Day 4: At Sea

It’s been getting rocky aboard the Nancy. The girls and Giovanni have been experiencing a rough day at sea. Waves are getting higher than what they were getting used to. And the internet has not been working well but we have maintain in contact. They are still deploying S10 nets, bongo nets and CTD’s; Jess favorite one. But today they were able to deploy SVP drifters. However, due to the waves picking up it was hard for them to deploy them since they are heavy and swing around off the crane line. Another cool equipment they were able to deploy were also XBTs and mocness net. The cool thing that Tatiana would like to share is that she was able to direct a CTD to 3700 meters deep below from the lab! And as you can see in the picture above, she used a Styrofoam cup with a cute drawing of an octopus whereas you can see the effects of what pressure has done to the cup at that depth. How awesome! You wouldn’t want to de swimming at that depth that for sure.

Now let’s learn a little bit more about these cool equipment they are using. As mention before in many of my posts, CTD’s provide data of salinity, pressure, temperature, oxygen and provides water sample. As for an XBT’s it an expendable bathythermograph, it is a probe with a really long copper cable, where once its launched it starts to go down the water until reaching terminal velocity and at the same time recording temperature, thus recording temperature changes within depth. Now that we know what all these awesome equipment is being used for, we can see how using them and collecting all this data is very important. Just by looking at the CTD’s above you can tell that they are really big and heavy. Therefore with all the wind and rocking of the vessels they are having a great deal of trouble with them but are still getting things done. Keep doing the great work guys!