The crew of R/V Sally Ride works hard to make the ship as capable as possible. The science plan for this cruise includes multiple deployments of a net called a MOCNESS. Ready for the ridiculous acronym? Multiple Opening/Closing Net and Environmental Sampling (or Sensing, depending on who you ask) System. Other types of net casts on previous cruises have all taken place using … Read More
Night-Time Net Tows
There is a migration of “prey” species like small fish and zooplankton to shallower waters after dark, which are then followed by larger, predatory species. It’s a phenomenon that can be seen using the echo sounder onboard R/V Sally Ride called a Fish Finder that sends out pings at five different frequencies. The plots of sound return data (shown here) are used to … Read More
Technicians At Sea: Resident Marine Technician
“I get to work with the world’s smartest people, the top scientists. I ask a lot of questions, I try to learn what they’re doing just for my own insight. These are the professors I could have taken grad school classes from. Over dinner I can learn the grand scheme, the big picture, over a napkin instead of a textbook. … Read More
SIO Acoustic Ecology Lab
Sometimes when R/V Sally Ride leaves port in San Diego there’s a long transit to the first station and the science party gets some downtime (the crew is always working). Not so on this trip – within 3 hours the fantail was crawling with scientists ready to deploy a mooring in the San Diego Trough. Within 24 hours, two moorings had been deployed and another … Read More
Seafloor Images from ROV Trident
SIO technicians took ROV Trident to the seafloor multiple times during the week-long cruise on R/V Sally Ride. Above are some images of animals on the seafloor. For scale, the red lasers are set 15cm (6 inches) apart. There were no biology groups onboard so animals weren’t the focus, but it’s always fun to see them in their natural environment. … Read More
Crew Introductions: Ordinary Seaman
“I’m going to work on deck, I’m going to move forward. I am one day going to be captain of a vessel. It might be twenty years down the road, but no one’s going to stop me from doing this.” Elysia is the ordinary seaman (O/S) onboard R/V Sally Ride, which is perhaps an unexpected job for someone who grew up in the … Read More
Overnight Ops: CTD Yo-Yos
There’s a lot of different groups of Scripps scientists onboard R/V Sally Ride this week, all vying to get their science objectives done. One of the groups has been here before. Back in December, grad student Maddie Hamann was chief scientist of a three day cruise recovering moorings and doing CTD surveys to study internal tides around the La Jolla … Read More
Technicians At Sea: My Story
“Not all those who wander are lost.” – J.R.R. Tolkien, Fellowship of the Ring If I’m going to write a series of blogs about technicians at sea onboard R/V Sally Ride, I may as well start with myself. If you’ve read the brief intro in the About the Author section on this page, you’ll know that I have always been … Read More
Let the Games Begin!
[ngg_images source=”galleries” container_ids=”10″ display_type=”photocrati-nextgen_basic_thumbnails” override_thumbnail_settings=”0″ thumbnail_width=”240″ thumbnail_height=”160″ thumbnail_crop=”1″ images_per_page=”130″ number_of_columns=”0″ ajax_pagination=”0″ show_all_in_lightbox=”0″ use_imagebrowser_effect=”0″ show_slideshow_link=”1″ slideshow_link_text=”[Show slideshow]” order_by=”sortorder” order_direction=”ASC” returns=”included” maximum_entity_count=”500″]Crew and scientists alike work long hours out at sea onboard R/V Sally Ride. We don’t get weekends or holidays off, and there’s no sick days. So a bit of distraction is always welcome, and some of us take our down … Read More
Overnight Ops: Mapping a Fault
For three nights on this research cruise aboard R/V Sally Ride, John DeSanto, a graduate student in Dr. David Sandwell’s lab at Scripps, used the ship’s multibeam to map the seafloor. His target was an area of the San Diego Trough fault, which runs offshore from the Mexican border to Catalina Island. The multibeam, as you may remember from a previous post, … Read More