In Newport, Oregon, during the month of October, an
environmental research vessel called the Bold Horizon prepared
to embark on a month long journey as part of a scientific
mission called S-MODE.
So S-MODE is one of the NASA Earth venture series
experiments. So it's a big multi-institutional experiment.
We're mostly looking at the upper ocean velocities, how the
upper meters of the ocean move. So we're learning that these
small scales, or small scale currents are more and more
important for our understanding of ventilation or how the upper
ocean is interacting with the atmosphere. So right now, it's
important to— we're unpacking all our packages and installing
instrumentation, making sure everything works and everything
fits. We have just two days, maybe three days just to do it.
And it's a lot of work, a lot of instrumentation go up top very,
to the top of the ship, some go down below.
So we care about the vertical movement of things like heat and
carbon in the ocean, because it's really important for
climate change. So I'm on the biology team. And in terms of
biology, we care about how carbon moves throughout the
ocean, because if that carbon gets deep enough in the ocean,
it stays there, and it's not released to the atmosphere. And
that's really important for what's called the greenhouse
effect. If you have more carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, you
have more heating. And then in terms of the physics side, we
care about things like temperature and salinity,
because the ocean moves around heat, and that's how the ocean
controls the world's climate.
This is an Imaging Flow Cytobot, we're going to use it to look at
phytoplankton community composition at the sea surface.
We'll sample from the ship seawater intake over there. When
a cell flows through the system, from the seawater intake, it
will trigger the lasers. And then once that happens, the
camera will take a picture.
Teams of scientists spent the better part of a week
retrofitting the ship for their instruments and data collection.
I'm just testing this float, this float will be deployed in
this S-MODE mission to measure the vertical velocity. And this
is the— this is the spatial characteristics of this float
because it can move with the water per se. So it can measure
the W, means the vertical velocity.
So we have like these two primary disciplines that are
going to be on one boat together, and that's going to be
the biology folks that are trying to understand how the
biology of the ocean is interacting with the physics. So
then we also have a lot of physical oceanographers on the
boat. And it's kind of bringing us together that we can piece
together this larger story of submesoscale features, what's
happening on these smaller scales that are not are not
currently captured by existing models and measurements.
In addition to the scientific fields on board, the Bold
Horizon isn't the only component of the mission.
The excitement of this project is that a lot of this is cutting
edge. So the interaction of these multiple platforms is the
biggest challenge. So we have three aircraft flying overhead.
We have multiple vehicles on the surface have multiple vehicles
underwater, but we will need to navigate our way through this
constellation of instruments. The other thing is that we are
chasing these really fast ocean features. They change really
fast and matter of hours. That's why having eyes in the sky is a
great asset. So they will be able to direct us to just the
right spots and we will try to move all our surface assets,
move our ship to where the action is and be there right in
time.
For these, we're watching radio science to measure atmospheric—
weather in the atmosphere. So temperature, pressure, humidity
and winds. And the reason we're doing this as part of our field
experiment, is because that we know from other past evidence
that the ocean can affect the weather. And one thing that
we're really interested in is seeing how big of a change in
ocean temperature or ocean currents can affect the weather.
Part of the low cost of the system is it's just a Styrofoam
cup, really, and the electronics are really the star of the show
here.
The most exciting thing about this line of work is that you
never know what to expect. So this this sense of discovery
that I think drives most people that go out to sea. We know
there will be new exciting features waiting for us there.
We don't know what they are. We don't know where they are, but
we'll be chasing them. We know we will find something that will
motivate us and really got us excited that keeps us you know,
working through the nights to actually understand what it is
happening how the ocean works.