June 26, 2009

6-26-09

“Mind you lad, if God ever wanted to be a fish, he’d be a whale”
-Herman Melville, Moby Dick

After many days of foggy weather, I woke in the late afternoon to some of the clearest skies of the cruise. There were hundreds of sea birds still following the ship, so I thought it would be a great time to get a little sunshine. I went up to the second level deck and exited from the cabin on the starboard side of the ship. I stepped outside and immediately saw it, a huge whale spout (about 20 feet high) a couple hundred meters from the ship! I ran in circles for a couple seconds not knowing if I should go inside and tell someone, get my camera, or stay and watch the giant marine mammal cruise by. Since the whale was going in the opposite direction compared to the boat, I guessed that I would not have time to go inside and come back out before it had disappeared. I ran down to the lower deck and told some others looking at birds in a different direction about the whale sighting. Luckily, the whale spouted a few more times before it was out of sight. We could see its huge arching back come out of the water following each breath. Judging from the small dorsal fin, black color, and large body, it was most likely a fin whale, the second largest whale species on earth. They can grow up to 88 feet long and estimated up to 77 tons. Fin whale are common in this area as well (other observers on the ship had spotted some fin whales during a time when I was asleep). It might as well have been one of the fastest whales on earth by how quickly it passed the ship and was out of sight. Even though I didn’t get any pictures, I was ecstatic after the chance encounter of one of the largest creatures to ever live on the planet.

As if the day wasn’t eventful enough, Dave Shull and company, were out coring sediment at a very deep station (3,455 m or over 2 miles). After two multi-corer drops, there was an extra core for Rachel and I to work with. I was finally going to get to slice up a sediment core! I tried to remain as calm as possible so that it didn’t make any horrible mistakes and waste the incredibly valuable sample. My heart was pounding a mile a minute as if I was about to attempt a game winning shot in the state playoffs. Rachel and I set the core on the slicing post and slid the plastic core tube down while pushing the sediment to the edge of the top of the tube. We collected the overlying water just above the sediment, and some 0.5 cm and 1 cm sediment slices (core processing pictures are of Dave and graduate student Maggie Esch). This was done with a clean turkey baster for the water, and some plastic rings, thin plastic cards and a spatula for the sediment sections.

The sediment sections looked like dark brown pancakes, to put it kindly. When it was all said and done we had successfully collected sediment ranging from months to thousands of years old. It felt a little like traveling back in time while we sliced further down the sediment core. While I was watching Dave and Maggie slice their core, I wondered out loud how the sediment would taste. Dave encouraged me to taste some of the discarded mud that they were not collecting. “Grit you can feel with your tongue is sand, and grit you can feel between your teeth is silt. That’s the ‘technical’ way of analyzing sediment grain size distribution.” I didn’t notice any sand, but there was certainly plenty of silt. I was actually surprised at how palatable the mud was.
“The saltiness makes it taste much better than pond mud” I remarked.
“Yes, it’s nicely seasoned” Dave agreed. I guess grey whales don’t have it so bad filtering all their food from huge mouthfuls of sediment.

That night we were treated to, by far, the best sunset of the cruise. It was a fitting end to a landmark day. I remembered getting upset when mud would get in my mouth from our epic pond mud conflicts, growing up. Funny how it turned out to be some of the most valuable career training I had received during my childhood or college days.

-Eli