on the illustration above for a roughly to scale version of this terror-bug). That’s…pretty far away…but not nearly as far as we thought originally. This kind of exercise really helps put things into perspective that are hard to imagine.</p>
<p>And if a mosquito like that is still hard to picture, we can do the same thing with a person. Let’s suppose we have a person who is 150 cm tall, or just under five foot. Instead of commenting on the fact that they’re a bit on the short side, let’s now see how long their arms would have to be to retain the proportions of the JOIDES and its drill string:</p>
<p>150 cm x 38.5 = 5775 cm or 57 meters! A football field (100 yards) is only about 91 m, so we’re talking a (shortish) person who could give you a shoulder massage from more than half a football field away! That’s a terrifying image! But it does help convey the sense of scale that we’re talking about. We’re currently in a break between cores (which is why I can write about monster mosquitoes and mechanically unstable people), and I’m watching the TV screen that shows how deep the drill assembly is at the moment. It’s slowing down around 4260 m, about at the sea floor, but without someway of contextualizing just how far down that is, it remains a number on a screen.</p>
<p>I hope this post won’t give anyone nightmares involving giant insects or disproportionate people, but instead conveys at least some sense of the different scales we’re talking about and that scales are definitely not just for fish (they’re for mosquitoes and people too!).</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>I might make a fly swatter to keep in the lab just in case…</p>
<p>Brian</p>
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<title>Underwater beach?!</title>
<link>https://joidesresolution.org/underwater-beach/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=underwater-beach</link>
<comments>https://joidesresolution.org/underwater-beach/#respond</comments>
<dc:creator><![CDATA[Brian House]]></dc:creator>
<pubDate>Sat, 13 Aug 2016 15:11:07 +0000</pubDate>
<category><![CDATA[EXP362]]></category>
<guid isPermaLink="false">https://joidesresolution.org//underwater-beach</guid>
<description><![CDATA[So today’s post will be short — I’m off shift now and would really like to get some sleep before... <div class="read-more"><a class="excerpt-read-more" href="https://joidesresolution.org/underwater-beach/" title="Continue reading Underwater beach?!">Read more<i class="fa fa-angle-right"></i></a></div>]]></description>
<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p>So today’s post will be short — I’m off shift now and would really like to get some sleep before the lifeboat drill at 10:30. Today was the first main day of coring after…many…unsuccessful attempts at getting started during the night shift. But at least actually having something to do makes the time go faster, even if that something is pretty much just moving water from one container to another and baking little bits of sediment to run on the gas chromatograph (see yesterday’s post for more on that).</p>
<p>Partway through today’s core, between some nice layers of good seafloor mud — you know the kind you could charge people to use at a fancy spa — we hit between 20 and 50 m of sand (depending on how far the piston corer advanced each time). And this wasn’t just like slightly coarser grains but still muddy. It was the kind of thing no one would ever pay money to have smeared on their face. We’re talking 60-grit here, like something straight off a beach. But wait, I don’t remember ever learning about underwater beaches…would they have underwater palm trees too? Apparently some of the <a class="glossary-term" href="http://archive.joidesresolution.org/glossary/9#term400"><dfn title="Look up the definition of Sedimentology.">sedimentology</dfn></a> folks have found bits of terrestrial organic matter, so maybe the underwater beach explains it all?!</p>
<p>Actually no, the trick is that this sand didn’t come from nearby. In fact it didn’t even come from just a little far away. It’s from the Himalayas (probably)! The neat thing about the oceans is that seawater is pretty dense (a bit like yours truly?) at around 1025 kg/m^3, while air is about 1000 times less dense (around 1 kg/m^3). What this means is that the density difference between seawater and sand (density around say 2500 kg/m^3) is much less than between air and sand. So if you get a landslide in the Himalayas themselves, the sand and debris and everything will just settle out of the air pretty quickly and won’t go very far since the speed at which a solid sinks through a liquid is (at least ideally) proportional to the difference between their densities (see the Stokes settling “law”). And furthermore, water is substantially more viscous than air, meaning it resists much more or is “stickier” (think of maple syrup as an example of something more viscous than water).</p>
<p>Now think about a similar “land”slide underwater. These things — called turbidity flows — are really neat because the sand and debris can stay suspended in the water for thousands of kilometers. Basically the turbulence in the water is so great that the sediment the water is carrying never really has enough time to sink before it gets swept back up into the flow (remember the density difference is lower and the viscosity is higher than in an above-water landslide).</p>
<p>What we encountered today was the result of an absolutely huge turbidity flow that brought coarse sand all the way from the Bay of Bengal, the only major river emptying into this part of the ocean, to where we are, a distance of around 2500 km! And these flows can go even farther — layers from them have been found near the Sunda Strait, another ~1500 km from here!</p>
<p>While an underwater beach would be fun, what we’ve found might be even neater. Core after core we brought up today was full of sand that washed off a mountain range that’s about as far from us as St. Louis is from San Francisco (I’m guessing a bit here). And to get from there to here, it flowed along the bottom of the ocean with nothing more than its initial “push”. I’d say that’s pretty cool!</p>
<p>That’s all for now from here — until we cross paths again,</p>
<p>Brian (who might end up dreaming about transferring water from one container to another)</p>
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</item>
<item>
<title>Tick tock</title>
<link>https://joidesresolution.org/tick-tock/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=tick-tock</link>
<comments>https://joidesresolution.org/tick-tock/#respond</comments>
<dc:creator><![CDATA[Brian House]]></dc:creator>
<pubDate>Fri, 12 Aug 2016 11:21:56 +0000</pubDate>
<category><![CDATA[EXP362]]></category>
<guid isPermaLink="false">https://joidesresolution.org//tick-tock</guid>
<description><![CDATA[We arrived at the first site early this morning, only a few hours after I fell asleep.  But I’m told... <div class="read-more"><a class="excerpt-read-more" href="https://joidesresolution.org/tick-tock/" title="Continue reading Tick tock">Read more<i class="fa fa-angle-right"></i></a></div>]]></description>
<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p>We arrived at the first site early this morning, only a few hours after I fell asleep. But I’m told the thrusters were deployed (more on them from Agnes) to stabilize the ship as we lowered the drill string. Or should I say the highly-trained ship crew lowered it — I would have been entirely unhelpful. The process is, as Marta, the lead geochemist put it, “a ballet” of heavy parts and machinery. Each 30 m section has to be pulled off the deck so it dangle vertically over the drill port in the ship and then lowered down through the derrick until it’s clamped <span style="font-size: 13.6px;">and held just above the ship’s deck. Then the next piece and the next, each section the same procedure, as the assembly creeps down through the water column. </span></p>
<p>But for now, I’m going to focus on what we’re doing up here…or not doing. Some members of the crew are extremely busy preparing software or getting sample requests ready, but for us in the chemistry lab? Yeah, we’re a little bored. We have most everything ready to go, from <span style="font-size: 13.6px;">the chemicals and sample bottle’s we’ll need, to </span><span style="font-size: 13.6px;">the core squeezers that we’ll use to extract pore water from sediments (the sediments have plenty of water, but it turns out even solid rocks can too — stay tuned to this channel). And all my materials are laid out. As the Organic Geochemist on board, I’m in charge of making sure we don’t encounter bizarre kinds or quantities of hydrocarbons that might indicate we’re close to a natural gas pocket, oil, or a layer of methane hydrates. </span></p>
<p><span style="font-size: 13.6px;">Those last ones are really neat — basically under high pressure and at low temperatures, water molecules can arrange themselves into a kind of cage structure with open space in the middle. Think of something like a whiffle ball; water molecules arrange themselves into a lattice, and then in the middle — at the center of the whiffle ball — is one lonely little methane molecule, CH4, just happy to hang out there. The trouble comes when you lower the pressure or increase the temperature on these guys. The cages fall apart and release methane. And that’s pretty bad since while methane doesn’t last long in the atmosphere, it is a very potent greenhouse gas (catastrophic release of methane from methane hydrates has been implicated in the very odd blip in earth’s temperature around 55 million years ago, known as the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum). </span><span style="font-size: 13.6px;">So we definitely want to be careful if hit anything like methane hydrates while we drill (the problems with hitting oil are more immediately apparent). And that’s why I’ll take a little bit (just a few grams) of each sediment core that we get, put it in a glass vial, and bake it to release what gases might be present. I’ll inject the gas produced into a nifty little thing called a gas chromatograph to separate different gases and see what hydrocarbons came out of the sediments. </span></p>
<p><span style="font-size: 13.6px;">If you think about it, separating gases is kind of tricky. For example, air is about 78% nitrogen, 21% oxygen, 1% argon and then lots of other things like CO2, H2O, CH4, etc. that don’t amount to even one percent altogether. But how could you tell that’s what’s in air if you didn’t know (or have access to Wikipedia)?</span></p>
<p>Well, if you’re a very clever chemist, here’s what you do: you take a long (say 100 foot) and very thin tube (like half a millimeter or 0.02 inches thick) and give it a the thinnest bit of a coating on the inside (the ones we’re using having a coating just 0.1 microns thick, about one tenth the thickness of a human hair). So now you have this really long piece of hollow spaghetti (they’re yellow, so that’s what they look like — check out the first attachment) with a fancy…something…coating on the inside. What next? If you’ve chosen what type of coating to use very carefully, the gases you want to separate will each interact a little differently with it when they flow past. The coating should basically be “stickier” for some of the gases than for others, so while some go through very quickly, others keep getting caught and move much slower. And remember the spaghetti is really long, so the time between when the quick and slow gases get to the end is long enough that they get separated fully. We can then use a number of different detectors (each is good at detecting certain gases but not others) to see when different gases emerge. Basically we end up looking at a graph of detector response through time, and that graph will show a peak if the detector picks up something (have a look at the second attachment). Finally by calibrating the instrument with known gases, we can tell when certain ones should reach the detector. Voila, as some of our French scientists might say — we’ve figured out what gases are present. And — stick with me here — if we integrate the area under each peak, we can tell how much of each we have running around.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>But for now the gas chromatograph sits waiting, just like me, for the first core to come aboard. And to ensure I don’t get into any chemical mischief while I wait (it happens…often), I will say goodbye with a poem of my own composition.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>*ahem*</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>The squeezers are aligned with precision and care,</p>
<p>In the hopes that fresh mud will soon arrive there.</p>
<p>And the vials for samples lie in their own holder,</p>
<p>just waiting, it seems, for us to grow older.</p>
<p>A glove bag lies here, flat and deflated,</p>
<p>to keep our fresh cores deoxygenated.</p>
<p>The gas-chromatography oven is whirring,</p>
<p>and the auto-titrators are set to get stirring.</p>
<p>Marta is prepping a lecture beside me,</p>
<p>and I have updated our collective supply sheet.</p>
<p>The day’s gone as slow as the continents drift,</p>
<p>the core will come soon — I hope we’re still on shift!</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>————————————————————–
</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>’til we meet again,</p>
<p>Brian</p>
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<title>Greetings from…somewhere in the Indian Ocean</title>
<link>https://joidesresolution.org/greetings-from-somewhere-in-the-indian-ocean/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=greetings-from-somewhere-in-the-indian-ocean</link>
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<dc:creator><![CDATA[Brian House]]></dc:creator>
<pubDate>Thu, 11 Aug 2016 14:16:44 +0000</pubDate>
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<description><![CDATA[Welp, here we are, somewhere between Sri Lanka and our next destination, designated SUMA-11C for now, the first site at... <div class="read-more"><a class="excerpt-read-more" href="https://joidesresolution.org/greetings-from-somewhere-in-the-indian-ocean/" title="Continue reading Greetings from…somewhere in the Indian Ocean">Read more<i class="fa fa-angle-right"></i></a></div>]]></description>
<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p>Welp, here we are, somewhere between Sri Lanka and our next destination, designated SUMA-11C for now, the first site at which we’ll try to persuade the seafloor to give us some of its mud. We’ve traded the frenetic congestion of Colombo for the complete isolation of the open ocean, although rumor has it some flying fish were spotted earlier, so I guess we’re not altogether alone out here.
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<p>Personally, while I liked traveling around Sri Lanka for a few days prior to departing, I’m glad to have the crew, other scientists, and flying fish for company now. Sri Lanka is a busy place and seems full of contradiction. While one foot is clearly rooted in the past with millennium-old ruins rising in grassy parks, newlyweds having their pictures taken nearby, the other is reaching hard for the future. And it’s a future of glassy high rises and five-star hotels, a new culture that strives to be global, and so feels placeless. I was worn out by the 30 hour trip from San Diego, but when I collapsed in my hotel bed, I hardly felt as though I’d moved. A nice green apple was placed out on a plate for me. It’s odd to travel so far and reach such a fun place as Sri Lanka only to be greeted with a room that could have been transported there from the US right along with you.</p>
<p>I got a bit antsy sitting in my comfortable familiarity, and since I’d arrived early for our August 7 departure, I took a train inland — an experience in itself — to try to find at least a bit of the country underlying the newly molded splendor. It didn’t take long before vendors hopped on the train, chanting the Sinhalese names of what they were selling. During the 5 hour ride on a seat that felt like it was carved from wood, I felt I was encountering more of what I’d hoped to find. I made a loop through Anuradhapura, Sigiriya, and Dambulla. The only reason I remember those names is from having to repeat them to the Tuk Tuk drivers who wanted to take me just about anywhere except where I wanted to go in their three-wheeled rickshaws. I made the mistake once of replying to the driver that yes, I liked spices. He said something back to me that was lost in the wind as we sped along, passing trucks so tightly I could reach out and touch them. I agreed, and the next thing I knew, he’d made a u-turn in the face of oncoming traffic and pulled over at a spice garden where someone insisted on rubbing some pureed avocado on my arm and then tried to convince me that ground ginger paste makes a perfectly natural hair-removal cream. I don’t think it was ground ginger in the bottle, but whatever it was the bald patch on my leg is a testament to its efficacy.</p>
<p>The ruins of Anuradhapura and Sigiriya were delightful as were the thousand-year-old frescoes in a cave in an alcove of the Lion’s Rock in Sigiriya. So many layers of cultural overlapped in those places — capitals were built only to fall into disrepair or be raided and later rebuilt. Prefectories were reoccupied after centuries of disuse. One room in the Dambulla cave temple is newly decorated with gold leaf and a plaster statue of the Buddha while the others contain the original sculpture and painting, sheltered for centuries in their alcoves. So maybe the hyper-modern is just the next layer of history to be stretched out over the island.</p>
<p>In any case, in true Sri Lankan fashion, we found ourselves stuck in the Colombo port with the JOIDES parked in as a huge container ship was loaded. After traveling inland to see the historical side of Sri Lanka, I had come back to Colombo and wandered through the sheer chaos of Pettah market, where people try to sell wallets with the apple logo branded on them, Tuk Tuk’s plow along, horns blaring to clear pedestrians out of the way, and legs of pork hang from vendor’s stalls. I’ll miss Sri Lanka and the time it gave me away from the concerns of being a student and publishing papers and worries about my scientific future. But there was no better sendoff, no more fitting way to leave, than by having to negotiate our way out of one final traffic jam.
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It’s almost 11:00 pm ship time, so I’ll wrap up this post. My shift will end in an hour, but I don’t think I can wait that long for “dinner” — it’s time to sneak down to the galley and avail myself of the 24 hour ice cream machine…or the stock of cake…or both now that the sea sickness has abated. And I promise, next time I’ll say more about the science since that is, after all, why we’re out here somewhere in the Indian Ocean, gliding past who knows what kinds of marine life in the dark.</p>
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<p>And I promise, photos of Sri Lanka are forthcoming…as soon as I figure out how to get them onto my computer.
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