Week 8: My first taste of Oceanography field research

Monday this week was just another day at the office.  Writing a research proposal, debugging the program, basically all the normal work activities.  But Tuesday was a lot more interesting.

Tuesday was the beginning of the research cruise I have had the privilege of participating in. Dr. Needoba, Grant, Melissa, Michelle and I drove to Astoria in the morning around 6:30 AM. We loaded our belongings and equipment onto the Wecoma and got to work almost right away.To get the full spectrum of the tidal signature at river mile 17 in the estuary, we sampled from about 6 PM Tuesday night to 5AM Wednesday morning. I mostly helped with lowering the sample pump/CTD into the water to get bottom and surface samples. I also was introduced to the filtering process for nutrients.This gave me time to work on my project paper and code between samples.

We headed upriver Wednesday to the Beaver Army Terminal sampling area (where the Saturn-05 station is located).  We took surface, middle, and bottom samples from the river and did the same along four stops as we went west toward the ocean. I made the rookie mistake of taking my seasickness medicine too late—as we went over the choppy Columbia River Bar Wednesday night. This induced some gastrointestinal reactions which I will not elaborate on in this blog. I tried sleeping it off, which worked. I was basically asleep all Thursday.

The Wecoma did the Columbia River Plume transects Friday. Sampling was quite hectic, as we filtered nutrient samples about every hour. The process of getting these samples is quite tedious, and made me appreciate the APNA more by orders of magnitude. It made me wish we had the APNA in the ship’s lab or in the CTD/Supersucker rig we are towing behind the ship. There are probably a considerable amount of engineering obstacles to figure out before that could be done though. Save for the seasickness, this cruise has been a very good experience of Oceanography field research.