Boring Days at Sea are a Blessing

For the last nine days, we have been underway acquiring seismic reflection data to study a plate tectonic boundary offshore Alaska with the R/V Marcus G. Langseth. Now that the initial excitement of deploying all of our seismic gear and watching the first sound waves arrive on our two 8-km-long streamers has faded, we have settled into a routine of watches and standard shipboard data processing. Meals, sleep and leisure also take on predictable patterns. Each day resembles the one before, and they all start to blend together. This may sound rather humdrum, but an uneventful day at sea is normally a successful and productive one (as one of the undergraduate watchstanders noted). When something “exciting” happens, it is usually not good.

Happily, a large proportion of our nine days have been blissfully boring, but we have had our share of happenings. Excitement takes the form of equipment failures, bad weather and marine mammals. Acquiring marine seismic reflection data is a fantastically complex undertaking involving a lot of sophisticated, interdependent gear, so things can and do go wrong once in a while. A few nights ago, one of our streamers sank too deep, causing a “streamer recovery device” (a specialized airbag) to deploy and float the streamer to the surface. The next morning, a team used the workboat to visit the problematic streamer section and remove the airbag. On a few other occasions, I have received phone calls in the middle of the night summoning me from my cabin to the main lab to discuss other equipment hiccups – no one ever calls at 3 a.m. to let you know that everything is going swell.

Whales are beautiful and majestic, and we have been treated to numerous sightings, but we try to keep our distance. Since we are creating sound waves to image the earth, and marine mammals use sound to navigate and communicate with one another, our activities might disturb them. A team of protected species observers (PSO) watches for mammals, and we suspend operations if a mammal comes too close. Yesterday morning, we found ourselves surrounded by three species of whales, including a rare Northern Pacific Right Whale – an amazing sight, but it prevented us from collecting data for nearly four hours.

Of course there are notable exceptions to the “excitement is bad” maxim, the most important of which is the science! We use our new data to create very preliminary images of the structures below the seafloor as we go, and they have revealed some intriguing and surprising features. A regular sight in the main lab is a group of people gathered around a computer screen or a large paper plot, talking and pointing excitedly. We have a lot of hard work ahead after the cruise to obtain concrete results, but it’s exhilarating to glimpse faults, sediments and other structures in our data for the first time and ponder what they might be telling us about this active plate tectonic boundary. Even after spending a total of nine months at sea on ten research cruises over my career, the excitement of new data has definitely not worn off.