The Fate of the Ocean
Page 4 of 12
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“If we can’t do deck ops, there’s not much else to do out here. I can’t write code aboard,” she tells me almost apologetically, as she crawls into her bunk. “I’m too brain dead at sea for that.” She is asleep within seconds.
In fact, we’re all dullards out here, drugged, sleep-deprived, exhausted by the constant bodily compensations of pitch, roll, and yaw. I’ve combined two powerful seasickness meds, something no doctor would recommend, a strategy that awarded me an hour or two in a strange quaaludelike realm where I had to remind myself to breathe. But I’m on my feet now, or rather on my backside, wedged into a stuffed chair in Oceanus’ library and chuckling helplessly at cartoons in The Prehistory of the Far Side.
“Do you want to work?” Curry prompts. “I’m short crew.” Suddenly, I’m on deck ops, geared up with hard hat, foul-weather gear, life vest, and steel-toed rubber deck boots, crouched on the starboard deck, where unpredictable waves wash over the rail and swamp us to our ankles, knees, or waists.
We are tending the workhorse of oceanography, a 5.5-foot-tall contraption known as a CTD, or conductivity-temperature-depth profiler, a collection of 21 four-liter Niskin bottles made from sewer- grade PVC, arranged in a rosette and mounted to a stainless steel circular frame. The package also contains an LADCP, or lowered acoustic Doppler current profiler, which records water velocity. At each of our 22 stops, the package is launched overboard and sent to the bottom, transmitting data to onboard computers 11 times a second along its route. On its return, a science tech commands the winch operator to halt the ascent so she can trigger each of the Niskin bottles to open and close their lids, capturing water samples from a variety of predetermined depths.
Dry, the entire CTD rig weighs about 700 pounds; wet and fully loaded, up to 1,800 pounds. To manage it, Oceanus carries a hydrographic boom amidships, complete with 30,000 feet of coaxial cable. Launching and retrieving in heavy seas requires phenomenal skill and coordination among crews working on three different decks: the bridge crew up top, the winch operator on the middle deck, and the bosun and whatever science crew are manning the gaffs and lines to steady the CTD as it comes and goes on the main deck. Using only Oceanus’ single screw and a bow thruster, the bridge must hold the ship steady in 20-plus-foot seas while assuring the streaming cable does not contact, and thereby slice through, the steel hull. The work requires finesse and boldness, and Curry, a fearless pro in a seagoing world largely ruled by men, clearly thrives on its rewards.
Warmer Waters, Stronger Storms
Adding to these perils is the fact that as the CTD descends, it enters a series of water masses of different density gradients. These are the underwater layers of the ocean conveyor belt, each flowing like a powerful river with its own direction and velocity—a reality made obvious topside when suddenly the cable whips through the water as if hooked to a giant fighting fish.
Curry calls it blue-collar oceanography, and the basics of it—big ships, GPS, depth finders, gyrocompasses, winches, cranes, and miles of cable—are the stuff of modern seafaring, whether for science, transport, harvest, or plunder. Technology drives human effort in the sea the way the wind once did, allowing us to access remote realms for extended periods with such proficiency that in the course of one human lifetime we have learned to pirate every molecule of the sea’s supposedly inexhaustible worth.
