Read Sidney Hemming’s first post to learn more about the goals of her two-month research cruise off Southern Africa and its focus on the Agulhas Current and collecting climate records for the past 5 million years.
It’s almost midnight here, and we’ll be setting sail around 7 a.m. The transit will take approximately six days to the first coring site. Right now, we have the uncertainty that we may not have Mozambique clearance in time for the first intended site, so we will have to make a decision when we get to the tip of Madagascar about whether to head toward the proposed first site, or instead go to the site that would be #4, the northernmost site in South African waters. Apparently this is a normal thing that the permissions are not granted until just as the ship leaves (we hope that happens here), and in our case we have rumors that the form has been signed but it is unclear where it is.
So Kevin Grieger, our operations manager, has been calculating times for alternative plans and considering plans we may have to drop if we cannot stick with the original schedule. We may have to skip some of the operations, and we may even have to forgo a site. Our highest priority site is the sixth out of six on our geographic path, so we have to be judicious in our planning in order to ensure we get there. And it is the closest to the port in Cape Town — word is we only have eight hours in the schedule between the coring site and the port — exciting but also scary because of all the work we have to get done before getting into port.
My husband, Gary, and I had fun in Mauritius before we came to meet up with the JOIDES Resolution. Ian Hall (the other co-chief), Leah LeVay (the IODP staff scientist) and I boarded the ship on Jan. 30, and we went into Port Luis for dinner that night to meet up with a few of the scientists, Allison Franzese, Steve Barker (former Lamont post-doc), and Sophie Hines. Sophie is a Caltech graduate student who is leading the pore water sampling program for her advisor Jess Adkins (also a former Lamont post-doc) who was unable to participate in the expedition.
So we have been living on the ship since the 30th and getting ready for the cruise. That involves a lot of meetings and training. Many of the science team did not know each other before we got here, and we also did not know about the others’ research plans. The plans will evolve as we discuss potential overlaps and collaborations. And they will also change as we find out what we really are going to encounter in the cores. We are all getting to know each other and learning what each others’ interests are and trying to come up with a plan that will maximize what we can discover with the materials we will collect on this cruise. It is very different than anything I have done before, and it is exciting. I think it will be a really rewarding experience. The group seems to already have developed a good rapport, and we are all very optimistic.
While we have been in Mauritius, the BBC picked up on our work, and twitter has been atwitter with blurbs about the cruise and people on the cruise. We have also had quite a few tours through the ship. Dick Norris (from Scripps Institution of Oceanography) and I went to a girls’ school yesterday and discussed global change and encouraged them to think about science. A small group of the girls from that school came for a tour today, and they seemed really keen and engaged. Lisa Crowder, who oversees the ship’s technicians working with core processing protocols and lab equipment, gave a really awesome show that we all enjoyed! She used the straw-in-the-milkshake analogy for coring in the ocean. It was a great visual!
It is supposed to be quite windy tomorrow, so I’m nervous about being seasick and I’m going to take my Dramamine first thing in the morning. I sure hope I am going to get my sea legs quickly!
Sidney Hemming is a geochemist and professor of Earth and Environmental Sciences at Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory. She uses the records in sediments and sedimentary rocks to document aspects of Earth’s history.
