Mission Journal 4 — Mark Patterson: Day 3: Wednesday, July 16th, 2003
Waking up at 50 feet is a surreal experience. The faint glow of dawn from the bunk room is broken by silhouettes of predators and prey in the last movements of their dance, before the brief respite when the sun rises. The pulsations of pressure fluctuations in your ears from the waves passing overhead gives you the impression of a beating heart of a superorganism, the ocean. Aquarius itself seems a living thing, with a daily rhythm of noises and activity, a beehive for underwater workers.
Today was a good one. Jo and I were dive buddies and we “flew” the oxygen/pH/temperature profiler down deep at the Pinnacle in the morning, and at the NE waystation in the PM. By the afternoon, Jo gave me back my “profiler’s license.” The readings again change dramatically as you traverse the nooks and crannies of the reef, or let the probe linger over the water flowing out from the body of a sponge, or tuck the meter inside a crevice. The coral bleaching chambers are running well too; the new pre-mission repairs and super glue job done by topside coordinator and Ph.D. student extraordinaire Lawrence Carpenter have held up to the rigors of deployment. In fact, set up of the chambers took less than a third of the time last year, thanks to his “packaging” of wire bundles, and flotsam and jetsam in a way that makes it a cinch to unwind in situ. We are sucking up almost a kilowatt of power from the entry lock! It would be impossible to run this experiment from the surface. The temperature controllers have their own kaleidoscopic rhythm in the entry lock, as they pulse packets of heat into the chambers at their own rhythm. I can watch the current meter on the power supplies that Byron has expertly wired up pre-mission, and know by the rise and fall of the numbers that all is well on the seafloor.
Kristen and Janet collected tissue samples expertly. I was amazed by Kristen’s fine motor skills yesterday using a very sharp implement and syringe, centimeters from my fingers holding the base of the coral. She missed her calling as a surgeon. They did some PAM measurements in the AM and on their PM dive, they made some preliminary transects for bristleworms on the reef, that may or may not have a connection to coral bleaching. Some work in other parts of the world seems to indicate that this worm may be a host for a pathogenic bacterium. My student Lawrence wants to see how common the worm is around Aquarius.
Byron and Doc Cargile paid a house call between dives. Byron came to fix the cell phone and the Doc to check on physical (and surreptitiously mental) health. He seemed to indicate that we (OK, maybe just I) get weirder by the day. I don’t suppose the “joy palm buzzer” I subjected him to yesterday has anything to do with that! (Said buzzer accidentally found its way into Roger’s bed last night under the covers, which gave him a jolt and a laugh at O dark hundred. It is now his to use as he sees fit on unsuspecting visitors.)
I write this at O dark hundred myself, as the chilling unit has gone out after years of flawless service. It could be as simple as the circulating pump. According to our Papa Bear, Craig Cooper, later this morning, the experts ashore will arrive and fix, but we are up temporarily as the temperature and humidity make it difficult to sleep. As I close, Jo and Janet have decamped to the entry lock, where they look quite comfy under the blower, with their porta-bedding. I am off again to try for sleep in the bunk room.