2025 Journal Entries from the Field
THE PIONEERS. PART TWO.
THE DEEP
At sea, 31 August 2025 aboard the research ship Roger Revelle
From the 0-1 deck, that is, one above the main deck, I’m watching the ocean. The surface is calm. My “height of eye” is about 20 feet, so the horizon lies some five nautical miles away. On the 0-4 deck it would be farther. For sailors that’s enough ocean area to know what’s going on and what to do in response. For the scientists aboard Revelle, the surface reveals almost nothing of what they want to know: what’s going on down deep.
In 1751, the English slave-ship captain Henry Ellis becalmed in the Gulf of Guinea doldrums wondered what the ocean was like far beneath his keel. He cobbled together a mile of line, lowered a weighted bucket rigged with a thermometer and a closable flap, then retrieved his water sample. It was cold. He and his crew took “vastly agreeable” cool baths, he logged (his human cargo did not). Other mariners took similar samples. It became apparent that the deeper ocean was uniformly cold. Why?
Well, that was pretty easy: Cold water had to come from the polar region. And further, that the layer of cold water beneath the sun-warmed surface had projected all the way to the equator where Ellis and others found it, must mean that there was some kind of flow in the abyss. Yeah, but what kind? Probably it was some kind of slow seepage. But even in the 18th century, scientists understood that if water flowed one way, it had to return the other way, if it sank in the north, it had to come up somewhere in the south and go around again. They had enough physics to recognize that nature insisted on circles. But that was about it, because there was no way to learn more about deep ocean circulation. There existed no instruments more sophisticated than Ellis’s “bucket sea-gage.” Centuries passed. The ocean rolled on.
Then, in 1944, a great American genius showed up at a sleepy little Cape Cod village called Woods Hole.
Henry Stommel
Henry Melson Stommel had graduated from Yale in 1942, considered a career in the ministry, did some graduate work in astronomy, taught it for a while at Harvard, when he found his way to the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI). It was founded in 1930, when oceanography was an infant science. None among its first generation had a degree in oceanography, because there was no such thing; few of its “scientists” were even scientists.
Columbus Iselin, its first director, was a wealthy yachtsman and adventurer, Frederick Fuglister a painter and musician, and Val Worthington had flunked out of Princeton for lack of interest. Some people dismissed WHOI as the “Harvard Yacht Club.” But these guys proved them wrong. Through force of will, intellect and the excitement of discovery, they became ground-breaking sea-going scientists. Fuglister became an expert in measuring the Gulf Stream, and Worthington on all aspects of the North Atlantic. They conducted their oceanography from the decks of a sailing ship, the legendary Atlantis.
With only four years’ experience, Henry Stommel published a paper in 1948 that explained why the Gulf Stream exists. It was suddenly clear to anybody interested in such things that a very special mind had burst on the scene. Brilliant as it was, that discovery pertained to wind-driven surface circulation, while our subject is the deep. Then in 1960 he pointed his intellectual fervor and creative insight downward into the depths.
He and his collaborator Albert Arons scrutinized the old notion of slow, basin-wide seepage of cold bottom water, and said, no, it couldn’t be that way. Down there, no wind riffled the water, but Earth still rotated. The force of its rotation demanded that, after it sinks, the cold water must congeal into a narrow, relatively fast current that flows along the bottom under the Gulf Steam back toward the equator. Stommel named it the Deep Western Boundary Current.
Say what? Jaws dropped internationally. A deep, cold current hugging the very bottom of the continental shelf beneath the Gulf Stream! Astounding. Incredible. But there was no way to verify this theory at the time of its conception. It was a current on paper alone, and both men knew that. But it wasn’t long before other more technically minded ground breakers invented instruments capable of actually measuring deep circulation. And today every grad student in Oceanography 101 knows of the Deep Western Boundary current (DWBC).
But what remains largely unknown is the nature, pathways, and mechanisms by which the cold water in the polar regions establish the DWBC. And that brings us aboard Roger Revelle, August 2025. Parsing that complex interplay of polar currents is our objective. We have aboard all the instruments that for so long were lacking. We have the ship and the motivated scientists and students, and we’re in the right spot to fill in the blanks in the magnificent system that delivers cold water back southward after it sinks from the surface—thus this grand natural system balances warm and cold to stabilize our climate on a hemispheric scale.
In the days to come I’ll do all I can to explain the ways and means of this at-sea oceanography in action, without, as Bob likes to say, going too far into the weeds.
Dallas Murphy
WEATHER
At sea, 28 August 2025 aboard the research ship Roger Revelle
“It’s comin’ on to blow, m’ son. Ye best be battin’ her down.” (Heard while aboard s/v Quetzal, Bugeo, Newfoundland, 2010)
“You know what I hate?” said Captain Sheasley, r/v Knorr, some years ago.
“What’s that, Skip?”
“When TV weather reports say, ‘The storm has gone safely out to sea’”
When sailors speak of weather, it’s seldom of precipitation or temperature; those are largely terrestrial concerns. It’s wind that matters to their lives and its sister, waves, the “sea state.” When it’s rough, you stagger down the hallways as if walking were an unpracticed act, and objects fly from their places with spiteful will. When the heavy waves meet her beam, she rolls like a bottle.
I bring this up because Hurricane Erin is supposed to sideswipe us sometime after midnight. We had stopped briefly at Torshavn, capital of the Faroe Islands, where the technicians, having successfully recovered ten “moorings,” left the ship and several new scientists came aboard. (More later about the moorings and the scientific data they gathered during a full year in the water.).
We’re heading seaward from the Faroes, where Erin is predicted to generate 20-foot swells. I haven’t heard any reliable forecasts of wind velocity. People are taking it seriously. Joe the bosun is stalking the decks with tie-down straps slung over his shoulder looking for anything movable. Bob sent a group email to the science party, “Secure your computers and everything else.” Visibility is reduced to a ship length in woolen fog.
It’s midnight now, and the fog has thickened. The horn blares every two minutes. But whatever we’re in for, has not yet arrived. If you peer too long into the fog, your eye conjures objects from their absence. Is that a whale’s spout?... A container ship crossing our bow?...Naw…. Anyway, if it comes on to blow, I’ll let you know.
* * *
It didn’t. We got lucky for now. Little wind, so no waves, just big swells. (While often used interchangeably, swells and waves aren’t the same things.) She took some heavy rolls during the night, but not enough to curtail the ocean measuring that goes on around the clock, weather permitting. It’s 0600 and I’m watching long, languorous swells heave up at the horizon and sort of ungulate their way to her starboard side from a little north of east. They’re large but soothing after our expectations of violence, and beautiful. The ship has fallen into their regular rhythm. The fog has softened to haze.
It’s midafternoon now. The swells have sagged. The sky is blue, clouds white for the first time since Iceland slid astern beneath the horizon. Delicate kittiwakes in flocks have joined the ever-present fulmars. The ocean changes its mood faster and maybe more abruptly than that of humans, the romantics who gaze at it and the scientists busy to understand it.
Dallas Murphy
THE PIONEERS. PART ONE.
At sea, 26 August 2025 aboard the research ship Roger Revelle
By 1890, Fridtjof Nansen, not yet 30, was growing melancholy, as was his wont, brooding that his greatest accomplishments were behind him. He was already famous for the first-ever crossing of the Greenland Ice Cap, on skis, of course, a feat judged impossible at the time. Tall and handsome, blond and blue-eyed, not only did Nansen look and act the part of the of the romantic explorer-hero-scientist, his timing was ideal. Not much of international note had happened in Norway since Viking times, but now with a list of world-class scientists and artists including Ibsen and Grieg, Norway was ready to assume her place as a modern European nation. Talk of Norwegian independence (from Sweden) was in the crisp air. Though Nansen was keenly aware of his symbolic importance and responsibility to the burgeoning nationalism, he wanted more for himself. The ice-cap crossing three years behind him, he fixed his melancholic gaze on the North Pole.
A stubborn myth was still kicking around geographical circles of an ice-free Polar Sea containing land, perhaps even another continent. Nansen didn’t buy it. There was no land, only a perpetually frozen Arctic Ocean. And there was empirical evidence for an east-setting current. Most compelling was the wreckage of the American exploration vessel Jeannette which had been trapped in the ice near the Bering Strait and crushed during an 1879 attempt to attain the North Pole. Everyone aboard this ill-equipped, poorly planned, and fecklessly executed expedition starved to death on the Siberian coast, but the bones of Jeanette had fetched up on the east coast of Greenland. Maybe, Nansen surmised, she had drifted right over the Pole. That’s what he decided to do.
With funding from the Norwegian Parliament, he commissioned the Norwegian marine architect Colin Archer to design a boat specially for the wild idea—the immortal Fram, “Forward” in Norwegian. She lives now in the Fram Museum, Oslo, and to see her was, for me, a kind of pilgrimage. (Peigen Lin, a scientist now aboard Revelle named his son Fram.)
The boat, 128 feet long, captained by the brilliant seaman and later explorer, Otto Sverdrup, entered the pack ice on 21 September 1893 north of the Bering Strait, 683 straight-line miles from the Pole. With her round bottom, she rode atop the ice as if it were a drydock. However, eventually Nansen realized that she would not drift over the Pole as hoped.
Then Nansen, the scientist, gave in to Nansen, the ambitious, fame-driven explorer—and he left the ship, knowing he’d never regain her. With a hard case named Hjalmar Johansen and 15 dogs he made a dash for the Pole, toward immortality or a miserable death. They reached 86°11”, the farthest north any human had ever traveled. But that was it. The dogs were dying, the ice conditions dreadful. To continue would have been suicidal. They retreated toward a desolate, uninhabited string of rocks called Franz Josef Land, that “cold, congealed, frozen land,” as its discoverer, Julius Payer, described it a few years earlier.
“Land! Oh wonderful word!” Nansen exclaimed in his journal. It had been 132 days since he’d left Fram. He and Johnassen spent the winter in a hole covered by polar bear skin and driftwood, subsisting on anything they could kill (You had to be Norwegian). On 17 June 1896, Nansen heard dogs barking; all his dogs were dead. He ran toward the sound, and he saw—a man. “We quickly approached each other, I waved my hat, he did the same….I came closer, and then I… recognized Mr. Jackson.”
“Aren’t you Nansen?” Jackson asked.
“Yes, I am Nansen.”
“By Jove, I am devilish glad to see you,” as Jackson recorded, “We shook hands again very heartily.” (From the biography Nansen by Roland Huntford.)
The history of Polar exploration is marbled with moments like these, which if posed as fiction readers would roll their eyes at the implausibility. Frederick Jackson had applied to the Fram expedition but was politely turned down because he wasn’t Norwegian, so he formed his own expedition. Its purpose was to prove the existence of the ice-free Polar Sea, the very myth that the Fram expedition had exploded.
Nansen and Fram returned almost simultaneously to Trondheim, and, reunited, sailed to Christiania (now Oslo) and a hysterical welcome, “a tumult of applause,” he wrote. Nansen mania broke out, worldwide. But after the confetti had been swept up and international paeans quieted, Nansen fell into a funk. The fame he’d sought didn’t really suit his temperament. And he was troubled by this irony: Fram had drifted just 19 miles short of his farthest north record. Had he stayed aboard, sparing himself the pain and mortal danger, he still would have broken the record. Further, he felt he had squandered time that could have been devoted to oceanography.
That’s Nansen for you. But had he a brighter temperament, he might have been a bit more cheerful. Quite a lot of science had been accomplished. They had sounded the Arctic Ocean for the first time, found it much deeper than expected, and had produced the first full-depth temperature measurements. They took hundreds of water samples with the new “Nansen bottle,” forerunner of the Niskin bottle we’re using aboard Revelle.
And here in Norway, before the advent of modern technology, Nansen’s contemporaries ignited the theoretical sparks in an explosion of ocean knowledge about the general shared characteristics of all the world oceans.
Explorers continued to seek fame and “firsts” in the Arctic, particularly the North Pole, and sometimes found only death. But these high-latitude oceans persisted in defiance of scientific knowledge. Understanding their circulation—and the relation to climate—had to await modern technology. We carry that technology aboard Roger Revelle. And it’s pleasing to think of this expedition as heir to the pioneers’ work when armed only with physics and imagination. Still, much remains to learn, but it’s also pleasing to know that we will contribute a chapter, or even a few pages, to the journal of ocean circulation in these high latitudes.
Dallas Murphy
SHIPS IN PURSUIT OF WATER
At sea, 20 August 2025 aboard the research ship Roger Revelle
A promising young doctoral candidate in physical oceanography sits nervously for the oral exam before a committee of prominent ocean scientists. Instead of quizzing the student on the principles of ocean circulation, one of the elder professors, a famous figure in the field, asks, “Now that you’ve completed you course work and have been to sea aboard our research vessels, how would you describe the oceanographer’s primary job?”
Surprised, the student pauses, ponders, then replies: “To follow the water.”
The story is probably apocryphal, a device composed to sum up the science. But when I first heard it, I didn’t fully appreciate its subtext: Following water is a lot easier said than done. As Carl Wunsch, a renown figure in the field, put it, “One of the reasons oceanography has a flavor all its own lies in the brute difficulty of observing the ocean.”
Oceans are sometimes frozen, often rough—and they’re vast in two dimensions (the entire world’s land mass could fit into the Pacific Ocean, with room to spare). And there are other factors of difficulty. The things oceanographers want to know about water in order to follow it—temperature, salinity, current velocity, chemical components—vary constantly. Take a measurement of them today, chances are they’ll be different day after tomorrow. Also, to understand much of anything requires highly sophisticated, expensive, and specialized solid-state instruments, which have gone to sea only relatively recently. Physical oceanography is a young science for that reason.
Rapid advances took place during the Cold War, when the Navy sought to hide our submarines and find theirs. While the Navy knew a lot about the surface of the ocean, they didn’t know much about its depths, so they essentially wrote oceanographers a blank check to devise technology and techniques with which to learn for them. Oceanographers then applied those tools of strife to peaceable scientific inquiry about the ocean for its own sake. (As someone put it, “The Navy got answers to questions it didn’t ask.”) Only then could the science reach adulthood.
However, one element abides: the ship. Not just any ship, but one designed from keel to masthead to serve ocean research. She must do things typical deep-sea ships can’t or don’t want to do, stop, for instance, at a particular point in the middle of the ocean while scientists probe its depths. She has to go to remote regions with rotten weather, such as the high latitudes remaining safe and entirely self-sufficient. She must be highly maneuverable, able to turn in her own length, so technicians can deploy or retrieve various instruments from the aft deck, even in surly seas. She needs stout winches and cranes to handle heavy gear. Thus, she demands diverse levels of seamanship unnecessary on ships that go from point A to B and back again.
Over meals, we talk of other research ships we’ve known. Knorr. Melville. Kristine Bonnevie. James Clark Ross. “I was on Healy when the ice—” “Remember how Oceanus snap-rolled?” Sally Ride. Neil Armstrong. Kronprins Haakon. I miss the WHOI ship Knorr (retired). I can go all runny and sentimental over these vessels, but it’s not cool to show it.
As chief scientist, Bob has enlisted Roger Revelle with a grant from the National Science Foundation. Everybody in this tight-knit but international business knows him. And everybody likes his chief-sci style. He’s calm, at least outwardly, no matter the adversity, such as when heavy weather steals his expensive ship time. And he doesn’t meddle. He delivers his plan-of-the-day to the captain and science party, then let’s people go about their jobs. Though the ship goes where he needs her to go, Bob is not in charge of Roger Revelle.
Captain Eric Wakeman runs the ship, assisted by his three mates: Chief Mate Tom Grose, 2nd Kirsten Hervey, and 3rd Hi’ilei Robinson. Second in this and every ship’s hierarchy, for obvious reasons, is the Chief Engineer, Tom Johnston. These officers and their crew have been all over the world. They’d probably make more money on, say, a Maersk container ship, but wouldn’t see much, since merchant ships tend to work one route over and over.
Asked what he likes best about research ships (R/Vs), the chief mate doesn’t miss a beat: “Travel.” Tom has been on about everything that floats, including fishing boats, captain on Seattle ferries, and merchant ships. “There’s a saying on merchant ships: cargo is king. That gets boring. I like the variety on R/Vs. Not only of the places we go, but also the variety of science.” For the crew Roger Revelle is home. Science parties come and go, usually in month-long stints with all sorts of different objectives and needs. “Everybody feels a responsibility to help make the science successful. I like that too”
Veteran chemical oceanographer Emil Jeansson, a Swede who works at the Bergen (Norway) Geophysical Institute points out that, “All ships are generally the same, but each is a little different.” Each brings aboard a piece of its own national character. “Yah, Yah, particularly in the food.” (Emil was surprised to learn that Americans use two bed sheets.)
There’s an age-old saying that all ships run on the stomachs of their crews. This one is no exception. We eat well, and a lot, thanks to Stephanie Brown, Senior Cook and, Ryan Mann, Cook. Theirs is the hardest job on the ship, and they do it skillfully. We appreciate that.
____________________________
Roger Revelle, Some Particulars:
Owner: Office of Naval Research
Operator: Scripps Institution of Oceanography
Built: 9 December 1993, launched 20 April 1995
Propulsion: Twin 3,000 hp Diesel electric motors
Length: 277 ft (84.4 m)
Beam: 52 ft. (16 m)
Cruising Speed: 12 knots
Range: 15,000 nautical miles (28,000 km)
Endurance: 52 days
Dallas Murphy
SOMEWHERE OUT THERE
At sea, 17 August 2025 aboard the research ship Roger Revelle
Let’s imagine that in, say, the year 700, a monk strolls a rocky crescent beach at the mouth of Bantry Bay in the west of Ireland. The tide is flooding fast, and a scatter of rain is falling. About to turn back, he notices a peculiar object in the line of wet, black sea wrack at the high-tide line, and picks it up. It’s a heart-shaped bean with a hard, shiny brown shell about the size of a child’s fist. He dries it, turns it over in his hand, and holds it to the light. He has never seen such a thing before. Did it come from across the Western Sea? Or from beneath the sea? Is it a sign, a symbolic heart? He squints out at the horizon as if for an answer. Finding none, he marvels still again at the ineffable mystery of God’s creation.
The bean, technically Entata gigas, originates in the tropics where, the monk’s Bible tells him, the seas boil, but enough made the ocean crossing to have been used as teething rings in medieval Europe, hollowed out to make snuffboxes, and, in powder form, taken as a laxative. Midwives used them as talismans in birthing rituals bearing gigas around the infant’s bed in the direction of the sun. Having drifted across the unknown, unknowable sea, they were attributed magical powers (or in the case of constipation, efficacious results.) We called them lucky beans in southeast Florida, where I first fell under the spell of the ocean.
Other drift objects crossed the Atlantic and fetched up on the shores of Great Britain, Ireland, Spain, and Norway, but none is so nautically well found as gigas for the voyage, its seed surrounded by a thin airspace for buoyancy and encased in a hard, impermeable shell for watertight integrity. It thrives on vines along sun-bright river banks between the Costa Rican rain forests and the Orinoco Delta. When the season is right, the vine drops its seeds into the rivers, and to begin its transatlantic voyage all gigas needs to do is reach the sea and the system of currents that will take it north. A few ride the current 900 miles to the Yucatan Channel, then over the north coast of Cuba, and into the Straits of Florida—the “beginning” of the Gulf Stream. About 35 million cubic meters of water every second blast through this half-pipe trench between Florida and the Bahama Banks. If it really were a “river in the sea,” in Benjamin Franklin’s term, it would transport a volume of water 80 times greater than all the rivers on Earth combined.
Clearing the Bahamas, the eastern bank of the “river” falls away, but the Gulf Stream still hugs the continental shelf of the U.S., and the Monk’s bean will cover some 120 nautical miles a day all the way to Cape Hatteras. There everything changes. There the Gulf Stream puts to sea. It casts off all terrestrial association, and will never again approach dry land. In technical lingo, the Gulf Stream becomes a “free zonal jet.” In utterly unscientific language, it seems to celebrate liberation with exuberant display. It wavers and undulates, casting off giant eddies, and long meanders. Over time, its net transport remains northeastward toward the Grand Banks of Newfoundland. But in the short term, there’s no predicting its whims.
However, to reach the shores of Ireland, Great Britain, or Norway, gigas must find its way into the North Atlantic Current (NAC), a sort of offshoot arm of the Gulf Stream itself. Twenty to 40 million cubic meters of warm, salty water deliver to the west-facing shores of Europe a moderate climate they don’t deserve, given their latitudes. For instance, the latitude of Bantry Bay, Ireland, is 51° North, where palm trees can survive, and farther north, much of the coast of Norway above the Arctic Circle remains ice-free year-round. (On the west side of the Atlantic, that latitude slices across the frigid coast of Labrador.) So here’s a clear-cut example of how the ocean, in collaboration with the west wind, strongly influences climate over a large swath of the Northern Hemisphere. And it’s only one example.
But now we must leave behind the monk, his sea-heart bean, and religious musings to follow the NAC into the Nordic Seas, our study area. There the NAC melds with a complex mix of currents, some flowing down from the Arctic Ocean, others originating in the Nordic Seas. And now the ocean delivers a truly fantastic performance:
All that water flowing northward must somehow find its way back south. If it didn’t, Europe would have been submerged eons ago. So what does it do? Come Arctic winter, the inflowing tropical-origin NAC water, already heavy with salt, further “densifies” from heat loss to the atmosphere—and sinks. Then, simply because Earth rotates, the water forms into a narrow stream and flows south beneath the Gulf Stream all the way to the equator. It’s called the Deep Western Boundary Current.
In a real sense, the existence of the Deep Western Boundary Current is the reason why we’re out here. Bob and his science party want to understand the headwaters of the DWBC. Specifically, they want to measure how the densified water finds its way from the relatively shallow Nordic Seas to the very deep North Atlantic Ocean. This requires the water to negotiate its way through canyons in the submarine mountain range between Iceland and the Faroe Islands to the east.
How astounding it would be to see this waterfall, dwarfing all on land, combined. To visualize the elegant, even magnificent, ways of the ocean requires imagination to translate the necessarily level-headed language of science into pure wonder.
Dallas Murphy
A BEGINNING
Reykjavik, Iceland, 15 August 2025 aboard the research ship Roger Revelle
Chief Scientist Bob Pickart wants to understand the ways and means of the ocean. He always has, devoting his long career at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution to the endeavor. Of course, no one can understand the entire World Ocean; scientists must specialize. Bob has looked north to the high-latitude seas, the Beaufort, and on this side of Canada, to the Greenland, Norwegian, and Iceland; together, they constitute the Nordic Seas—our destination.
These can be unruly waters. I was with Bob during a 2007 expedition, a “cruise” in the parlance, when a storm blew hurricane-force and higher for 24 hours, driving before it magnificent 60-foot breaking waves. Even on the calmest days, the dynamics of the Nordic Seas are dizzyingly complex and confusing as if to intentionally defy scientific understanding. So, “Why bother?” is a reasonable question for non-scientists to pose. On one level, it’s because that’s what oceanographers and other Earth scientists do—they seek to understand nature. On another, there is a degree of urgency these days to glean the wild array of hot and cold currents: What happens to salt water in the Nordic Seas redounds to and in part determines the conditions of our climate. But to learn anything and then report it to you, we first need to get underway.
Captain Wakeman has taken in his dock lines, and that’s as good a mark as any for the beginning of a cruise. He cons Roger Revelle away from her berth and points her bow toward the mouth of Reykjavik Harbor. Now, as at the outset of all voyages, expectant questions hang over her decks. What will happen out there above the Arctic Circle? Will the winds and seas allow Bob and his team to do their work or just make us miserable? Will the electronic tools essential to measure oceans fail when we need them the most? And what about the ship? Ships occasionally breakdown through no one’s fault. In any event, fair or foul, we’ll have sea stories to tell—and if all goes to plan, ocean secrets to reveal.
The harbor pilot has come and gone, and now the ship pitches slightly in a gentle seaway. It feels good.
And so we invite you aboard vicariously on this month-long cruise, its unique combination of fine tolerance science, demanding seamanship, and heavy industry. We’ll deliver updates in prose and photography not only to address the science, but to evoke daily life aboard a dedicated research vessel alone on the open ocean. I’m pleased now to welcome you aboard Roger Revelle.
Dallas Murphy
