Team Diebold goes to SeaStudents blog from the Aleutians aboard the R/V Langseth

For anyone with a vegetarian diet, shipboard life can be culinarily mundane.  Given that Manhattanites enjoy regular access to several excellent farmer’s markets that provide fresh organic produce, their transition to all-canned, frozen mixed vegetables as the main veggie option day in and day out is less than welcome. Don’t misunderstand, the cooks onboard Langseth […]

Apart for celebrations revolving around Andy’s birthday, the past few days have been relatively uneventful. Several now-fixed equipment errors caused minor panics, but we’ve generally been shooting away, moving south of Kodiak Island, and soon we’ll start to zigzag towards Dutch Harbor. We fill our days with books (this is already the best-read summer of […]

Apologies for the late posts – there was some confusion with regards to who is writing when. Given that with our perpetually cycling shifts, the five of us are rarely ever in the same place at the same time, any form of coordination is a truly magical, and slightly telekinetic, accomplishment. Dearest little Andy, the […]

Last night on watch, we launched a total of 54 XBT and XSV probes in order to measure properties of the water column with depth. XBT (expendable bathy-thermograph) and XSV (expendable sound velocity) probes are, unsurprisingly, expendable instruments which remain on the seafloor once deployed. The probes drop through the water down to the bottom […]

It only took 10 minutes right before dinner-time to ramp up. Being down in the lab on watch, I couldn’t feel it starting until I made it to the galley. It was there in the mess that I experienced it’s full force. Hanging spoons swayed from side to side, water glasses sloshed from brim to […]

[Again due to an account error, this post is several days late. It is meant to precede yesterday’s post by Hannah.] Today we avoided calamity. At 2 AM, two hours into my watch, Streamer 1 stopped sending us any data. Rather than sloping oceanic crust, the raw data display showed only a terrifying, bar code-like […]

The seas are a’rockin and a’rollin worse than we’ve seen so far. Most of us are happily doped up to avoid turning up our own dinners. Suddenly the everyday motions have turned into a hazardous workout – pinballing off walls in the hallway, trying to go up a down staircase, and even bracing against the […]

On watch recently we’ve had the responsibility of editing bathymetry data. The Langseth has been collecting a large volume of multibeam bathymetry data as we travel along our lines. These images of seafloor topography, acquired by measuring the time it takes a signal to travel down through the water, reflect off the bottom, and return […]

With a daily grind centered around eating, sleeping and watching data, I have realized two main differences between life on land and life at sea: first, the little moments become big, and second, the people become entertainment. I don’t know if it is seismologists? Boats? Boredom? But shoot, people are nice on this ship. Whether […]