Dispatches from Sea >>
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| March 2007 |  Laura Preston, educator, UNH/Salem High School, Salem, NH. |
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| April 2007 | |||||||
March 27
Today’s dispatch is an excerpt from a letter written to Annie
Zaino’s parents from Annie:
“...Our staterooms are tiny, and everything has to be in drawers or lockers or tied down in some way. This is a bit of a challenge for me, who often can't see the floor of my room at home. But I packed light, so it isn't too hard. Bathrooms are tiny too--if you stand in the center, you can touch all four walls without stretching. The food is really great, but there is so much of it and there is lots of pasta and meat and fresh bread and other heavy things. If I fall overboard I will sink!”
“There is some exercise equipment, but I am not getting as much exercise as I should. They apparently have some boxing equipment. I may skip this, since the motion of the ship could prove dangerous. I am sure I will use my muscles more once I have to start carrying buckets of rocks around.”
“Everything here is very similar to home, but with small changes. Trash, for example. Instead of splitting everything into recyclable/not, its biodegradable/not. They incinerate the plastics and metals and things, and store it until we get back to land. They process the biodegradable stuff and throw that overboard so the fishies can eat it.”
“We got to our first work site yesterday - a site of some recent (past year) eruptions. We got our equipment working, so things are going really well on the research front. This wasn’t part of the original proposal, but it is wildly interesting to find out what is going on at a new eruption site, so our fearless leaders got a bit of extra time scheduled in for us to stop here. (Minor side note - story of how this was discovered): Some seismologists working in the area were trying to figure out why they couldn't retrieve their remote control seismometers and went to investigate. Oops.... they got covered in LAVA. Perhaps that means the ground is leaking! We are going to try to retrieve two of them with Jason that might just be half trapped by a bit of glass so they can get the data out of them. The main site is the overlapping spreading center. Which is where we will be heading off to tomorrow.”
 Francis Mansfield and Liz Goehring look over the first data sets to come from the sonar in the main lab. |
 Several of us learn how to record ship and “fish” positions in the Jason van. |
 Emily Klein takes a well deserved break. |
 John O’Brien pauses to let me look at his fresh (from the sea!) magnetic survey graphs. |
 The science team confers on new data. |
 A beautiful Pacific sunset. |
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