On the Way to Singapore!
Posted by: Rory Wilson
Monday, July 30, 2007
1:00 PM Indian Ocean
These are footnotes while I remember:
I just had a good short conversation with Oleg. He is a very interesting person and although we speak different first languages, his English is very good. He is from Russia and has been to sea on many ships and has much experience. During the cruise, he has taken excellent photographs and this week, we are having a photo contest for everyone who has been taking pictures.
We have been sharing pictures by putting them on the ship computer network and we are now going to group them and have people try to choose the top 100 cruise photos. This will be hard to limit to only 100!
Out of those, we will put the Top 10 right away on the pages here, then when I am further sorting things out, I will make a gallery page so that you can see all our best 100 or so images.
Yesterday was quite a finale!
We did a total of 33 dredges on this expedition, at locations that will help up determine the age for formation of different areas of the 90 East Ridge. We actually were able to come as far south as we had hoped, and the amount of rock collected at each site was good. At first take, our expedition accomplished what we set out to do.
When we saw the dredge come up over the transom yesterday evening, we saw that the rock in the top was larger than anything we had ever brought up! I actually took a video clip of some of our antics in trying to get it out of the dredge. We picked up the dredge upside down, kicked at it, prodded it with a big pry bar, and finally had to resort to a huge sledgehammer to free it again.
Quite a spectator group too! Most everyone not on a watch was on the back deck to see the action. There were six or eight actively involved and the rest were simply celebrating the great conclusion of our science work. All right, celebrating is maybe not the right word... but there was a nice sunset and a long southern swell that everyone enjoyed.
What next?
I actually just posted a question like that for the students who have also been a part of this trip. Their final question is to think about what we have learned and done so far... and ask the next question. Malcolm Pringle and I were discussing that this morning.
Will Sager and I had a video-conference earlier this week with a group of teachers in Texas at the "School of Rock". This group of teachers comes from all around the nation to study oceanography and the ocean drilling program. During that meeting, teachers wanted to know how this improves the classroom experience. It was an easy question!
Our real classroom is out here.
It is wherever we really learn and now we have better tools than ever to share that.
Anyone is welcome and encouraged to write about this. We are all students out here and I will try to post as many of your ideas as possible. This website would not have been possible without the help of lots of people who have worked on it.
Still more to come too.
Some of the research results will take in-depth analysis and we wil keep posting results and new information here for the next year or two. During the next two months, there will be a lot more here. Come and visit, and write us with your ideas.
Who knows what really comes next?
(This was sunrise today as we cruised toward Singapore)
Rory
JULY
7/30 - Final day at sea: on the way into Singapore
7/26 - A Day in the Life of a Teacher at Sea
7/18 - Checking our Position (Latitude) with a Sextant
7/16 - Monsoon Blues in the Indian Ocean
7/15 - WAVES, Rough Weather, but an exciting day... WHALES
7/11 - Not the Best Day for Science at Sea
7/9 - Discoveries on the 90 East Ridge
7/5 - Closer to Home, Life Here Onboard
7/2 - Ocean Careers: Texas to Russia
JUNE
6/30 - Easy Cruising Day: Now in the Southeast Trade Winds
6/27 - We Crossed the Equator Today, Heading South.
6/21 - Night Time Fun in the Indian Ocean
6/20 - Transit Gale in the Indian Ocean
6/17 - Arrived in Phuket, Thailand (finally)
