Greenversations

Day 3 – August 1, 2009

03:30 a.m. my alarm goes off. It didn’t take much to wake up as the rolling waves had me sleeping a little lighter last night. At 03:48 I rolled myself out of bed and had to do a bit of a balancing dance to stay upright, get dressed, and not wake up Kate.

As I entered the wet lab to greet the departing team and my group, I could tell the Bold was hauling its way to the next offshore station. The staff and crew hadn’t slowed down for a minute all night long.

We were headed “down East” as they say, up along the outer reaches of Penobscot Bay in northern Maine to station R1 -14, about 30 more minutes. Shifts have been light on the sampling as we’re working our way through the outer points which are fewer and far between. In a day or so we’ll be turning around to work our way down closer to shore, where the work will really pick up.

I found out that the last team had done another plankton tow for our budding marine scientists in New Bedford, MA around midnight. I wonder if they caught anything good? Chief scientist Matt Liebman says that the zooplankton tend to move up in the water column at night, whereas during the day they tend to trade places with the phytoplankton which relies on more sunlight.

Speaking of sunlight, it seemed to come up quickly. Though I have to admit I enjoyed the hour or so of darkness on the deck, it felt a bit special knowing we were doing this work round the clock. We all feel it’s incredibly important to study the water that seemingly is far away from the influence of human activity, sadly though we’re finding that it’s not the case. By gathering this data far offshore, we can compare it to the health nearer to the coastline. It is our hope that in future years we can come back and do the same sampling to see if conditions are improving or getting worse. Perhaps you’ll be doing this very same work someday!

At 04:37 we arrived on station, and we were told the water was about 470 feet deep! We deployed the CTD and rosette water sampler, everything went smoothly. I noticed the water I was bottling from the very bottom was freezing! Now might be a good time to explain that we’re taking water samples from three parts of the water column, the bottom, the middle and the surface. I’ll explain more tomorrow about what we’re looking for to determine where these levels are. Each of the three batches though is filtered to catch the chlorophyll, which we carefully contain for analysis at our lab in Chelmsford, MA.

We processed the samples as we took off for station R1-10, about a 5 hour haul away, even further north. To help the next team we cleaned the lab and labeled some extra bottles, I headed to the bridge to get some photos of the rising sun. Once I got there, I promptly decided I wasn’t going to miss another sunrise on this trip.

At 06:10 I sat up on the bridge with Derek, ordinary seaman and Doug, third mate, to record our latest data results from yesterday and this morning. They told me we were approximately 26 miles offshore and wouldn’t have an internet signal until this afternoon. Today’s sampling work will consist of a lot of offshore stations, fewer and further between. Sorry guys! Technology still can’t help us when we’re this far away. In between writing my eyes were peeled on the horizon for those telltale water spouts…

06:21 Doug and Derek, turned on the weather report for Captain Jere as he settled in his chair with a fresh cup of coffee. At 07:00 I went to wake my roomie, her shift was starting in an hour. I also figured it was a good time to take some sea sick meds to be on the safe side. We were rockin’ and rollin quite a bit, even though the seas were relatively calm, the swells were wide.

Before I knew it, I had zonked out with my jacket still on, but awoke to a gentle knock on my door. Even in my groggy state I knew it could only mean one thing! My team leader Ed had come down from the bridge to tell me that First Mate Doug had spotted a spout!
I didn’t even tie my shoes (don’t try this at home), and ran up the stairs using the walls and handrails because I wasn’t totally awake yet. Once I reached the bridge I squinted my eyes onto the horizon and sure enough, about 200 yards off the bow on the starboard side I saw the little, white puff of mist from the whale’s blow hole! I got some pictures and used my zoom lens as binoculars. We watched his dorsal fin come up and then disappear into the deep blue. While it was only a glimpse into this whale’s solitary travels, I hope it’s a sign of more to come today!

That was my first time seeing a whale in the Atlantic Ocean, and after consulting a whale identification book with Doug and Ed, we are fairly positive it was a Common Minke Whale, judging by the shape of the dorsal fin and even the shape of the spout cloud. Not all misty spout clouds are the same!

It’s a little past 1000 now, and I’m up on the “steel beach” as Captain Jere fondly calls it. The sun is bright, we seem to be able to see forever to the horizon. Now I can understand why so many early explorers thought the Earth was flat! Did you know that? Believe it or not it took humans a while to figure out that the Earth is round, and because of this you can’t see the other side of the ocean, it curves around very, very, gradually, which is one of the reasons you can’t see the other side.

Fellow EPA staffer Regina Lyons just joined me, and we traded stories of “sightings” today. Whereas I had been lucky enough to see a Minke whale, she said that as she was leaning over the side of the boat watching the waves, she saw four balloons go by in 20 minutes. Wonder how those got out here? It’s so pristine you’d never expect it, but balloons can travel hundreds of miles in the air before they fall back down. These ones were white and silver mylar, maybe they came from a birthday party or a wedding? We were going too fast to grab them, and it sadly tells another story about the ocean these days. We shouldn’t see garbage and plastics out here, especially in an area off northern Maine where less people live. Regina said they had started to degrade a little bit, but usually the bits of garbage just break into smaller pieces, especially plastics. They never really go away.
More on the rest of my day later! ~ Jeanethe, “aspiring Second Mate”

Jeanethe Falvey works in EPA’s Boston office.

The sun set around 7:45, and my first shift began! Sporting a bright orange vest and hard hat, my team helped to deploy the CTD off the starboard side of the BOLD just off Cape Ann in Gloucester, MA.

In this first day (and a half day at that) we were able to sample 7 stations!  Chlorophyll samples are being sent to EPA New England’s laboratory on land in Chelmsford, MA.

Stations labeled “R1…” are located on the Captain’s Log page. New Stations have the latitude and longitude.

At a bit past midnight, my shift ended and we were on course to New Hampshire’s coast. Said, “hello and goodnight” to my roomie who caught the tough shift, she will get back to the room around 4 am.

I wonder what tomorrow will bring!

Hi there! Each day thousands of people are working at EPA to help clean up our environment. I’m one of the lucky few that gets to see how this work is done out on the ocean! My name is Jeanethe Falvey, I’m 24 years old and have worked for EPA for just over two years since I graduated from Bates College in 2007. This week, from July 30 - August 6, I will be onboard the OSV BOLD, EPA’s only ocean research ship. Scientists will be studying the health of New England’s coastline from Boston Harbor to Penobscot Bay in Maine, and I’m here to help show you what life is like onboard the ship. Learn more at http://www.epa.gov/ne/boldkids/ and follow me on Twitter @epalive!

Jeanethe Falvey works in EPA’s Boston office.

About the author: About the author: Charles LoBue serves as the chief scientist and diver for the US Virgin Island leg of the OSV BOLD voyage. He is an environmental scientist in EPA Region 2 in New York City.

March 6, 2009 (Day 26)

For most of our trip so far, the weather has been very good to us, and we’ve been able to keep to our itinerary. But when the weather doesn’t cooperate, all of our plans are thrown off. Unfortunately, that’s the current situation that we’ve found ourselves in as a strong, low pressure front is upon us and the weather is quickly becoming a problem. Rain is now pelting down, and winds are howling out of the northwest with gusts up to 39 knots (about 45 mph).

This will prevent us from working at our remaining stations on the northwest of St. Thomas. It’s not the rain that concerns us, but the sustained high winds that are creating rough sea conditions and will make it virtually impossible to be able to put our small diving boats out into the water. It is what it is, and we all have to keep in mind that this is beyond our control. We go back to the drawing board to figure out what is in our control. We decide to cast off from our dockage in Charlotte Amalie, cruise east, and anchor in Coral Bay in St. John. We’re hoping that the stations in this embayment on southwest St. John, are protected enough to allow diving.

We are so grateful for the assistance of The Virgin Islands Department of Planning and Natural Resource in helping us transport some of our divers, using their fast monitoring boat, the Vigilant. She’s been docked in St. Thomas, so crossing Pillsbury Sound to rendezvous with us could be a difficult task if the seas are rough. But as the BOLD bounds into 4 to 6-foot seas before turning into Coral Bay, we anchor and it seems calmer, and we’re delighted to see the Vigilant anchored at our meeting point. It’s time to get to work.

We’re able to safely load the Vigilant and two BOLD rigid-hulled, inflatable boats on the leeside of the massive BOLD hull. Although stiff winds prevail, the sea surface tucked behind these mountains seems to be staying down enough to allow diving. We’ll find out as divers return and have a chance to report back to us.

As the boats return, the sun is now shining and we learn of success; the waters are workable. Being a glass-half-full kind of guy, I’m confident that we’ll have success in our next two days here on the south side, and we’ll ultimately get the weather to allow us to return to complete our stations on the north sides of St. Thomas and St. John.

March 6, 2009 - 2:00 p.m. (Day 26)

About the author: John Senn is a press officer in Region 2, New York City. He covers water issues, including water permits, wetlands, coastal water and beaches, oceans and lakes, as well as RCRA, and Voluntary Programs. John’s been with EPA for 2.5 years.

Everyone’s heard the riddle about whether a tree falling in the woods when no one’s around actually makes a sound. A similar analogy can be made for the work being one right now on the OSV BOLD; if no one sees what we do, just how valuable is our work?

Yesterday, some 200 people—about half of them students from local middle and high schools—got a close up look at EPA’s coral reef survey and the BOLD’s inner workings through an open house at Charlotte Amalie in St. Thomas. EPA scientists, the ship’s crew and members of the U.S. Virgin Islands Department of Planning and Natural Resources served as tour guides, and demonstrated the coral reef survey techniques and diving operations currently underway.

Apart from seeing all the cool gadgets and gizmos that make the ship run, as well as our dining hall and living quarters, visitors heard about the importance of studying, protecting and enhancing the health
of coral reefs around the Virgin Islands. Bill Fisher, an EPA scientist from Florida who’s been contributing to this blog, told the visitors about how the Virgin Islands, like many small islands around the globe, are specially vulnerable to the potential impacts of global climate change and human activity.

Rising sea levels affect how close people can live to the coast. Elevated ocean temperatures can alter marine habitat and change how some animals, plants and fish function, including coral reefs. The reefs, Bill explained, benefit islands like the Virgin Islands by acting as a natural (and free) barrier to destructive storm surges; man-made barriers cost millions of dollars to construct.

Coral are also particularly sensitive to even the slightest changes in the water around them, so they’re good indicators of looming water quality problems. Bill was clear to explain how almost everything we do on land affects what goes on in and under the sea. He emphasized to our visitors, especially to the students, that lowering one’s carbon footprint can have a demonstrable benefit in their backyard.

Many of the students who came aboard seemed excited to see and hear about what we were up to. Hopefully we inspired them to take action to protect this beautiful and ecologically-significant place. Maybe a few will even become environmental scientists and carry on our work someday.

About the author: About the author: Charles LoBue serves as the chief scientist and diver for the US Virgin Island leg of the OSV BOLD voyage. He is an environmental scientist in EPA Region 2 in New York City.

We’re at anchor in St. James Bay on the eastern corner of St. Thomas, giving us access to both St. Thomas and St. John stations. Our daily routine has already been well established, and with three dive teams making three dives each a day, filling scuba tanks is an essential task. The breathing gas that we use is Nitrox, which is air spiked with extra oxygen. Increasing the amount of oxygen decreases the nitrogen breathed in while diving, which in turn allows for longer dives without saturating our bodies with nitrogen levels that could cause decompression sickness or the “bends.” Nitrox is specially blended daily on board, with factory efficiency, by the BOLD technicians.

Planning for each day always starts the night before, when after dinner, the survey coordinators and BOLD captain meet to finalize dive plans that start the next morning. Dive team assignments are posted in the ship’s laboratory, which serves as a survey operations center. Divers are responsible for checking the oxygen content of the Nitrox in their tanks, and before retiring each night, they must analyze the air in his or her tanks assigned for the next day.

In the morning, divers check the assignment board to see which boat they’re in and the order of boat deployment. The teams stage their gear for loading onto the boats, with care to include all of the dive gear, survey and sampling equipment, drinking water, and oxygen kit. The gear is methodically loaded; missing one piece of equipment or gear would abort a survey and require a return trip to the BOLD. Once the boats are loaded, divers are on their way to start their work. GPS units are used to locate the station, and a snorkeler confirms that the site is appropriate to “count.” If it’s a go, two divers gear up and splash in to begin the survey; in about 10 minutes, two more divers descend to fill out the survey team. The observations are performed and recorded according to our protocol.

When the divers are finished, they return to the BOLD where samples are logged and refrigerated, data sheets are rinsed and dried, and dive gear is rinsed and hung to dry. Data is then entered into computer spreadsheets by the statisticians, with rigid review by the diver. Water samples are filter-processed for various analyses. Logged data for each diver is entered into the dive officer’s spreadsheet to track each diver’s activity and to ensure that no one has built up too much nitrogen in his or her system after several days of diving. After a long day of being the water, the whole process begins again for the next morning.

March 3, 2009 - 7:30 p.m. (Day 23)

About the author: John Senn is a press officer in Region 2, New York City.  He covers water issues, including water permits, wetlands, coastal water and beaches, oceans and lakes, as well as RCRA, and Voluntary Programs.  John’s been with EPA for 2.5 years.

I’ve spent plenty of time on sailboats and in canoes and kayaks, but just boarding and getting acclimated to the OSV BOLD in St. Thomas was an experience unlike any I’ve ever had on a watercraft.

The ship is like a living organism. Even the smallest pieces of equipment and supplies have their proper place. And no matter where you may be on the ship, if She’s moving, so are you (your stomach included). That means newcomers like myself had better find or re-discover their sea legs pretty quickly or endure seasickness.

In the case of choppy seas most everything is attached to the floor or secured in some other way. All the drawers on my dresser and desk have locks, for example, so they won’t slide out if we hit an unexpected patch of rough water. Safety always comes first regardless of what type of boat you’re on, but on the BOLD, it comes first and second, partly because the ship is so big–224 feet long and 45 feet wide–and partly because of the complexity of what She’s expected to do on a daily basis.

After Her days as a Navy ship, the BOLD was transformed into a state-of-the-art research lab, complete with side scan sonar, biological sampling and analysis tools, and powerful computers to help process all the data that’s collected.

But the BOLD would just be a fancy boat without all the people who make Her work. The 18-person crew knows the ship inside and out, and there’s a chef on board who makes sure we all get three square meals each day.

The team of EPA scientists, who hail from every corner of the country, is nothing short of world class. The coral reefs they’re mapping right now have never been surveyed in such a comprehensive way. People often think that we’ve studied every inch of the planet, but this effort is showing that there are things we still don’t know, especially when the land and water are changing beneath our feet.

Well, we’re cruising back to port at a pretty good clip and the ship’s starting to rock a bit, so I think I’ll go catch up on sleep.

About the author: Mark Reiss is a marine environmental scientist with the dredging, sediments and oceans team in EPA Region 2, comprising New Jersey, New York, Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands. He is one of the principal investigators on the OSV BOLD’s Puerto Rico voyage.

As I had talked about in yesterday’s post, we wanted to have a little fun after all the hard work the crew and science members had put in to complete our surveys. So, we decided to see what would happen if we securely attached foam cups, signed by students from three science classes at a Manhattan middle school and by three teachers from Puerto Rico that joined us on the OSV BOLD, and drop them down on the CTD to 2,500 meters. The weight of all that water produces incredible pressure, just over 3,600 pounds per square inch (PSI). Our instruments are built to withstand this pressure, but foam coffee cups aren’t. The pressure causes the cups to shrink to miniature versions of themselves, as it forces the air in the foam out and sticks the plastic together.

Various items prior to being sent into the depths of the sea.

The crew had seen that before on other cruises so they knew what would happen to the cup. But this time we also sent down an uncooked egg, an unopened can of soda, an orange, a waffle, and a few floating key chains—basically anything that wasn’t tied down! Everyone on the boat made predictions about what would happen to the items, and they were hotly debated for the three hours it took to make the cast. We all gathered on deck waiting to see what happened.

I got mostly firm predictions about what would happen to the soda and the egg we sent down when I polled the boat and scientific crew (though a few people admitted that they just were guessing). And I got a lot of good theories to back those predictions up.

Various items after exposure to the incredible pressure of the sea.

Some confidently predicted that that the egg and soda can would be “toast.” Some people thought that only one would make it or that the egg would break if it went down lying on its side, but would be okay if it went down on its end. Some said that the items would explode. The best one came from our captain who pointed out that the shell of the egg is an engineering marvel of nature so it would withstand the pressure, but the soda can has a weak spot built in and that would make it explode.

Well, maybe the captain did predict the egg would come back fine, but then why did the soda can make it okay, too?

An egg shell is indeed a natural engineering masterpiece, but that’s not why it survived. The reason the soda can, egg and orange did not crush is pretty simple. (By the way, things do not explode under pressure). They are mostly filled with fluid, and fluids do not compress or squeeze together like air does. The fluid inside pushed against the can and the shell from the inside and kept them from collapsing while the pressure outside tried to crush it. If the egg were hollow, even the engineering properties of its shell would not have saved it. The results of our little experiment definitely surprised most of us.

About the author: Mark Reiss is a marine environmental scientist with the dredging, sediments and oceans team in EPA Region 2, comprising New Jersey, New York, Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands. He is one of the principal investigators on the OSV BOLD’s Puerto Rico voyage

Another component of the work we do on the OSV BOLD is lowering an instrument called a Conductivity, Temperature and Depth recorder—we just call it a CTD—through the water column down to 1,000 meters (3,280 feet) about every two hours. It takes about 40 minutes to get the CTD down to that depth and then back up on deck, but it’s important to use the CTD because it tells us about the structure of the ocean.

People tend to think of the ocean as all the same but there is actually a lot of structure in the ocean, and our CTD casts showed that structure. The structure of the water is based on density. Less dense water floats on top of denser water; warm water is less dense than cold water, and less salty water is less dense than saltier water. So, a river that runs into the sea does not mix with the seawater, but rather floats on top of it because it has less salt—it’s less dense. Our software calculates the density using the temperature and salt content measured by the CTD.

We completed all of the Conductivity, Temperature and Depth Recorder drops to 1,000 meters (3,280 feet), and on our last cast we sent the CTD down to 2,500 meters or 8,200 feet. That’s pretty deep—picture it as eight Empire State Buildings stacked on top of each other. As you can imagine, it took a long time to go all that distance and back up. You might think that after all the waiting, everybody onboard would have been pretty bored, but everyone was eagerly waiting for the CTD to come back onboard. We’d decided to have a little fun with the test by adding a simple experiment to demonstrate depth pressure. Make sure to check in tomorrow to see what kind of fun experiment we did with the CTD Recorder!

February 24, 2008 - 3 p.m. (Day 16)

About the author: Charles LoBue serves as the chief scientist and diver for the US Virgin Island leg of the OSV BOLD voyage. He is an environmental scientist in EPA Region 2 in New York City.

We arrived at our dock in Charlotte Amalie, St. Thomas after a steaming all night from San Juan, Puerto Rico. Fair cruising conditions during the crossing allowed most of us to get a good night’s sleep. We tied up at 6:30 this morning in the Crown Bay Marina, a popular cruise ship port.

Today we begin our acclimation to living and working at sea for the next few weeks on the BOLD. A drill had us all assembled on the upper deck prepared to abandon ship. The ship’s crew briefed us in life boat and emergency procedures, including the emergency exposure suit. They’re called “Gumby suits,” and when you see somebody dressed in one, no explanation is needed for that moniker. Those uninitiated to the pleasures of donning a Gumby suit had the privilege of being our Gumby models.

The morning was fast paced, with a series of meetings to discuss daily operations and scientific strategies. It’s very important that we’re all on the same page when coordinating loading 12 scientists and their equipment our three small boats several times a day in a heaving sea. It’s also important that each dive team is performing all the field assessment procedures in a consistent manner.

In the afternoon, we finally got in the water for our first dives. We deployed two boats to a nearby site to stage a series of rehearsal dives to practice the various survey and observation procedures.

All went well, and the day ended with a one-hour science meeting to discuss the trial runs, and to come to consensus on certain details of documenting the observations. Now we’re ready to observe and measure the condition of these coral reefs around St. Thomas and St. John.