My Dearest Anais,

Research vessel Atlantis at dock in Astoria, Oregon.

I was very happy to see you off to your new school yesterday and to know that you are happy there. Of course, to leave you and Mama again, after we had been apart so long, is no fun. But after working so hard and so long on this project, to actually leave to go to sea is a relief. Yesterday I found myself in Astoria, which is a pretty little town near the mouth of the Columbia river in Oregon. I suspect, however, that it contains more boats than people. The Atlantis is here, and if you look at the photo of her you will see a ship with a bright blue hull and superstructure of a green-a certain shade of green that defies description, I should add. This is not to say that the ship is not pretty-no, in fact she is quite pretty (assuming you don't mind green) and rests proudly at her dockside spot, where I arrived just in time to watch a zillion eggs being loaded. Besides finding my cabin, which I share with a fellow named Neil-he has the lower bunk and I have the upper one-the only useful thing I managed to do was to figure out how to use a gadget called a digital camera. Someone in the Museum was foolish enough to give me this with the expectation that I will be able to use it to send photographs back to the Web site. Mama will be very surprised to learn that I have actually learned how to use this camera, but you must tell her that this does not mean that I will learn to use our video camera.

Accompanying us on the cruise are three people-Susan, Mark, and Andrew are their names-who are planning to make a TV program. They have been running around the ship all day following people with a huge camera and this long pole with a furry thing (it's actually a microphone) on the end, which is a bit comical. Perhaps even more comical was their attempt at interviewing your father and trying to get him to say something intelligent.

Love, Papa

 
 
Saturday, September 6

Dear Anais,

Departing for sea with coastal Oregon in background.

At 9:00 this morning we left, on the outgoing tide. The Columbia is an enormous river, much larger than the Hudson River. It was discovered in 1792 by a fellow named Robert Gray, who named the river after his sailing ship. At its mouth, where the Columbia meets the ocean, past Cape Disappointment on the Washington side, are a series of sandbars. These form because the river brings down a lot of sediment, but in the ocean there is a current-called a long-shore current-that flows along the coast. This current moves sand across the mouth of the river. The resulting sandbars would block the entrance of the river to large ships were it not that a channel has been dug (and is continually being dredged) through them. A pilot-someone who knows these waters very well-takes us through the channel, and after we get through it we leave him off on a small boat so he can return to take another ship through. These waters can be very rough when the tide is going out and the winds come off the ocean in the opposite direction, but today it is clear and calm, and no one is seasick yet.

On deck in Astoria, Oregon; loading scientific equipment.

Wow, there are 59 people on this ship. Some of them are the crew that runs the ship itself, others are responsible for operating ALVIN and Jason, and then there are the scientists and engineers-29 of us all together, and we are responsible for making observations and maps, which I shall tell you about later. It will take us nearly 20 hours to get to where we are going, which puts us there about 4:00 or 5:00 in the morning (yuk). In the meantime my task is to try to understand how everything works.

I trust all is well. Great big kisses, Papa

 
 
Tuesday, September 9

My Dearest Anais,

Big excitement last night....We received an urgent message that there have been numerous and small earthquakes occurring about 30 kilometers south of us. Such a swarm usually means that magma is moving in the earth and also that a volcanic eruption is either taking place or about to take place (don't worry, we're not in any danger). All this is going on below the ocean, so it is not so obvious what is actually happening. Since we were the closest ship to the possible eruption, we decided we had to investigate. If an eruption had started, not only lava but also volcanic gases and possibly even the fluids and the microbes living in the cracks in the rocks at the vent site would be entering the ocean, so we wanted to be there to sample what is coming out at the beginning of the eruption. So off we went, and over the side went the contraption that samples and measures the temperature and other properties of the water. All we found was ocean-no signs of an eruption in progress. But we shall keep listening for earthquakes and probably go back to the site later.

Jason before the launch.

We have started our project. Yesterday we made a detailed map of the axial valley of the Juan de Fuca Ridge. I think I tried to explain this to you before I left, but you should ask Mama to explain it again. Actually, the Juan de Fuca Ridge is not a ridge at all-it's a series of ridges all parallel to each other and about as high as the ridge on the east side of the Hudson River (the Palisades), where we live. And running down between the two highest ridges is a valley, called the axial valley, where most of the volcanic eruptions occur. That is also where hot water, heated by magma at depth, is coming out of the ocean crust and where the bizarre rocks form that we want to study.

Jason being launched over the side of the Atlantis.

How do we make a map in water so deep that we cannot see the bottom? We use something called sonar, which basically means that we make a noise in the water and listen for the echo as the sound bounces off the bottom. To make a really detailed map, however, we can't just make the sound and listen for the echo from the ship. We've got to do that from an instrument near the bottom that is towed by the ship and that sends the signal back to the ship on a wire. We've finished that project, and this morning we are attempting to launch Jason, which is the underwater robot, called an ROV, or remotely operated vehicle to be exact. This launch is very tense because the ocean is rough today, and if there are any mistakes our whole project could go down the drain.

Otherwise life on the ship is rather pleasant. My biggest achievement has been to figure out how to get in and out of my top bunk without (a) hitting my head, knees, or whatever on the ceiling and (b) falling on my head when trying to get out of it (the hard part). Making the top bunk is another matter...I haven't mastered that yet, although I will admit (as I am sure Mama has already guessed) to not actually having put much effort into the task. As I mentioned, the waves are bigger today. No one is seasick, but on the rocking ship it is odd to reach for something to discover that either you or that something is not where you thought it was. So, how's school, kiddo? I hope that you and Mama are doing well, and thank you for the letter you and Mama wrote.

Love, Papa

 
 
Friday, September 12

My Dearest Anais,

Today I woke up, and it is gray. From the top decks, from any deck, there is nothing to be seen. We are not in the shipping lanes, so there are few passing ships. Nothing but a lonesome albatross our off and on companion.

Fiber-optic cable boom lowered over port side of research vessel Atlantis.

We finished our first dive with Jason last night. Yesterday brought much frustration due to a series of constant delays and failures of equipment. As I mentioned, Jason is this little unmanned submarine. It has a bunch of cameras mounted on its front (and one in back), an arm like a robot, propellers that drive the craft up, down, front, back, and sideways, and a small sonar (I explained sonar in my last letter, if you remember). One of the cameras can move like an eye. Jason is attached to the ship by a cable, and we can drive it around from a control room on the ship. What we are trying to do is use Jason to map the chimneylike structures made mainly of certain metalliclike minerals called sulfides and all sorts of worms, snails, and other strange things growing on them. The idea is to move up and down around the sides of these chimneys while photographing the whole thing in great detail and at the same time determining its exact shape, which we do with the sonar and stereo cameras. The stereo image is really cool, so even though it's hard to understand, I've got to explain it to you. When you look at a stereo image of something, it seems like it's in three dimensions, as if you were actually looking at a real object rather than just a picture. Stereo images work the same way your eyes do. Your eyes allow you to sense how far away things are because they look at objects from two slightly different angles. A stereo image is made from two pictures taken of the same object, at slightly different angles. When you photograph an image in stereo you can sense the depth and see its real shape when you look at the photo with a special pair of glasses.

Small boat operations from the research vessel Atlantis to recover elevator.

Anyway, as I said, yesterday started out rather frustrating. The first thing we had to do was place three transponders on the ocean floor. These are small instruments that make a noise so that we know exactly where Jason is. If they work, we can know the location to within about a centimeter(!!), which is about the size of your fingernail, but-guess what-two of them did not work (like our car, washing machine, etc.-I know what you're thinking). So, we had to tranport others to the ocean floor and then use Jason to put them in the right places. All of that took hours and hours. Finally, after more than 24 hours of work, we got everything working correctly and started mapping the sulfide chimneys. That's really fun because this is a world like I have never seen before or only seen in photographs, but here we are wandering around in a wilderness with a flashlight, and we can see it all in color and in stereo too. Jason was pulled back to the surface this morning. We accomplished what we wanted to accomplish with this first dive, which was to solve the problems we knew we would be faced with and to learn how to map the chimneys, so things are not so frustrating after all.

So that is all I have to say to you today. Great big kisses to you and Mama.

Love, Papa

 
 
Sunday, September 14

Dearest Anais,

Anja

ALVIN returns from its first dive

Tonight things were a bit slow, at least for me. We are now at a stage in our cruise where every day we launch ALVIN, the small submersible that carries three people-a pilot and two scientists. The main purpose of these particular dives is to collect information on, and samples of, the critters that live near the hydrothermal vents. As you probably know all too well, I study rocks, not critters, and thus am not involved with this research. We shall return to the mapping in a few days. Standing around with my hands in my pocket but trying to look intelligent, I figured I should probably do something useful and volunteered to help the biologists with the stuff they brought up with ALVIN. So I extracted tube worms from tube worm tubes for them. Now tube worms are really weird creatures. (I imagine that the tube worms are thinking the same thing about us, but that is a different matter). And I will admit to not knowing anything more about them than you do, at least not before I started extracting them from their happy homes, and so now I shall tell you everything I do know, which as you can see is not much.

Tube worms

First of all, tube worms make for themselves a home of a hollow tube, like a straw, which can be anywhere from a few inches to a few feet long, depending on the neighborhood, and there they spend their entire lives. The weirdest thing about them, however, is that they don't actually eat anything. It might seem obvious that if you don't eat you don't need a stomach, or for that matter a mouth or anything between your mouth and your stomach and your stomach and your rear end. And, in fact, none of those things do tube worms have. If tube worms don't eat, don't they get hungry? No, because they have mastered a culinary art unknown to you and me-they get someone to eat for them. (I know what you're thinking-you're wondering if you could get someone to eat your spinach for you.

Tube worm bush

Don't get your hopes up.) The lucky devils to assume the role of the gourmet are tiny little beasties called bacteria, which live as a community inside the tube worm. What the tube worm does is to take chemicals out of the water and provide them to the bacteria. The bacteria eat these chemicals and turn the chemicals into food for the tube worm. Et voila, dinner! Oh, but there is just one added complication, namely that the chemicals that the bacteria eat and turn into food for the tube worm come out with the hot water from the hydrothermal vents, and these chemicals are not generally in the surrounding seawater. So if water stops coming out of the vent and you happen to be a tube worm...why, you are toast!

So that is the story of tube worms. Goodnight, kiddo.

Love, Papa

 
 
Tuesday, September 16

My Dearest Anais,

Rainbow

Thank you very much for your letter. I am particularly happy to hear that you still like your class after the first week and especially that you are working hard on spelling and math.

Tubeworms

Now, about the tube worms.... It was not exactly my intention to suggest that tube worms might be good pets. Noooooo, indeed not. I suppose you are thinking that they might go into the tank with our fish, Gourmand, but Gourmand lives in fresh water. Now you remember what the ocean taste like-it's rather salty. If you rummage around in one of the bottom cabinets in the kitchen you will find a liter measuring cup and a small scale (Mama, of course, will know where these are). If you fill that measuring cup with water and add to it exactly 30.2 grams of salt and then mix it up until all the salt is gone-well, that's how much salt sea water has. Please do that over the sink, by the way.

Remember what I said about the bacteria that do all the eating for the tube worms. They eat chemicals, in particular something called hydrogen sulfide. As a gas, hydrogen sulfide smells like rotten eggs, and that's basically what you would have to make in the fish tank. My biologist friends tell me that they can make food for tube worms in tanks in their laboratories-rotten vegetables and a few other goodies apparently do the trick-but by this time Gourmand would be gagging, if fish gag, as would the rest of us.

Inside Jason control van

One thing in the tube worms' favor is that they can live at almost any temperature. The water on the bottom of the ocean is 2 degrees Celsius, which is about 36 degrees Fahrenheit, or ever so slightly above freezing, and tube worms can live at that temperature. But such cold water can't hold much hydrogen sulfide, so the tube worms that live in those places look a bit ill-sort of like you would look like if you didn't eat dinner. On the other hand, we see big fat tube worms that live on top of the sulfide chimneys where the water is like the water in your bath-40 degrees Celsius (or 103 degrees Fahrenheit). It's not the temperature that makes them fat but the fact that the water contains a lot of hydrogen sulfide.

The real problem with keeping tube worms as pets is pressure, which we don't think about very often. The floor of the ocean where we are right now is about 2,000 meters (which is exactly 6,562 feet, or more than a mile, if that's easier to think of) below us. Now just imagine how heavy a bucket of water is-you can barely lift it, right? Say each bucket is one foot high and one foot on each side. You lie on the ground, and I put the bucket on top of you. That's okay. Then I put another on top of that. Less okay, and now you're thinking this is only maybe fun. Then another-now you're hurting. The pile increases to ten, then twenty, finally to 6,562 buckets. That is equal to 29,000 pounds on every square inch of your body, so you are squished, flat as a pancake, way beyond even burnt toast. But that's what tube worms like, and in fact they don't like it any other way.

ALVIN

So the short answer is no, tube worms do not make good pets.

Well, that's all I have to report today. A storm is supposedly approaching. The promised big waves have yet to arrive, and the storm may pass us by with nothing more than a whimper. Because of the threat we were unable to launch the submarine, and everything on the ship is tightly tied down. I was up most of last night helping with a sonar survey, which allows us to see what the ocean floor looks like. Perhaps we'll get more done tomorrow.

Love, Papa

 
 
Thursday, September 18

Dearest Anais,

A storm approaches

Today is the third day in a row that we have been unable to launch ALVIN or Jason because it was too rough and the wind was blowing too hard. So naturally we are a bit frustrated.

The only thing we have been able to do is to collect water samples. Water...hmmm. You would think that to collect water all you'd do is throw a bucket over the side and retrieve it-we are not, after all, lacking for water out here. But no, the water freaks are not satisfied with that. Instead, over the side goes this complicated contraption that collects many different samples at different depths and also measures the temperature and other properties.

The NOVA crew

That's because ocean water is actually rather complex-think of it as soup. Of course it contains a lot of salt. In fact it has several different kinds of salt, most of which you are not familiar with since we don't use them. To make matters more complicated, you can't actually see these other chemicals in water for the same reason you can't see the salt in water-the stuff is dissolved. There are also some things in ocean water that you never dreamed of. For example, there is a minuscule amount of gold in seawater! Basically, seawater contains a little bit of almost everything.

Stowed for the storm

You might be wondering where all the stuff in seawater comes from. The answer is land. All the water that falls as rain carries dirt, gravel, garbage-everything you have seen being carried in a river and stream or down the street when it rains-ends up in the ocean. Things are taken out of the ocean too. For example, animals with shells make their shells out of a chemical called calcium carbonate, which they get out of seawater. So if there were no calcium carbonate in water, there would be no animals with shells.

Actually, it is not completely true that the ocean gets everything from land. It also gets some chemicals from the vents that we are studying. Now that I think about it, tons of dust from outer space also land in the ocean every day. But that's another story....To return to the vents, the hot water that comes out of them carries all sorts of weird stuff, including chemicals that bacteria eat. The water that comes out of the vents disperses in the ocean as smoke from a fire disperses in the air. So one of the important reasons that we take lots of samples of water and measure temperature is to find the clouds of vent water, which in turn helps us find the vents themselves.

Margaret Carruthers

Okay, that's enough about water for one night. Perhaps this will give you something to think about next time you drink a glass of water.

Love, Papa

 
 
Saturday, September 20

My Dearest Anais,

Moonrise before the weather change.

It was very nice to get another letter from you and learn what you did at school, especially that you played some baseball. Ahh...it's the greatest game there is. You also asked me about how gold exists in seawater. I do not know the answer and I am not sure that anyone else knows either because, as I said, there's not much gold in seawater. But I can tell you that gold is attached to some other elements to make a molecule, and that molecule floats around among the water molecules. So there aren't actually particles of gold in seawater.

Talking about water, about five minutes after I sent my last letter about water the cable holding the water sampler, which was at the time five or six feet above the ship's deck, broke, so naturally the sampler broke. No one was hurt. The water sampler weighed only about 2,000 pounds (about as much as a very small car), but the cable was supposed to hold 20,000 pounds or so. The moral of the story is don't stand under water samplers suspended by cables.

Black Smoker

We did get some water samples during the ALVIN dive the next day, and we were also able to measure the temperature as it was coming out of one of the vents. The temperature was 303 degrees Celsius (or 577 degrees Fahrenheit). Now it is interesting to reflect on how hot 303 degrees Celsius is. First of all, if Grandma were to cook, say, Thanksgiving turkey at 303 degrees Celsius, she would end up with a shriveled little black thing about the size of a small chicken that no amount of gravy, cranberries, or anything else would help. Also, realize that when you boil water on the stove, it reaches only a temperature of 100 degrees. So how can there be water at 303 degrees if it boils to form steam at 100 degrees? Pressure is the reason. There is so much pressure that steam doesn't form because it takes up too much space. So the higher the pressure, the hotter water has to be to boil.

ALVIN

To everyone's relief, we finally launched Jason yesterday and are now doing the mapping we set out to do. Jason is basically an underwater robot. It can be moved in various directions, and in front it has a hook on one side and a mechanical arm with a claw on the other side. Jason is attached to another vehicle that floats just above it, and that other vehicle is attached to the ship by a cable. Controlling it is not so simple. For that we need a pilot who drives Jason around, an engineer who controls the winch that controls the cable that Jason is attached to, and a navigator who moves the ship around and shows the pilot which way to go.

control van

Mounted on Jason are eight (!!) different video and still cameras and a gizmo called a pencil sonar (this sends out a very narrow beam of sound to allow us to determine the distance to a small spot on whatever object we are looking at).

All of the images from the cameras and data from the sonar come up the cable to the ship. To figure out where to go and what to do with Jason and to keep track of all the information requires an additional five of us. The worst job belongs to the poor guy who has to keep track of the video recorders.

Jason

Can you imagine-nine tape decks running at once and someone having to change and label all the tapes. A couple hours of that and you are cross-eyed. Anyway, all eight of us are crammed into a container, which is about the size of a garage for one car, which would not be so bad except that we share that space with an enormous amount of electronic equipment. We work 24 hours a day, without stop, and to do this we divide ourselves up in three groups. Each group works 4 hours and then has the next 8 hours off. My shift is from midnight to 4 A.M. and then noon to 4 P.M.

So that's what our lives are going to be like for the next four or five days, or until the next storm arrives. I hope you have a fun weekend, and it will not be long before I am home with you and Mama.

Great big kisses, Papa

 
 
Wednesday, September 24

ALVIN resurfaces

ALVIN being lifted onto Atlantis

My Dearest Anais,

Sunset on the Juan de Fuca Ridge

I am happy to hear that you and Mama are well and had such a nice weekend. Mama tells me that you are taking gymnastics and enjoying it. Here our days are all the same and the weekends pass without anyone noticing.

Fixing Jason

We have been working with Jason for the last several days. The work is both interesting and boring. The latter because Jason moves very slowly (the ship and the one it is attached to, called the Medea, must move as well), and we seem to spend most of the time moving from one place to another, placing the transponders, testing sensors, and the like. During this time there is nothing much to do but to keep an eye on what's going on and to take an occasional note.

Once the tests are done and the beacons placed and working, our explorations start and the difficult hours are quickly forgotten. The ocean floor is dark, and we can see only as far as our light allows. Someone likened this exploration to wandering in the deep woods at night with only a small flashlight. Can you imagine in those woods the difficulty of knowing where you are going, where you have been, how big the trees are, and what they look like? The world of the ocean bottom is totally alien.

Imaging the sulfide structures

Traveling through the mirk, the sulfide chimneys first loom as ghosts in the distance, like ruins of a dank medieval castle. As we approach, the shadows gain structure and then more detail, and suddenly we find ourselves up against them. Many are so large we cannot see their tops. The big ones are really enormous. To know their sizes we can only sail up and down their sides with our small craft and measure the water depths at their tops and bottoms, but we cannot see them entirely. The larger structures are 60 to 80 feet tall-more than twice the height of our house.

Sulfide sample from venting structure

Upon closer examination it becomes apparent that some of the chimneys are covered with tube worms. At the distance of a foot or two, the life is rather colorful, but when we move back the color disappears, especially the reds (water absorbs the color red, which means that you cannot see red in the water at distance). Shimmering hot waters rise around the structures, emanating from numerous vents on them. Some of the vents belch black smoke, which in reality is hot water with particles of sulfides. The particles form as the hot subterranean water meets the cold ocean.

Dave Butterfield, NOAA/PMEL in the main laboratory

We have been studying two clusters of sulfide chimneys. One consists of three large structures and the other consists of two large structures. Both are surrounded by many smaller structures.
We have been mapping them from all angles-looking down on them to determine their positions relative to each other and from the sides to determine their exact shapes and appearances. We see them with sonar, black-and-white photographs, color photographs and color video, and even in stereo (which Mama can describe to you), and eventually this is how you will be able to see them.

So that is what has occupied us for the last several days. I have been able to write to you now only because we have a day's respite, but now Jason is back in the water, and in a few minutes it is my turn to take the watch again.

Great big kisses, Papa

 
 
Monday, September 29

Our final log of the black smoker expedition is a "guest" log. It comes from Margaret Carruthers, research assistant at the American Museum of Natural History. See the Who's Who section for more information. It is written to Kate, another member of the Earth and Planetary Sciences Department at the Museum.

Dear Kate,

Mosaic of an active chimney

Mosaic of sulfide structures

We had a lot of data to mess with from the Jason dive last week. I have been working on creating mosaic images of the S&M structure, learning a new mosaic program, and teaching everyone else how to do it. Our Jason dives were separated by the ALVIN program just for this reason-so that everyone could work up the image and navigation data and figure out better ways to go about collecting the data for the next dive. The images for S&M are quite good, but unless Jason's heading and pitch are the same for a whole sequence of images, it's difficult to piece them together without severely distorting them. In addition to eight cameras, Jason also has a sonar system that can measure the topography of a surface in front of it. The sonar scans back and forth and can have as good as 1 centimeter resolution. That is, we can determine the shape of the surface of the sulfide structures to an area of 1 centimeter. Dana Yoerger, one of the engineers from Woods Hole, has been able to take the sonar data and make topographic profiles and surface maps of the structures. This is not an easy task. It took about three days of messing with the data and writing programs to display it correctly. We are hoping to be able to take the mosaics and overlay them onto topography for a three-dimensional representation of the structures. I think it will be possible on a small scale. That is, we can probably overlay a mosaic of a single side of a smoker. But whether or not we can mosaic different sides of the structure together is another matter.

Mosaic of fractured basalt

We've put Jason in the water again. This time we are in the Mothra region, which is south of the Main Endeavour Field (MEF-where S&M is) and not as well explored. Debbie Kelley and John Delaney went down there in ALVIN a few days ago. The Mothra region has a very different character from the MEF. In the MEF, the structures are fat and columnar, with many flanges. Flanges are mushroom-head-shaped structures that seem to grow out from the sides of the smokers. But in Mothra, most of the smokers are spires or pinnacles without flanges. We are in the process of very carefully gathering images and topographic data of the spires. We imaged in a forward-looking mode, that is, with most of the cameras looking forward, for the first of the Mothra dives. Then we recovered Jason and remounted the cameras and sonar to look downward. This will give us the much-needed detailed plan view of the area. We have nearly, if not completely full coverage of the area now.

Smoking flanges

"I'm Not A Crook" sulfide structure

There are two great pastimes other than evicting worms from their tubes that perhaps Ed didn't tell you about. The first, coloring Styrofoam cups and wig-heads is done late at night, before an ALVIN dive. You might never think that Styrofoam cups would make an interesting present, unless of course you could present them to someone who'd never seen or conceived of them before, or maybe if they had a really good drink inside. Even then, I don't think they'd be too exciting. But after their journey to the bottom of the ocean, they become beautifully contorted espresso cups or shot glasses. I'll bring one back for you.

The other activity is marine Ping-Pong. As you can imagine, the game is much different from the terrestrial version. As the ball maintains its course, the table and net do not. I've never thought of Ping-Pong as much of an aerobic sport, but when the ship rolls 25 degrees and you have to run three steps to the ball, you're really running three steps uphill, or flying three steps downhill. It's quite invigorating. If you master this, challenge can be added by playing while the floor drains are hiccupping up dirty water, vent fluid, and red tube worm dye, allowing you to attempt the downhill and cross-country ski versions of Ping-Pong.

I hope everything is well at the Museum. We'll be back next week.

Before the Dive

After the Dive

Margaret