A deep dive for the “Tanker”

Isa Rosso
December 29, 2017

Icebergs!

I’m still recovering from 2 very long days.

On the night of the 25th, we had a wonderful surprise at the galley: every table was decorated, there were dry fruit, chocolate and bottles of (no-alcohol) wine (pretty good, I must say!), a table full of delicious fruits, cut to resemble animals, another table full of desserts of any kind. It was such a feast! The cooks and everybody at the kitchen worked super hard to make us feeling as a big family.. and they doubtlessly succeeded!

photo: Rakesh Rao Manker Tanker with me in the back

December 26th, the alarm on my phone rings at 1:00AM, just after 3 hours of sleep. We are on station, time to get ready. We should have started with the CTD cast, but again things are not going smoothly. The swell is big, as always. Sometimes it’s fun, sometimes it is... well, not so fun. Michelle (the CTD technician) notices that there’s an issue with the block that attaches the winch to the CTD rosette. We would have 100% lost the rosette if he hadn’t noticed that! This sets us back of a couple of hours. Hours of brainstorming, where engineers, scientists, crew members, all worked together to find a solution. I get always very impressed by the limitless resources of our brain in situations where resources are lacking. 

The cast started late, and after a few hiccups in which the winch got stuck, the cast was stopped before reaching the target depth of 2000 m. The current was so strong that the rosette was just drifting away instead of descending deeper. Now, here’s a funny thing: apparently, at any other station where no SOCCOM floats have been deployed, all this kind of drama never happened O.o 

We had some more drama right before deploying the float, when I noticed some oil on the top part of it. I confess I freaked out, but the SOCCOM team in the U.S. (who I was talking to via WhatsApp.. .notice that there it was Christmas day!!), together with the scientists here, made a dream team, and everything was soon solved!

So, Manker Tanker (float #0693) was deployed on December 26th, at 02:58 UTC, at the latitude of 58 59.75’S and longitude of 70 01.52’ E!! I did my best to draw a nice cartoon on it, which you can see it on the pictures (ok, I’m not an artist).

Manker Tanker safe in its crate

This is the second float adopted by Gilroy High School, a second class of Jeff Manker. The float’s name is inspired by the shape of the float itself, which the class thought it looked like a SCUBA tank :-) Scuba diving is one of the things I love most! I’m sure Manker Tanker is having an amazing adventure down there! The float’s already reported, and showed that everything works very well.. I wonder where it will end up after 1 year. Any bet? Think about it, and check its trajectory and its measurements during its life.

Holey iceberg

The first icebergs have started to appear, first on the radar then in front of our eyes. No matter how many you’ve seen before, these pieces of ice are masterpieces of nature! I can never get bored by looking at them. And with the icebergs, the first whales came!!! I still don’t have good pictures.. but I’m expecting to see more as we go more south.. especially because I completely missed out the orca breaching in front of the ship.. I was taking a nap. 

Whale blow, with ice in the background