Gang plank pulled, door being secured while motoring out of port.
We finally left Reykjavik today at 0900 as scheduled, under sunny skies. Temps are still chilly – around 50F. But we are steaming downwind so the ship has a rather gentle roll – good for getting those sea legs. We are heading more or less to our first moorings site, which will take about two days to get to. On the way, we will stop to do some instrument testing. First we will lower the CTD (which stands for conductivity-temperature-depth) package to make sure it is working properly.I’ll talk more about it in a future post, but basically it measures salinity (from the amount of electricity conducted by the seawater) and temperature as it is lowered on a wire over the side of the ship. The data is transmitted up the wire to a PC where we see it plotted on the screen in real time.
Amy Bower is a physical oceanographer at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution. She has been chasing ocean currents in the Atlantic and Indian Oceans for over 25 years, primarily by releasing acoustically tracked floats far below the sea surface. Legally blind since her mid-20s, Amy uses adaptive technology to continue her research.