We are shooting seismic line 3 right now at the location of (36.2N, 157.6E), which is over the western flank of the second big massif (ORI) of Shatsky Rise. Weather is friendly enough after it has been upset for line 1&2. Approximately 24 hours later, MCS line 3 will be completed. That tells us that 3 of 5 lines in total will be done at that time. More than half way done, Gig'em! (this is an exciting word that aggies use for yelling something good according to our Texas A&M traditions). At the same time, I deeply wish everything go well all the way till we finish the rest of MCS data collecting and end this cruise successfully. Cross fingers~~!!
Although I guess the previous blogs have talked about enough amount of bad news, for example, broken glass screen, seasickness, bad sleep, bad appetite, unfriendly currents resistance, high wind, rough sea-surface, gun issues, and so on. I am sorry I have another one right here. That is, the internal disk of my workstation died when I was copying data from ship network. #@&*%$*~! That means I am losing the operation system Centos and data processing program ProMAX, i.e. my workstation brought from thousands of miles away is not going to work during the rest of the cruise. How should my processing job go? God must be kidding me. I didn't completely believe that until the ship IT guy confirmed that disk was physically dead. We can hear "click-click" sound when trying to boot up computer from that harddisk. Calm down, and things can't happen with no reason. Our Carina workstation for seismic processing has been used for quite a while as we can tell from that fact that it's a Pentium 4 machine, and lots of read and write occur since its 2007 when dealing with seismic data typically on the order of GB even TB. I think it's kind of time for its life. However, should it crash at this bad timing when I do need it to work during the middle of the cruise? No processing work from now on till cruise ends? Bad luck is the first word that comes to my mind. But wait! Or I'd better say destiny, fate, or I should have realized that in advance and I should have been better prepared. The last one sounds more practical. Fortunately, we do have a back-up plan on that, which is to use the ship server computer to process data. It has ProMAX installed and 16 CPUs and 24G RAM and multi-screens. Ooooh~! Gig'em again~! Big pressure relief. All I need to do is to bring my external hard drive and plug it in the server, and then go. Furthermore, now I am able to copying raw data and loading them in ProMAX at the same time, which is not gonna work on Carina due to its low computer configuration. But it will still take hours to have raw data set up and take days to complete processing work. Because, again, Langseth is collecting high resolution seismic data with 36 airguns and 468 channels. Huge dataset, I mean. Nevertheless, later on, hopefully during our transit back to Honolulu, we will see what seismic images we can have after processing and what geology stories can be revealed over Shatsky Rise.
Pictures are showing the multi-screens and its black rack of ship server.
"However, should it crash at this bad timing when I do need it to work during the middle of the cruise?" --- I had a similar moment during the previous Shatsky cruise. Here's Murphy's law: If anything can go wrong, it will.
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