Posts by dtrewcrist

The best way to describe life at sea is it functions as a routine.  Wake up. Eat breakfast.  Deploy or recover ocean observing equipment. Break for lunch. Deploy or recover ocean observing equipment. Break for dinner.  Finish deploying and recovering ocean observing equipment, if needed. Most deck operations are completed before dark, so everyone figures…

One of the challenges of recovering ocean observing equipment is to snag large, heavy equipment in moving water and guide it to the rear of the ship for pickup.  The Endurance 17 team has made the snagging of this equipment much easier with an innovative design that uses modified commercial off-the-shelf pelican hooks – typically…

Trenity Ford, a PhD candidate at Oklahoma State, is onboard the Thompson to collect and redeploy a foraminifera substrate experiment. Foraminifera are single-celled protists that can live both inside and outside of their shells. He reports on his experiences during Endurance 17 here. Bookmark the site and follow along to have another insider’s perspective about…

Sometimes the ocean takes over and recoveries of ocean observing equipment don’t go quite as planned. That’s what happened today when the Endurance 17 Team tried to recover the Washington Inshore Surface Mooring. This mooring is specifically designed to examine coastal-scale phenomena and withstand the challenging conditions of shallow coastal environments, including large tidal fluctuations.…

As it turns out, breweries and scientists have something in common.  They both like to recycle beer bottles. As part of daily operations, the Endurance 17 team conducts water sampling on water collected by a CTD (conductivity, temperature, and depth) Rosette. The water samples are used to validate oxygen, salinity, nutrients, chlorophyll, and dissolved carbon…

As my mother-in-law would say, today on the R/V Thomas G. Thompson was chock-a-block full.  We arrived at the Washington Shelf Site around 11 am and immediately set to work. The first task at hand was to deploy the Washington Shelf Surface Mooring, a huge 8,000-pound, 20-foot-high buoy. The instrumented anchor, called the MFN or…

The Coastal Endurance Team applied Desitin ointment, typically used to avoid diaper rashes and other skin ailments, to Glider 917.  The ointment is a zinc oxide solution that prevents marine growth on gliders that traverse the shallow coastal waters near the Endurance Array’s Washington line.  Marine growth thrives in the upper layers of water where…