By David Schlaphorst
The Story of Monega, 4Ms, the dolphin(g)s and the whales
The UPFLOW deployment expedition is off to a good start. As of this morning, we have successfully deployed two OBS. All the stations have been named by school children from the UK, Portugal, Germany and Spain. The first one to go was Monega yesterday in the late evening, just before the sunlight faded completely. The ship was carefully navigated into position and slowed down to nearly a full stop. You could feel the excitement in the air. After months of planning and organising the project and after days of testing the equipment we had finally reached the point where we would have to let go of our first OBS and hope that it behaves and functions well during the deployment time, while sitting by itself in about 4000m beneath the sea surface.
Monega on deck right before its deployment.
Ana herself took the task of pulling the rope that releases the instrument from the crane once it was lowered enough to reach the water. This operation has to be handled with care, because a seismometer, the instrument inside which is actually responsible for recording the movement of the ground, is a very sensitive object. So, you definitely do not want to let it hit the water surface too harshly. However, since we are in the middle of the Atlantic, there are always waves and there is always movement. It is one thing to deploy a seismic station on land, where the ground patiently waits for you to finish your task, and to deploy it in the ocean, where the water surface keeps changing constantly.
Ana holding the rope that will pull the yellow bolt out of the holding hook to release Monega.
Monega being released into the Atlantic and giving us a final light signal.
But everything went fine and through the night the ship powered up its engines to bring us to the second spot, where 4Ms was deployed this morning at 6:00, sinking down as the sun rose up. The sea was so calm it could as well have been a solid flat surface, or “mar chão” (floor sea) as they call it in Portuguese. Quite stunning actually. We will now continue to deploy stations over the next few weeks, hopefully in weather conditions as excellent as those we had so far.
4Ms on the crane waiting to be lowered towards the seasurface and then released.
Another nice side effect of calm seas and being outside a lot for the deployment is the increased chance of spotting wildlife. Yesterday we were very excited to spot a number of dolphins and a whale around the ship (the excitement was probably palpable by the creative spelling in our Twitter post we had to send out straight away). Even if they were too far away to capture them accurately with our cameras, the sight of the rising tail as the whale was diving down again was still stunning. Our unwritten rule will now likely be: if we see whales again, we will have to let everyone know, potentially in all caps.
Auggie looking at the whale. We slightly cheated here to make the whale look a bit bigger in the picture, it was too far away for a better picture.
