SEAPLEX

Things seem to be going well as the SEAPLEX team continues to sample in the gyre.  Morale is high despite the fact that they have run out of Dr. Pepper!

Our post today is from Jesse Dubler, a cruise volunteer and  a recent graduate of UC San Diego.  This is Jesse’s second post.

Jesse writes:

We saw so much plastic debris in the ocean as we cruised at 10 knots to meet up with Project Kaisei’s flagship, Kaisei, which is out here at the same time collecting samples. We made time in the morning to send out a small boat to collect the debris that was just out of our reach. I had a lot of fun hunting down crabs living in a floating tangle of ropes and nets that the small boat brought back! I think I caught seven of them that the others overlooked, hehe.

I’m on the night shift which I am thrilled about. We get to meet some exotic creatures that swim up closer to the surface at night and the view can be breathtaking when the moon is not obscured – the recent full moon was incredible! Oh, in the galley, they feed us tasteless military rations… just kidding! I came onboard expecting cafeteria food like what they would serve at a camp but the food served is surprisingly delicious and varied… for example, we had a Thanksgiving-like dinner with turkey, mashed potatoes, and the works just last night. There are no food fights onboard this vessel! The major downside for me personally is that it is extremely expensive to access the Internet via satellite. In other words, we are limited in our use of the satellite only to submit blog entries and upload select pictures – a maximum of 4mb daily for the entire crew. None of us can check our personal e-mail or see the comments made on our blog entries by our loyal readers.  I think it is much worse since I know Internet access is possible but we can’t use it, as opposed to being somewhere like the wilderness where it is simply not an option. We sleep in bunk beds and take short “navy showers” which means we turn off water while soaping up or shampooing our hair because the ship’s desalination device can generate only so much freshwater – yep, we have the capability to convert seawater into fresh water. That’s the life onboard this vessel in a nutshell… there are no frills or luxuries here like on a cruise ship but we are definitely comfortable while cruising at a leisurely 10mph for approximately 2,000 miles total.

Personally, I primarily assist with the deployment of all the instruments as well as collecting flow through samples every hour or four hours on behalf of (chief scientist) Miriam. We had trouble early on with the flow through device at the bottom of our boat which pumps seawater to cool the engine from about 3 meters (9 feet) down below the surface. It had a valve that allowed us to extract water from this flow but it yielded very little in debris and was very good at exterminating the tiny copepods by squishing them. After tinkering and development of new forms, we realized it was not workable. On the verge of giving up, I asked whether if we could bypass the flowthrough system and set up a hose over the side with a pump sucking up the water. I thought this would work assuming the engineers onboard had a spare pump. They did and it worked out nicely! As a result, I was called a “genius”! Miriam then modified the lab protocols and restarted the sample collection which is essentially a filter that we swap out and empty the contents into a 4oz glass jar then preserve them in either formalin or ethanol. Unfortunately, just today, the pump stopped pumping water because we were supposedly cruising too rapidly. We have not decided whether to continue this data collection effort or not. I have definitely learned one thing though which is that out in the “field,” scientists often need to improvise and even modify lab protocols on the fly. It is not as simple as it would be in a sterile laboratory environment.

Speaking of things that are not what they seem to be, I want to talk about the nature of the gyre. The San Diego Union-Tribune article from July 30th referred to a much quoted factoid that the Great Garbage Patch is two times the size of Texas. The truth is… nobody quite knows the true size of this plasticky soup since you cannot see it from the space. Also, the reason why it was such a big discovery when Captain Charles Moore of the Algalita Marine Research Foundation stumbled onto this patch is because it is simply so out of the way in the middle of nowhere. Stay with me here… if you think about your last international flight overseas, you might recall flying in a curve to the north. This happens because this route is actually shorter, faster, and more fuel efficient than say, going directly across the oceans. This also holds true for shipping routes that has ships traveling north along the Alaska coastline to Asia then down to Japan. This garbage patch is hundreds of miles from the nearest shipping route and no one really has a reason to come out to such a remote location. We arrived at the gyre on Sunday and the ocean has been unusually calm so we could see where the water is subtly going under. I would like to describe it like finding numerous very weak toilets sucking water down; if you’ve visualized it like the gigantic whirlpool like the one generated by the angry King in the Disney’s Little Mermaid movie, you’re wayyyy off.

Jesse Dubler monitors the continuous seawater flow station aboard the R/V New Horizon.

The tall ship Kaisei rendezvoused with the R/V New Horizon in the North Pacific Gyre during a picturesque sunset on Aug. 11, 2009.  Photo taken by Jim Leichter.

Two lanternfish were collected along with several bits of plastic. Photo taken by Jim Leichter.