Chinglish

We are now heading to Hawaii. Happy and exciting. However, actually, the first week on board can be very trying. Because seasickness is really a miserable and unforgettable experience. The first two days I can’t eat anything except apples and instant noodles. I have never imagined that eating will become so difficult as it seems that there was always a voice saying “Oh, you will just throw them up one or two hours later, or even earlier”. And I just felt that every kind of food had the smell of milk and sourness, which make me feel sick. Moreover, the rocking feeling and the continuous noise cause my brain to become inertial, which make it harder for me to concentrate on reading books and doing my homework.

Soundersuite

Whatever, the difficult part has gone. Thanks all these kind people on Langseth. I really appreciate them.  Let’s talking about something interesting. The first time I saw the “soundersuite” in the main lab, I found the seamounts is similar with some mountains in Chinese Landscape painting (a water-based art form with a strong emphasis on ink) in some extent.

Chinese Brush Painting

Do they look similar each other ? Oh, maybe I should say that the seamounts just look like the draft for a Chinese landscape painting.

Moreover, Joey showed me something more interesting after I told him something about China. It is called “chinglish”-Chinese English. I may sometimes speak“chinglish”. I hope you will like the followed pictures.

The Langseth in Verse

So, I asked 8 if he would be able to contribute another blog entry and this is the response I got.

Answer: Cannot predict now.

I am taking that as a ‘No’. Here are some limericks instead.

There once was the Langseth, a ship

Over wave and trough did she skip.

Many instruments aboard

To always record

Depth, gravity, mag – every blip.

There once was the Langseth, a vessel

Where in their bunks scientists nestled.

‘Til called to their shifts

Their heads they must lift

For with errors and logs they must wrestle.

There once was the Langseth, a boat

On her airguns the crew they would dote.

Oft while in a turn

Guns were brought up astern

To ensure best acoustical note.

There once was the Langseth, a fine tub!

Where the galley crew made us good grub.

But when seas ran high

Up in knots stomachs tied

And to keep the food down, there’s the rub.

Seismic shoot 110% complete. Success!

After completing the scheduled lines a day early we were able to extend shooting on the last line for an additional day in the direction of Hawaii. The weather has been very foggy the last 48 hours, and while the winds are relatively calm, the fog is very creepy. One wonders what could be just 50 yards from the ship, where water and sky disappear into an eerily shifting cloud of grey. It almost seems to breathe. Standing outside in the fog, one becomes completely soaked in a matter of minutes. There is reported to be a great deal of both small and large debris adrift in this area from the tsunami in Japan, so fantasies of ghosts and sea monsters aside, the low visibility dose pose a real hazard. We do have a forward looking infrared (FLIR) camera on the ship, but it won't reveal objects at the same temperature as the surroundings, only ships with their engines on. Last night, my shift had the job of pulling in the streamer in driving rain. Thankfully the temperature was above 70. Despite getting wet, it was fun donning the lifevests and hard hats and "getting our hands dirty". Also got to practice my bellowing. "BIRD ON THE SURFACE!!!", "BIRD IN THE AIR!!", "10 METERS!!", "5 METERS!!!". These are calls made to the tech controlling the winch as the streamer is pulled in. The birds are devices that have wings or more technically, motorized fins, on a sonar range-finding device that can be used to dive or surface the streamer to an optimal depth. The birds must be wrestled over the stern rail to prevent the delicate fins from striking the ship (they are quite heavy ~40 lbs), then removed from the streamer, disassembled and packed away. This task was completed in just three hours for 6 km of streamer, and as soon as we had lifted the tail buoy out of the water, the crew was pushing the throttle wide open to begin the long transit to Hawaii. Paradise, here we come!

Miss Gravity

Shot error

A shift on the RV Langseth, at least for my group, consists of two halves with two separate groups of people. Because the science group is “on” for 8 hours and “off” for 16, we interact or at least get to see the whole of the ship’s crew, whose shifts consist of 12 hours on and 12 hours off (noon to midnight and midnight to noon...our shift is from 8AM - 4 PM). The first half of our shift is under the supervision of Michael and Megan (aka Mergon) and the second half is under Bern and David. As pictures show from previous blogs, there are several computer monitors and tv screens that must continuously be checked to ensure that the recovered seismic data are of the highest possible quality. Fortunately, I only need to spend the majority of my time monitoring a fraction of the total amount of screens in the seismic lab, around 10 or so. During the first half of my shift I work on crossword puzzles with Michael, read a novel, work on my thesis, talk with Megan about the previous night’s happenings, and of course doing everything previously mentioned while monitoring the computer screens. Every day at 10 AM, Michael brings everyone mid-morning snacks, which are always welcomed with a sense of relief. The second half of the shift is a continuation of the first, although I focus on reading because the crossword puzzles are usually completed by the mid-morning snack.

As the science portion of the cruise is concerned, we are trying to make up a little time that was lost over the last couple days due to unfortunate weather. We had been fighting large waves and strong head currents that resulted in the ship sailing at speeds about as fast as someone walking. The current weather is much better; however, adverse conditions are again expected in the near future.

On that note I will segue to the title of this blog, “Shot error”.

When we first began the seismic acquisition test phase of the cruise, whenever some sort of error occurred during this process, a muffled sound emanated from a nearby speaker. Without ever hearing this sound before, I was sure it was just an alarm with no apparent connotation. Sounding like a jumbled mess of consonants with a vowel or two, “Hmmm errerrr” was all I could make out of it. Laughing it off the first few times and mocking it with Heidi, it was to my surprise when Megan told me that it was actually saying something. As for any acquired taste, I had not yet become accustomed to that audible computerized cacophony. The noise perpetuated from the speaker was in fact saying “Shot error” or “Gun error”. If the instruments aren’t communicating between one another as they should be, “Gun error” will sound. However, if a situation occurs where the arrays of guns do not fire simultaneously, or a missfire occurs, or even if they just aren’t working properly, “Shot error” will sound. It is imperative to record these errors both on paper and through a digital computer file. This ensures that anyone in the future who wishes to further inspect certain “shot points” may do so and easily identify the type and time of any problems that occurred. After hearing this voice more times than I can remember, I can now easily distinguish between the two errors when the computer decides to announce its presence and I’m pretty sure I would be able to understand more. Unfortunately, I think its vocabulary is limited to those 3 words.

As I finished typing the previous sentence, the speaker spewed out “Gun error”…I guess it’s back to work.

How to get Langseth goods

Some watchstanders asked me how they can get Langseth T-shirts and sweaters. In my previous cruise, the captain opened a slop chest every Sunday afternoon, so I told them to wait for that. But during this cruise, we already had Sunday twice, and so far no slop chest... Actually, the current captain is different from the one for the previous cruise (Langseth has two captains in rotation), so he may have a different plan. I asked the captain about this this morning, and he told me, "Oh, come and see me any time while my stateroom is open; I'll open up the slop chest then."

Great! But watchstanders, please be nice. Don't visit the captain's room just by yourself; instead, form a group of interested people (at least two) to reduce the total number of bothering the captain. And one more note: the slop chest takes only cash.

In case the reader of this blog who is not on the ship is interested in purchasing cool-looking Langseth items, I'd suggest to visit Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, which is located in Palisades, NY. They probably have a gift shop, though I'm not 100% certain.

Should Carina Retire?

Hi, world!

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.