Archive of October 2nd, 2007

Teacher at Sea log for October 2nd, 2007 by Linda Sciaroni

The science team and I have been divided into Jason watch teams. Also on the watch teams are members of the Jason crew: a pilot, a navigator, a data specialist, and an engineer. For our cruise the pilots are Bob Waters, Phil Forte, and Will Handley, the navigators are Akel Kevis-Stirling, Casey Agee, and Steve Gegg, the data specialist is Peter Lemmond, and the engineers are Dan Duffney, Casey Machado, and Bob Elder. Today I interviewed our engineers about their work at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute in Massachusetts.

Dan Duffany attended engineering school at the University of Massachusetts in Lowell and graduated in 2006. He worked part time at Woods Hole during his college years as technician assembling Solo Floats. These autonomous stations rise and fall in the water on a ten-day cycle reporting temperature, conductivity, and pressure. These stations have electronic and hydraulic components that receive instructions from satellites in the ARGOS system. Now he is a design engineer with Woods Hole at the Advanced Engineering Laboratory. Scientists come to his group with proposals of what they need and Dan's team designs a system to meet those needs. He is on this cruise to see how equipment functions in the field and to train to be a regular member of the Jason Team. Lately he has been thinking about designing a solenoid rock buster. Today while piloting the Jason 2 he picked up an awesome rock.

Casey Machado graduated from the University of New Hampshire in June and now works as a design engineer with the Deep Submergence Laboratory at Woods Hole. He is principally in Hawaii for the HROV project, which will debut in Hawaii in November. He grew up in Cape Cod, worked at Woods Hole during college, and began working full time this summer following his graduation.

The third engineer is the mentor. Bob Elder got his early oceanographic engineering experience at Scripps Oceanographic Institute following graduation from San Diego State University. After six years he moved to New England and joined Woods Hole. Engineering at Woods Hole includes electrical engineers (electronics, electro-mechanical, and electrical systems), mechanical engineers (anything related to the motion of vehicles, structure, and power systems), computer technicians and programmers.

Both Casey and Dan are also involved during the deployment and recovery of Jason 2 on the ship's deck. Their job is to reach over the end of the fantail with a special hook to get a rope attached to Medea. This is necessary to bring Medea safely on the deck. Once Medea is secured, the 54-meter cable that goes between Jason and the Medea needs to be safely brought aboard the ship. Then Casey Agee uses the crane to get Jason onboard.

Science Update October 2 by Todd Bianco

Jason 2 has returned to the surface from Site 08, our second visit to Middle Bank. This time we explored seamounts and ridges off the northeast flank of the volcano. Many of our samples were in-place lava rock, and we are very interested in what we found. Some of the samples are glassy, like our other samples from Middle Bank and Kaula, but other samples have much more plagioclase, a mineral found in small amounts in our other samples. Also, some of the rocks are green and white on the inside, rather than the typical gray to black of Hawaiian basalts. These rocks, which were collected near the summit crater of a large cone, appear to be moderately to strongly altered, but the original composition is hard to identify at this point. We also found that samples that had greater than ten millimeters of manganese coating; this is some of the thickest, and presumably oldest coating we have seen.

Presented by the School of Ocean and Earth Science and Technology at the University of Hawaii, with financial support from the National Science Foundation.