Go west

We had had very smooth weather for almost three weeks. Elegantly we slid through the water, the vibrocorer was lifted into and out of the water without swinging at all, we walked without staggering along the length and width of the ship; all was easy. We cored so much we worried ourselves. Would we have enough core liners, end caps, cling film, tape, boxes? And almost all cores were a success. Sometimes we didn’t quite core what we hoped for, but generally, we cored up at least 2m of something. 

The cores of the eastern part of the cruise

But then we had done the last core in the east, and we headed along the north coast of Northern Ireland to the western parts of the cruise. And things changed. First the sediments. The first core we tried on the western side yielded only a few pebbles. So did the second one. The third one they let vibrate for a fair while, and then we got 60cm of stiff, unforgiving material. This clearly wasn’t the muddy east anymore!

 Not what we came for, but pretty: Holocene mud with lots of snails in it. I think it's Turitella.

Some of the 14C samples we collected on the first leg

Then the weather caught up with the geology. We got waves! We rocked in our beds so much I struggled to sleep! I ran the treadmill like a drunk, and then when it got worse had to forget about the whole thing! The day shift tried one core, and then abandoned the mission; it was too dangerous to have a 5000kg metal contraption swinging out of control. There would be no more coring until the weather cleared up. Which it didn’t; so there was no more coring until port call.

A still from a small video I made of the waves. The actual video is so big I'll have to upload it from land.

The second lag hadn’t even begun, and we had been reminded of that science cruises aren’t always as smooth as we had been tempted to believe on the first leg. It was clear that things would be different! The coring will be hard, and we expect to have to run away and seek shelter from a storm within days. We’ll see! But we’ll be a fresh and rejuvenated team, and we’re as ready as we could be!

Routine coring

As I write this the first leg of the cruise (which has two 3-week legs, and a port call in Killybegs in between) is drawing to an end. We’ve been coring for weeks now. And we’re running on routine. Which is good.

By sheer coincidence we have developed different roles within the coring team. If a core comes on deck, you can reasonably predict who cuts it, who holds the end being cut off, who labels the sections, and who puts the data into a spreadsheet. All have their tasks, and all goes smooth!

The BGS hosing down the vibrocorer before taking out the barrel 

When the cores come out of the core scanner and need to be split, measured, photographed, described and packed, we change things around at random. You don’t want to be describing for six hours on end! And it can be a bit stressful on a busy day; if Elke keeps on bringing in cores from the core scanner lab, and new cores are coming on deck at the same time, and there are cores everywhere and we can’t keep up. Unfortunately, it can also be a bit too quiet if there are no new cores coming in; most often, it is just two of us in the lab, and we don’t have a radio. And I can’t sing. I do anyway; one would be surprised how many songs have lyrics that can be made, with a few substitutions, to be applicable to coring. Fortunately, my lab mate Riccardo is more skilled in musical matters. (It tends to be us during such times; the busy time is between 7 and 12, and Kasper has geophysics watch between 8 and 12, while Sara tends to be elsewhere). And once in a while, Elke comes out with a new core section, and as she mans a lab in a container on her own, she tends to be a bit starved for human interaction as well. That helps! 

Too many core sections; where to put them? 

 Riccardo puts away a core that has been fully processed

And once the cores are in, the splitting can be exciting; we know from the cutting into sections what we can roughly expect, but seeing the entire sequence for the first time is quite something else. Opening a core that looked especially promising is nice! In a research proposal you tend to show idealised versions of what’s to come, but sometimes nature is kind and looks just like that. And when we get the kind of sediments we are after, we take whatever looks suitable for 14C dating from those, and sometimes just take entire slabs of sediment out, to sieve later, looking for very small datable material. But we carefully log the duds too. Maybe they’ll be of use to someone else! And logging those can be a bit boring; actually, logging the overlying Holocene stuff on top of our desired (de)glacial sediments can be too. But needs to be done!

James determines the shear strength of an interesting sediment layer

Handling the cores when they come out of the core scanner is largely devoid of practical challenges; sometimes on has to resort to unconventional methods for splitting cores if they are full of rocks or enormous shells or even bedrock, but that’s about it. The real suspense comes from the core equipment; that is under a fair amount of stress, and that sometimes shows. We have had bent barrels, liners that need 8 people to pull them out of the barrel, we have had countless many inverted core catchers (we often keep these as souvenirs; I have one!), and we have had a bolt missing from one of the three legs of the vibrocorer. If we lose a leg of the corer, we lose the ability to core, and the purpose of the cruise. Fortunately, it is a fairly straightforward repair, even though it involved two cranes not otherwise used for coring, and harnesses, and whatnot. And, worst of all, we have had failure of the engine that pulls the barrel out of the sediment. But everything has been dealt with! I hope it stays that way during the second leg.

So far the weather has stayed nice all the way (a bit of rain one night, but still no waves worth mentioning), and we’ve seen little in the way of charismatic macrofauna. I’ve seen two dolphins pay a brief visit one night; that was it. And I’ve seen land a few times; we’ve seen Anglesey (yay!), the Isle of Man, Cumbria, and bits of Scotland. We’ll be seeing Ireland soon!

An unusual sight for leg 1: a winchman in the rain

So only a few days left until port call. And then the second leg. I really look forward to that; we’ll lose a few really nice people, but I trust the people we get in their place are equally nice. And at the moment, the ship is swarming with senior people who have organised this whole trip. There is not very much space for the likes of me to be involved in anything other than the humble work, which is a bit unfortunate, as it is the first leg that covers the region I will be working on. With some people leaving and thereby making space, I will be much more involved in the second leg, even though it will be Durham that deals with that part of the research. But I look forward to sticking my nose in a lot deeper! And not only will it be possible, but I expect it to even be necessary; on the first leg, we have the transect leaders (each transect has a scientific overlord; we’ve done James’ leg and Rich Chiverrell’s), but at least one of the transect leaders of the western transects will not be on board when their transects are done. A bit weird they didn’t drop everything they had in their hands and made sure they would be there, but I’m sure they had their reasons. And it does mean they’ll need all the expertise they can get, and that’s where I come in! I also think I know how to better run a coring team. So I am bristling with ambitions. Bring on the second leg!

A perk of being in the night shift: you get to see the sunrise!

Discordia and reconciliation

All’s well that ends well. So all that’s not ended yet can turn out well. My professional relationship with Roland isn’t over yet. So it’s too early to draw final conclusions on it. I hope it will end well! And faithful readers of the blog might now wonder why I doubt that at all; wasn’t all well, all the time? But no, it wasn’t. There were some hard times. But it looks like these are now behind us.

And why did nothing show up on the blog about this? Well, if you have friction with your boss, writing about it on your blog, of which you know the boss in question reads it, might not improve things. And additionally; if you apply for jobs, and your potential employers google you and read you are being frictional with your immediate superior, they might think you are difficult to work with and think twice about hiring you. Yes, reader, this blog is self-censored! And what you read now is the third version of the text. It takes people of more talent and boldness to publish any material that could jeopardise a job application. The job market is hard; for me ten others! So do I lie on the blog? No. Do I purposefully gloss over things? Oh yes. So why stop glossing now? And what was there to gloss over in the first place? 

Roland is a man with strong opinions. And these opinions have got him far; he has a chair and an impressive research output. What he does clearly works. But people like me might argue that he is a bit too inclined to think that his way is the only one that works. And that he needs to do whatever it takes to make other people see that and work in his way too.   

When I just started working with him, I knew little of sea level research. Under such circumstances it can be quite nice if there’s a chap there who tells you what to do. But one learns, one has a fresh look on things, and increasingly one can, and should, find one’s own path. It is important to be in control of one’s research as soon as possible. But the more I found my feet the more I ended up brushing with Roland. 

Things came to a head during a fieldwork in Sussex. I had written a draft of the infamous Iceland paper, and Roland had sent it back to me with corrections. Some weren’t corrections; erring is human so sometimes he just had the wrong end of the stick. Most of it was useful and constructive. And then some of it was a question of style. And style, in my opinion, is the first author’s territory. And first authors should be open to suggestions, and good arguments, of course, but I’d say in the end it’s up to them whether they use, for instance, split infinitives or not. I do admit I get recalcitrant if people order you to do things simply because they say so and have the power to make you. I’m perfectly happy be explained why I’m wrong and then change my ways, but “because I say so” in my book isn’t a valuable argument. And during that fieldwork, I told Roland I allowed myself the freedom to ignore style changes that didn’t come with an explanation and that I didn't agree with. It was the wrong time. I later found out he had stomach trouble at the time; his fuse was short that day. He raised his voice to a level I won’t easily forget and told me in no uncertain terms that the manuscript had to be exactly how he wanted it. And I didn’t try to fool myself that he wouldn’t have the power to enforce that. 

From that moment on, I wasn’t enjoying my job very much anymore. It’s not very nice to work hard on something, but to know you are given no responsibility whatsoever over that work. What I didn’t know was that Roland had not revealed his deep-thought vision, but just blurted something out in an impulse, and forgotten about it immediately after. 

I still had the thankless task of finishing the manuscript after all. It wasn’t much fun, as one can imagine. Even correcting misspellings and other evident errors in Roland’s edits was stressful; every character had to his liking, apparently, rather than correct. I didn’t fight for the more fundamental issues.  And then I got hired in Bangor, and left. I revelled in the newfound freedom! Although, of course, the manuscript was still looming. 

And then the cruise approached. Antony sensed that relations were strained, and knew I would be pretty much out of things for six weeks. He suggested the final edits would be done without me. Roland agreed, and sent me an email with the gist ”how have things got so bad?” And that was when things got better. And when things were brought into daylight, I figured I could mention things on the blog. And it remains a sensitive topic but the blog is very incomplete without this story. 

I explained I had struggled with his overbearing manner; with his making changes rather than arguing for changes, and I told of my failed efforts to bring this up and talk it out. And the turning moment on fieldwork. And to my relief he answered in a constructive way. And that was when he told me he did not remember anything of the crucial incident. What? But it did explain why he had not spoken up earlier; he had thought I had just spontaneously withdrawn. And he explained he felt responsible, as the Principal Investigator of the project, for every last comma of the project output. I could see his point, but I think he forgot to also be responsible for the people in the project. If these aren’t happy the project doesn’t benefit!

But by then, it had been a year during which I had not tried to resolve the situation because I figured I would only be yelled at, and he had not tried to resolve the situation because he figured I would just withdraw within myself. But it had possibly been solvable all that time. One learns. But it’s not too late. 

I answered with another long mail, explaining how I thought we could now proceed with both the manuscript and the ongoing collaboration (iGlass!) in a better way. I have not heard since. When I get off the ship I will have to submit the Iceland paper within days; communication then will therefore probably be rather pragmatic. But in September Roland is expected to visit Bangor as an external examiner for one of our PhD students. I think we’ll be able to go and get a pint and talk things out properly! And we will have differing personal styles forever, both regarding work and regarding dealing with our fellow men, but that should not mean we can’t combine these in harmony. I hope all ends well!

Read Welsh now, speak later

Once upon a time, my sister who lives in Helsinki was  babysitting a 1.5-year old. I am generally afraid of children, but this specimen was rather low-threshold, so when it was convenient we one day would babysit together when I was visiting Finland, we did. And it went well! I have a reasonable Finnish vocabulary for non-Finnish speaker, and this girl generally kept her sentences restricted to a word or two, so she represented the unusual phenomenon of a native speaker I could keep up with. As long as the sentences didn't get more complicated than "kilti ankka" (cute duck) or "iso juna" (big train) all was well! And she seemed to take delight in a grown-up who used a similar sentence structure (I know I'm using the term "sentence" here in a rather liberal way). So when you're learning a language, find yourself a native speaking toddler! Or other learners; in Norway, I got a lot of support from my fellow foreigners who were also keen on practicing. Save the adult native speakers for later; they tend to be too fast, too slangy, too complicated.

I don't know any Welsh toddlers. I do know lots of fellow learners; there are quite many people in the Welsh class! And only having had four hours of Welsh class I am desperate to practice my conversational skills. So as I wrote before; I had hoped to rally some for using the usual class hour for conversation practice.

When the class stopped for summer I only had three Mondays in Bangor before I would set off to sea. So three potential hours of practice! But NOBODY wanted to join. On any of these days. I did learn a little, though; every week I kept sending out the rallying emails, in Welsh, and the tutor tended to send them back corrected. That at least helped!

I am now about to go offshore. Nobody on board speaks Welsh, so I am again restricted to learning how to read Welsh, and to mutter to myself. But there is light at the end of the tunnel; the tutor mailed me she'll be back from having been gone in Early September, and though the class doesn't restart until late September, she's willing to talk to me as soon as she's back. So I have something to keep me motivated! Not that I am not motivated already, but this helps against my occasional moods of "I'm never going to learn..." I hope to learn so much from my various sources I can have a reasonable conversation with her when I get back. And the delay at the start of the cruise, and the transit afterwards helped a lot; I ploughed through my entire grammar document, I did some exercises, and I am (finally) making progress on the Welsh novel I have. I finished the first three chapters (of 19)! And in the back it explains all sorts of sentence structures (it's not just a novel; it's also a Welsh-learning-resource.) And the reading helps with building a vocabulary; if words come back often enough I start remembering them at some point. I am making solid progress here!

I am confident I will be able to hold my ground after the cruise, talking with the tutor. It won't be easy, but it will help heaps! I'm just starting to arrogantly wonder how long I'll still be benefitting from the course. It took the current participants over a year to reach the "what colour is your car? My car is blue" stage and I am, if I can say so myself, rushing past. But that's OK I presume. If there are no courses that are more advanced I might start to try my luck on the locals! Oh dear. But that's the whole point, so I'll have to one day make that step anyway! But first I'll have another few weeks to train myself. Bring it on!

A day in the life of a cruise scientist

So what does it look like, a day on board? My day tends to start around 11PM. I get up, I have some breakfast, I might have time to check my emails, and then it’s time to go to the main lab, for change-over from day shift to night shift. Colm, the cruise leader, will keep us up to date of what’s been happening during the day; what cores have been taken, how it went, whether there was anything worth mentioning on the geophysical observations. Then he’ll us what the plan is for the upcoming 24 hours. The day coring team will tell us where they got to, and whether they refined the procedure of core processing. And then we’re go! 

 

Some exchange of information between the head of daytime geophysics Katrien (left) and three members of the night shift

We, the night coring team, are Sara Benetti from Ulster university, Kasper Weilbach from Durham university, Riccardo Arosio from SAMS, Richard Chiverrell (who is part coring team, part geophys, part outreach) and me. And sometimes we get a hand from the leader of the night geophys team: Fabio Sachetti from Galway, who happens to also be married to Sara. So we have 4 nationalities (Rich is English; Sara, Fabio and Riccardo are Italian; and Kasper is Danish) in the team, including a token Brit. 

We might be dealing with cores as they are coming on deck, or as they are coming out of the core scanner. The core scanner requires cores to be at room temperature, so when a core comes on deck we cut it into sections and label it, and then leave the sections in the core scanner container. They need to equilibrate for 6 hours. The core scanner lady, Elke Hanenkamp from Leicester university (and a German; yet another nationality), works from 6AM to 6PM, so quite often, we suddenly get very busy after breakfast, when she starts churning out the cores we put in the container early in the night. These are ready for scanning when she finds them in the morning. When she’s done with them, the real work starts! We can get a core from deck into the container is some 30 minutes, but the splitting, photographing, measuring, final labelling, describing, and packing takes a lot longer. And there are periods when we’re just in transit, and all cores are either in the core storage because we’re done with them, or in Elke’s container. And then we just hang around! We keep an eye on the geophys, we catch up on emails, we eat or read something, or we even sleep or go to the gym. If there is a sufficiently long period of non-activity, such is OK! I hit the gym at 4AM during my second shift. 

 

The vibrocorer is hoisted on deck in the morning sunshine after having taken a core 

Somewhere around 6AM we tend to get hungry and go up to the mess for some food. The crew saves a meal for everyone who had not shown up at dinner time (and that includes the entire nightshift; we’re asleep at that hour) so we can go up, shove it in the microwave and have, say, steak at 6AM. But not everyone’s stomach is ready for a heavy meal at such an hour, so these just eat some toast or fruit or whatever tickles their fancy. 

 The evening meals saved for the night shift. This is not good food for when you've just woken up; I tend to let my stomach get into the mood for some 6 hours

The busiest time tends to be after breakfast; Elke’s shift is 6AM-6PM (we seemed not to be able to afford two core logging experts), so cores start coming out of her lab, ready for processing, from around 7AM. And then she churns out the spoils of the entire night, so we tend to keep running all the way to hand-over at noon. So then the cycle repeats itself; we brief the day corers, Colm briefs everyone, and work continues. 

 

Carrying a core liner to where we cut it

We then go for what the ship calls lunch but which is dinner for us. After a few days Riccardo had the bright idea to buy a bottle of wine as accompaniment. Brilliant! The day shift is not allowed to drink at that hour, but the night shift is. And as I write this, that has been the only alcohol I’ve had since we set off! I may even be getting healthier here. The exercise is not how I like it, but it’s enough; the food is good, and my drinking habits have clearly improved. 

After dinner I tend to check emails once again (by that time the rest of the world is awake too), and then my eyelids start to droop and I return to my cabin to crawl into my snug bed and listen to the sounds of the ship and the water. And then at 11PM the alarm goes!

First real cores

It would all start with a piston core. Our ship had a vibrocorer and a piston corer on board; the former is a big construction with a tub on top, filled with water. As soon as it’s positioned on the sea floor, some mechanism makes the ~1000 kg of water move around, creating the vibration needed for pushing the barrel into the sediment. It’s the sort of equipment you need when you core close to to land; the sediments tend to be rather stiff, and won’t go into the barrel without some vibration-shaped convincing. The piston corer pretty much is just a steel barrel, with only a big weight on top to make it sink into the sediments. The piston helps these to penetrate deep into the barrel, but all is limited by how deep the barrel gets into the sea bed to start with. But we would kick off on the continental slope, at ~500m depth, so although we would probably only take one piston core, it would be the very first one.

 The piston corer is deployed

 It comes up again, under scrutiny of James

We had been on shift since midnight. It had been the first shift; we had all tried to get some sleep before going on duty, but with our bog standard circadian rhythms, few of us had managed very well. We were all very sleepy. And we wouldn’t get to the coring site until after breakfast. So we had a rather boring shift; we looked a bit at the geophysical measurements that were coming in in real time, but otherwise we just read books or picked our noses or pootled around. And we yawned an awful lot. But then, at ~10:30AM, we finally had a core on deck. We could snap into action! And so we did.

It was the first core of our shift. Most of us have done cruises before, and have an idea of how things are done. These ideas are not always the same. And those who hadn’t been on cruises before were a bit uncertain of things. That first core therefore turned into a bit of a whirlwind of contradicting opinions and commands flying around. And it was after we all had been on our feet for pretty much 27 hours, so both on both the distributing and the receiving end of the suggestions (let’s call them that), moods were frayed. I have experienced more pleasant bursts of core handling. But we got it done. And then our shift was over!

 A relaxed geophysics shift

The next shift we got to finally handle vibrocores. It’s a very different mechanism and quite different for the technicians operating them, but for us it’s pretty much the same procedure. And after a while we got into a routine! And that made things a lot better. We pretty much found the optimal way of doing things, and just did it. We were still tired; you don’t turn your day-night rhythm upside down in only 48 hours, but we now worked as a team, and not as a bunch of grumpy individuals. So from the second shift on, core handling became fun! And that’s good; 1.5 hours of lousy shift is a more than acceptable sacrifice for weeks of pleasant work. And of course there still were hiccups; sometimes people forget the distinction between best practice and personal preference, but it all stayed within limits. And it’s quite satisfying to cut cores into sections, label them to within an inch of their life, split them, describe them, and put them away in a cooled container. We got a few boring cores with pretty much only sand, but we also already got a few beauties, with what surely looks like glacial sediments in the bottom! Exactly what we’re looking for!

The cores as they lay acclimatising in the core logging container. Elke, the logging expert, didn't want to be in the picture. Not with her front, anyway. 

Richard Chiverell shows his skill cutting the core liner

Riccardo Arosio then cuts the core caps (one would almost think one needs a Richard of sorts for that sort of thing)

Sara Benetti has just split one, using a cheese wire and some pallet knives, and gets a first glimpse of the full sediment

  

 A core ready to be described. Once that's done, we're finished with it as far as the cruise is concerned! All other work will happen on land.

Culture shock

NB; this is a catch-up blog post, about things happening before the cruise, while blogging about the cruise has already started. This post relates to the Coniston trip the weekend before the cruise; maybe not in the correct chronological position but still worth documenting!

With mine explorers you know what to expect. Mud, sweat, precarious false floors, lots of banter, late nights, lots of beer. And that’s fine! The more intellectual part of my brain gets its kicks at other times. When I’m out with the YCC I expect rather civilised banter, but when the NYMCC gives acte de presence too, I just harden my skin and expect to stand out like a sore thumb with my pronounced lack of rowdiness. But sometimes, I have to rapidly adjust.

I had written about the weekend in the Lakes District, visiting Coniston Copper mines. On the first night, all were busier catching up and drinking beer than pondering the mine. And things did get a bit rowdy! And I was holding my ground amidst the boisterous. But then one of the guys brought his phone out, and started showing people some porn that seemed to even be rather disturbing by porn’s standards. Luckily, even the more uncouth of the men respect anyone’s couthness (that word should exist), so nobody expected me to want to see that, and nobody tried to change my mind, or even lure me into seeing it by deception. One chap figured it would actually be best to remove me from the scene entirely, and he whisked me away to the lounge. There he suggested to do some drugs. I know this is a rowdy bunch, but I wasn’t buying into that. He surely was pulling my leg! But he did whip a small sachet of white powder out. I still wasn’t having that. It could be anything! And when he saw he wasn’t fooling me he told me what it really was. It wasn't anything I could have seen coming.

It was a bit of deep sea ooze, collected by the crew of the Challenger. The Challenger! The ship that started oceanography! The ship that sailed from 1872 to 1876, went all around the globe, and sampled and measured more than you can shake a stick at! If I find a foram  in one of my samples which I don’t recognise, the first source I still turn to is the Challenger report! That is such a thorough piece of work it has never been surpassed. And one sometimes needs additional material, but the Challenger set the standard. I don’t know how many non-ocean sciences nerds know about the Challenger, but within the community this trip is more famous the one to the moon.

So here I was. I had had to make the switch from mud, beer and porn to the holiest of science history! That was quite a culture shock. It was one of the weirdest things that ever happened to me on a caving weekend. I have the sample at home now. I’ll see if I can find something exciting in there after the cruise! But even if it’s only nannofossils (for which I don’t have the equipment to be able to see them) the sheer thought of having some Challenger mud is very exciting indeed!

 A lab on the Challenger