**Guest blogger Randy Christian is a crew member on R/V Sally Ride, but this month is working on FLIP, Scripps’ FLoating Instrument Platform. FLIP is deployed on a project offshore of Southern California, accompanied by other members of the SIO fleet, R/V Sproul and R/V Sally Ride. You can learn more about Randy in this blog post introducing him as second mate, though … Read More
Trace Metals
R/V Sally Ride has its first bubble! It consists of a fort of plastic sheeting with filtered air fed in through a flow hood to create positive pressure (see header photo). Dr. Kathy Barbeau and her graduate students set it up in the wet lab in order to keep their work area clean of contamination. Their experiments focus on such … Read More
Zooglider Science
Leg 3 of this R/V Sally Ride cruise is underway after switching out the science party in Oceanside. Samples are being collected by a few different groups, including Scripps professor Mark Ohman and undergraduate and graduate students from his lab. We are operating in the vicinity of a zooglider that was launched recently from a small boat. The glider is an unmanned vehicle that carries … Read More
Ground-Truthing
Onboard R/V Sally Ride, and in oceanography in general, a lot of sensors are used to collect information. In order to check that inferences made are backed up with data, ground-truthing is required. On leg 1 of the current cruise, scientists used passive and active acoustic sensors to determine the density of animal populations. There are sensors attached to the bottom of … Read More
Buoys in the California Current
Dr. Uwe Send’s lab group at Scripps Institution of Oceanography consists of grad students, scientists, technicians, and engineers that fabricate, maintain, deploy, and recover instruments all over the world. This week they’re on R/V Sally Ride recovering a mooring, and deploying a new one in its place. This one is attached to a surface buoy, unlike the other mooring operations done on the … Read More
Crew Introductions: Able Seaman
“It’s so awesome – the research, the science…you feel like you’re doing something good with your life. Just to know I’m part of it – loading the gear on, making sure everyone’s safe when they’re operating. It gives you that satisfaction of bettering the world. I wouldn’t get that from a 9-5 job. I’m incredibly grateful to be here.” AB … Read More
MOCNESS Trials
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