Spider on the Rocks

Peroxide blonde

2012-02-02T20:22:00.000-08:00

I've been cleaning all of my samples from last summer. The idea is to get all the organic gunk out, because all I want to analyze is the chemistry of the shell, not the chemistry of the other stuff. This translates to a lot of sitting very still and working with very tiny things.

The cleaning process happens at 65ºC, which takes a while to stabilize.

Not quite at 65ºC. Yet.

I can't emphasize how tiny each sample is. I keep them in little microscope slides with 10 wells (each sample gets its own well. They are really small.

This is my entire summer's worth of work.

Each one is the size of a grain of sand. You pick them up with a tiny paintbrush, the kind you might use to paint the facial expression on a tiny model man standing on the deck of a ship built inside of a bottle.

My brush is named Otis.

Then I crack each shell open with the point of a scalpel.

I was pretty impressed by all the cytoplasm and other ... well, organic goo that was inside of some of them. So I literally peroxided the snot out of them, and now they're clean. I scavenged some foam from a buddy and built a little foam raft so the samples could ride on the 65ºC bath. I'm sure Fisher Scientific has a version for sale for $30, but mine works just fine.

Slow servers

2012-02-01T13:07:00.000-08:00

Today I'm trying to submit an abstract to a conference in June. The meeting is in Montreal, which should be fun--several thousand geochemists descend on a picturesque French Canadian town.

The server, however, for the abstract submission website, is a different problem. This appears to be powered by some kind of gerbil wheel or other improbable device. Of course everyone has left their submission until the very last day. I spent 2 hours clicking through their site, setting up a profile, entering all of my information, and refreshing the page about 3 dozen times. Luckily, I am patient and persistent.

At the end of all this, it turns out that they had so many problems with other submissions that they have moved the deadline forward. Glad I was so persistent today.

The largest conference in the world

2011-12-15T10:03:00.000-08:00

Last week I went to the annual fall meeting of the American Geophysical Union. AGU is the largest gathering of geoscientists in the world--every year, attendance is record-breakingly large, and this year we broke the record yet again with over 21,000 attendees.

Riding on the escalator is the best time to spot people below.

Chance meetings with people I knew years ago are common. It's like going to a music festival, except without all the instruments and jamming. Everyone has a nametag. Lots of faces look familiar, and you can't figure out why until you've already passed them. The best interactions are when you pass someone on the escalator going in the opposite direction, and you only have time for a sedate, demure "parade wave", like the Queen of England.

Some people dress up. We are scientists, so we're not quite sure how to dress up. The classic look for AGU is:

a suit (because you know you're supposed to wear a suit)

backpack (with the straps slightly crushing the shoulders of the suit)

white sneakers

plaid shirt

baseball cap

poster tube

AGU is held in the Moscone Center in downtown San Francisco. The size of the building is too staggeringly large to really comprehend. It's like trying to come to terms with the vastness of geologic time, which, come to think of it, we have all had to do at some point or another. The number of concurrent events going on at any one time is also really too staggering to comprehend. The poster hall alone is so large that you can't see the other side. It is arranged in alphabetical order; when I have to hike from PP ("Paleoclimate") all the way to C ("Cryosphere"), I have to pack a poncho and a snack.

The poster hall is, in fact, so big that pigeons fly around inside. Sometimes they land and walk amongst the posters.

We all stay in hotel rooms as close to the Moscone Center as possible. There's nothing like sharing a hotel room with 3 or 4 of your closest colleagues, people you usually share office and work space with every day, to really get to know each other's habits. This year we stayed in a cinema-themed hotel that had a strange interior window in the bathroom that merely connected us, in an auditory and olfactory way, with the bathrooms of other hotel rooms directly above and below us.

I'm not sure how to interpret this.

You see a lot of weird stuff at AGU. Well, I see a lot of weird stuff. These guys were from the NASA Solar Dynamics Observatory, and had their mascot with them, Camilla Corona.

A rare candid photo of Camilla Corona.

So I went to talks and listened. I went to poster presentations and asked questions. I went to lunch and dinner with people and talked about science until my ears almost fell off. Going to a conference like AGU is one of the most stimulating things I can do as a scientist--I spend all year sitting alone in my office, reading, getting ready to talk to other people about science. It's pretty exhilarating.

I did spend some time down at the Embarcadero, on the waterfront in San Francisco. Here's an obligatory safety shot:

Even at a professional conference, safety first!

... and then we did the whole thing in reverse

2011-08-27T11:41:00.001-07:00

At the end of our field season, everything always happens too fast. The island has a feeling of serenity and perpetuity, that life there goes on forever. As the season slows, we have a little bit less work to do and a little bit more time to do fun things. I went on some fun dives and saw bat rays, grumpy kelp bass, tiny skittish sharks, giant sheepshead, spiny lobsters, a big old eel the size of my whole leg, hiding up in a crack. There is time to breathe and just be happy.

With the Davidson Countercurrent spinning up in August, the water gets so clear and warm.

The fog comes up from the Pacific.
There is nothing to the south of us except San Clemente.

Then we disrupt it by a flurry of packing, killing off the last of our cultures, unplugging and draining the water recirculators, and dashing around with bubble wrap. We cram and pack everything into the stalwart wooden crates, and palletize everything else. Yes, "palletize" is a verb.

Wise words

2011-08-25T14:15:00.000-07:00

Signmakers are looking out for the Logistics Queen

Town

2011-08-23T10:29:00.000-07:00

The town of Two Harbors is our nearest population center, although they do not have a post office. Two Harbors is located on a narrow isthmus with, not surprisingly, a harbor on each side of the island.

View of the Isthmus when headed over to gas up the boat.
Second harbor not pictured.

Many of my favorite objects are available at the store.

Pieces of the science

2011-08-14T22:14:00.000-07:00

These are some scenes from around the lab, cumulatively photographed. Contrary to the cowboy-like diving tales, we spend most of our days in these rooms, working hard on keeping the forams we collect alive and in culture.

The station for making seawater, doing alkalinity titrations, and other important-sounding things.

We usually save these important things until after dinner, which is why this post is vacant during daylight hours.

Getting suited up

2011-08-13T20:44:00.000-07:00

Our mornings usually start around 6 am. We eat breakfast, head down to the lab to get collection gear, then to the dive locker to get suited up, and then go get the boat.

The dive locker. Imagine the odor in a hot room full of that much wet neoprene.

Running on empty

2011-08-12T20:42:00.001-07:00

These days have been very, very busy.

News and updates:

Last weekend I finally got to dive Bird Rock for fun. It was amazing, as usual. It's a big wall dive with urchins, blue-banded gobys, big purple sea fans, garibaldi, and tons of other great stuff. Bill and I took the Beagle over, a big bathtub of a boat, and anchored in the shallow end on the reef on the harbor side, then circumnavigated the island underwater. Highlights included a school of at least 700 tiny silver fish (OK, I can't speciate underwater), and amphibious ducks! I think they were cormorants or something... we were at 30 feet and they were diving down to us, cruising around on a plane of remarkably constant depth, and then corking back up, with their little webbed duck feet tucked behind them. First time I've been visited by a bird underwater.

Bird rock is the one in the mid-distance, decorated in white. We circumnavigated this island counter-clockwise.
If the wind is just right, it can get pretty fragrant.

Hold onto your hat!

2011-08-05T17:55:00.000-07:00

Almost every evening, we gather together a little bit before dinner and sit out on the patio and have drinks and snacks, and talk a little bit about science.

Yes, I've climbed the peak in the background. There are a lot of cactus.

Welcome to a whole new water mass

2011-08-04T15:44:00.001-07:00

The big secret I've been keeping is that we are here doing some incredible science. Most days I want to take moments to enjoy and write about and share non-science moments, but this skews one's perception into thinking that my days are filled with farting around on nature hikes. This is not the case.

The scuba diving we do is a specialized procedure called blue water diving, which you can read more about here. It's a strange experience, with very few visual and spatial reference points. The biggest dangers are sharks and losing track or control of your buoyancy, since there is essentially no bottom where we dive. We dive in a team of three: two people to collect specimens, and one safety diver who carries a shark stick and keeps track of the trapeze and down-lines. Our days usually consist of a blue water dive in the morning to collect specimens, followed by a day of processing the stuff we've collected. Once we get through all that, we go through a maintenance routine on the specimens we've already collected, and then do everything else we need to get done in the lab. At night we make up new seawater for the next day.

Fox in socks on roof with peach

2011-08-01T10:08:00.000-07:00

We have had a few visits from the fox at the lab. It might actually be 2 foxes. Someone left the screen door open on the ground floor, and the fox snuck in and stole a backpack and took it outside in the bushes. He was discovered during the theft, but managed to make off with a big package of M&Ms.

I didn't say it was a *big* fox. Find Waldo!

I'll be a legend in my time

2011-07-31T18:48:00.000-07:00

There is one bar on this island.

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Buffalo Soldier

2011-07-31T08:17:00.000-07:00

During the summer on Catalina Island, the interior can get really dry. When the plants all go brown and the only succulent things left to eat are cactus, the bison come down from the interior and visit us at the lab.

His name is Wilson.

Late night crafts

2011-07-28T23:31:00.000-07:00

Our research is now in full swing. We now have 10 people here working for the project, and we are already running low on some food items. More people and more food arrive Monday. Everyone is tired and flagging.

We are also already starting to break stuff in the lab, and run out of things. Tonight I'm making extra view chambers, which we use to view the critter of interest under the inverted microscopes so said critter can stay in a little pool of seawater.

This is actually a photo of me doing a sloppy job on a minute precision project.

Not a great choice for a late night arts and crafts project, but it's the only time I have left to do it.

Sub!

2011-07-26T22:27:00.000-07:00

I hate the Beatles. Really. Hate the whole band with a passion. I especially dislike getting their songs stuck in my head while scuba diving. This can be a problem.

Last week they brought in a submarine that will be housed here and tested throughout the summer. It came on the deck of a boat and was then offloaded onto the boat ramp.

There was much discussion.

A truck came down the (impossibly steeply graded) hill to manipulate the trailer.

The truck had trouble getting traction on the rear wheels, so they got some assistance.
The big barn in the background houses the hyperbaric chamber.

We built this city on rock and roll

2011-07-20T21:35:00.000-07:00

One of the challenging things about our field season, which makes it kind of unique amongst field programs, is that we're not doing that much actual "field work". Certainly the field work is a critical piece, and our proximity to the ocean is key. However, we come all the way here and then basically spend several days setting up a lab in a remote location. From Monday until now, we have been setting up and making noise. Soundtracks are included.

Caulking projects: The Rolling Stones, The Eagles, Right Said Fred

Caulking projects. Here's hoping it doesn't leak.

Other, more creative caulking projects.

Arrival

2011-07-18T22:20:00.000-07:00

Today I got up at 5 am. Well, I get up at 5 am every day these days, but today seemed especially long. I'm feeling a little tired for extra words, so the pictures will have to do.

We got to SCMI at about 6:30 in the morning. They were loading the boat with our stuff. Remember these wooden crates that keep following me around?

Brian used the crane to lift the crates, suspended by straps

and swung them out over the water, high in the air

Food Shopping #2

2011-07-17T20:20:00.000-07:00

Today we are finally close enough to our actual departure to go shopping for the "perishable foods" shopping list. We went to the Costco in Long Beach, California, and filled a shopping cart with fruit and cheese and bread.

I do mean *literally* filled a shopping cart with fruit and cheese and bread.

This Costco was smaller than the one I am accustomed to going to. (I almost said "the Costco I often go to, but the truth is that I try not to go very often at all.) In addition to being smaller, this Costco also was poorly stocked enough to have things like milk way in the back of the coolers.

I had to climb into the cooler case to get the milk.

Carmageddon

2011-07-16T14:02:00.000-07:00

A stretch of the 405 Freeway in Los Angeles is closed for 53 hours this weekend. People have been going crazy "preparing for the worst". Businesses are preparing for the end of the world. Local residents on the west side fear they may not even be able to leave their houses, and a hospital at UCLA is offering beds to its employees who fear they may not be able to commute to work. JetBlue even offered $4 flights from Burbank to Long Beach for the weekend, for those trying to travel. For all that, you'd think we were in the middle of a civil war, or some kind of attack on American soil. Nobody has bombed the freeway. They are just closing it to repave some ramps.

I watched it on the TV news. People are seriously going nuts. NPR even did a piece on it.

This is the reason that we drove down on Wednesday and unloaded the truck, and the reason that I'm parked in LA for 4 days waiting for our departure on the boat next Monday morning. Strangely, it has afforded me the time to write, to work on manuscripts and my dissertation, like a real grad student--or, at least, a studious and virtuous one. I get up in the morning and work on the most recent round of edits. I catch up on emails. I go to the post office, which I can't do on the island, and to Target to buy soap, which comes in a 10-pack only. After all this commotion getting ready to leave, the last few days have been strangely peaceful. I don't even have that harbor smell lingering in my hair anymore.

From the streets of Sacramento to the freeways of LA

2011-07-14T12:36:00.001-07:00

Next step: drive everything to Southern California.

There are not a lot of inconspicuous places to park a 26-foot truck overnight. Because of this, I decided to leave it parked where we had loaded it, so I had to walk over and get it Wednesday morning. I got into the truck at 5 am, started the ignition, and Steppenwolf's Magic Carpet Ride immediately leaped from the radio speakers, the intro part with the whammy bar. It seemed like an enthusiastic way to start the day.

Rolling out. The fully-loaded truck did not handle like a Magic Carpet.

John suggested that I pick him up in the parking lot of the local Safeway Grocery, because "it might be difficult to maneuver" in the small parking lot outside of his apartment.

The Joad Family prepares to depart for Catalina

2011-07-12T17:20:00.000-07:00

Today we loaded the truck with all of the lab gear we'll need for almost two months on the island. In some ways, this is the culmination of all the weeks of packing. Mercifully, it has cooled a full 20 degrees from last week, to a high of a mere 85º.

Eric and I picked up the U-Haul in the morning, at a lone Union 76 Station out in the middle of a field.

He even let us keep the big cardboard "LOWEST COST" banner to use as a sunshade.
I'm stoked!

I rented the 26-foot U-Haul, the largest one available. It's not small. The gas station attendant was pretty fun. He had a thick Middle Eastern accent, and kept asking us how to pronounce words, like "miles". We got to horse around in the back stockroom area while he completed our order on an ancient, buzzing PC, and a second attendant shoveled ice from an ice machine into bags for resale. "Oooohhhh, you get the big one! You ever drive one of those things? The back of it, it is as big as a whole house!" The vehicle is certainly as long as my apartment.

You know how U-Haul always has some kind of "nature and science" motif to the designs on its trucks? Well, this time I got the one with the zebra. Excuse me, I got the truck with the representation of the Pliocene-age Hagerman Fossil Beds in southwestern Idaho, a 3-million-year old deposit that includes fossil horses that are some of the first recognizable representatives of the genus Equus.
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Deep Blue Lake

2011-07-09T21:43:00.000-07:00

Scuba diving is an integral part of the research I'll be conducting on Catalina. Somehow I managed to make it since last fall without diving, which is a crying shame. Tyler and I are both headed out to do research dives in the next week, so we decided to spend some time up at Lake Tahoe doing training dives.

From the north end of Lake Tahoe. Looks warm, right?

Diving at Lake Tahoe is not at all straightforward. It is a freshwater lake, and I am accustomed to diving in saltwater, where I have a different buoyancy. Tahoe is at 6200 ft. elevation, which means that all of our tables and calculations of pressure and accumulated nitrogen, calibrated for sea level, need to be adjusted. Most importantly, the lake is cold--and I mean COLD. Tyler dives in a drysuit, so he can adjust his thermal undergarment to suit the conditions, and he is a big tall guy with good circulation and pink cheeks. I, on the other hand, am short, with a high surface-area-to-volume ratio and perennially cold hands and feet. I've lived in hot deserts for enough years that it takes a 90ºF day to get me out of pants and into shorts. I used to dive in Puget Sound with chemical handwarmers stuffed into my gloves. In short: I get cold.

Food Shopping #1

2011-07-07T17:17:00.000-07:00

We're going to be on Catalina Island for 6 weeks. This means that we have to feed the people in my research group for that long. This time out, our group has elected to eat dinners at the cafeteria at the marine lab, which means that we are shopping for 10-16 people for breakfast, lunch, and snacks. I sent out an email to everyone a week and a half ago and asked them to comment and add to the grocery list I had generated. Surprisingly, very few people had additional requests.

Eric and I went to Target, Ace Hardware, Best Buy, Costco, and Walmart (in that order). We got a lot of food. I'm not kidding.

Logistics Queen

2011-07-06T15:22:00.000-07:00

My research group is getting ready to depart for a 6-week field-and-lab excursion on Catalina Island in southern California. There is a lot to do to get ready, and I'm modestly understating myself here. We show up and they give us a lab space that has benches, and outlets. Last time we had to go hunting around and rustle up enough chairs. This means that we need to bring absolutely everything we might possibly need, and a bunch of stuff that we imagine needing in our dreams. It is sort of like remembering to bring a jacket on a cold evening, except scaled up to galactic proportions (or at least a modest municipality). If you bust a shoe, you have to go back to the mainland.

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