The End

The ship approaches the Bahamas once more, heading for Freeport where the scientists and technicians shall disembark. For this exceptionally long cruise, the end is a strange feeling. We are on day 47/48, and you can certainly tell going by the state of some of the scientists! Lots of long and busy days and nights, even a fair amount of steaming with little to do takes its toll. We are certainly all looking forward to stepping back on land with all the luxuries that come with it.

We deployed our last mooring early this morning, and it was actually raining… the only mooring we have had to do in the rain. But it was only a quick one - just lob it over the side (gently with a crane). All our data processing is complete, the cruise report is ready, and most importantly, we have the updated MOC time series! It looks beautiful. It is certainly very rewarding to see the last 18 months of data added on as a consequence of all the hard work done by the whole of the ships crew. 

Tension and excitement reached fever pitch in the main lab as the new MOC timeseries is produced.

Lets not forget that as well as the end of this cruise, it is the end for RRS Discovery. She did her last CTD this morning, we had estimated it was the last of the thousands of CTDs she has performed in her lifetime. Her final job will be to sail the crew back to Southampton. 50 years at sea is certainly an impressive feat, and we are all honored to be a part of her last voyage! So whilst the new RAPID array looms in the dark, we look forward to seeing more unique data from deep in the Atlantic Ocean in 18 months time.

Alex, Rafael, Charlotte, Ben, Darren, David and Gerard

 

The crew, technicians and scientists of Discovery Cruise 382–Disco's Last Dance

Ocean Velocities from the ADCP

Aside from the CTDs and the moorings, there are also many instruments mounted to the ship that are constantly collecting data as we go. One of these is the Acoustic Doppler Current Profiler (ADCP), which measures how fast the water is moving under the ship. Much like a sonar, the instrument sends out a sound pulse, which is then scattered by small particles or plankton in the water. The ADCP listens to the echo and uses the so-called Doppler effect to calculate the velocity with which the particles (and thus the water) are moving. In this way, we can monitor the currents under the ship almost in real time!

The Antilles Current, just east of the Bahamas. This warm, shallow current flows north in the top 800 m with speeds of up to 60 cm/s (1.2 knots if you prefer) in this example. You can see the subsurface maximum of northward velocities measured by the ADCP.

This figure shows us crossing the Antilles current earlier this week. The ADCP shows strong subsurface currents down as far as 800 meters! 

Charlotte

Final Week

We're into our final week of Disco's last dance. And what a final week it is! In comparison with the long steams that broke up the work earlier in the trip, we now have lots of moorings to do–all in close range of one another.

This week we are doing the Western Boundary moorings. These moorings that measure the Antilles Current and the Deep Western Boundary Current in the North Atlantic. These are arguably the most important moorings in the whole of the RAPID array.

Tuesday will be a very exciting day. We recover WB2 the keystone mooring in the array. That evening, we should be able to look at an updated timeseries of the Atlantic Overturning circulation. This will be the first update since April 2011 and promises to be very interesting. I, for one, am very excited.

The last update showed us some dramatic interannual variability. There is a nice synopsis of those results here.

Meanwhile, before heading off on this leg, we stopped in Nassau, Bahamas. We picked up a new crew and some new technicians. Some of the scientist managed to get on land for a bit. Here's the ubiquitous picture of Ben and Darren in the sea with one of our hard working technicians, Ian.

Ben, Ian and Darren enjoying themselves during our brief stop in Nassau last Friday

Nassau is primarily a port for cruise liners and we think that Discovery may have felt slightly out of place at the dock–can you spot Discovery in the picture below?

Spot the Discovery

Gerard

Lats, longs, knots, points and cables

Life on a ship has a lexicon all of its own. Many might know the bow or the stern. You might know that starboard is the right-hand side of the ship facing the bow and that the port side is the left. On board, you don't talk of walls and floors–you're in the world of bulk heads and decks. Some of the terminology has it's basis in the old setup of a ship. The fo'c's'le/forecastle/foredeck was traditionally where the castle towards the bow on a ship was. And while heads are located all around the ship these days, in times past they were also on the bow. These days the forecastle deck is a more pleasant place. But I digress, what I wanted to talk about was the nautical terminology for distances, speeds and directions.

A picture of the usually peaceful foredeck on Discovery taken from our rival blog: Memories of Discovery

Latitude and longitude is a good place to start. These are the two measures used to break globe into north, south, east and west. Latitude is zero at the equator and ±90 at the poles. Longitude goes from 0 to 360º. The zero of longitude is arbitrary but nowadays is accepted to be at the Greenwich Meridian near London. The same place that gives us the Greenwich Mean Time–GMT–that Darren described. The prime meridian wasn't always at Greenwich and, if you're a keen fan of Jules Verne, you'll have to take Paris as your prime meridian to figure out where he's talking about. Paris Mean Time–PMT–didn't last long and, primarily because it was very grumpy and irritable, was eventually superseded by GMT, which is now universally accepted.

One degree of latitude is 60 nautical miles. Or one minute of latitude, 1/60 of a degree, is one nautical mile. Longitude isn't spatially consistent*. 1º of longitude is equal to 60 nautical miles at the equator but elsewhere you have to take a cosine of latitude to get the distance. For example, at 52ºN, the latitude of Cork, one degree of longitude is 37 nautical miles. It is possible, depending on your location to change longitude very quickly. For example, in the picture of Morrissey with a cat on his head (below), should the cat spin around, he/she will go through 360º of Morrissey. The same would be true of a human at the north pole.

Morrissey with a cat on his head. The cat is demonstrating how it is possible to go through 360º of longitude by spinning while located at the poles... or in this case Morrissey's head

Another measure of distance is the cable. It is one tenth of a nautical mile. After eagerly learning this new nautical term, I was determined to use it as often as I could. And, like every scientist who learns a new nautical term, I eventually use it incorrectly. Like one time when we asked our American colleagues to set up two cables from a mooring site and were greeted with blank expressions: Americans don't do cables. 

Is there a point in all this? Well, I'm glad you asked. The point is a unit of direction. While a point as a unit for direction seems a little arbitrary at 11º to begin with, the explanation has some sense to it. It is a point of a compass. If north is at 0º, west is at 90º. Then NW is 45º, NNW is 22.5º. Half of this again is 11.25º and that is one point.

Hard to fathom? Not really: a fathom is 0.01 of a cable and is used as a unit for depth.


Gerard


*Shrewd readers may now be thinking that latitude isn't exactly spatially consistent either due to the earth being an imperfect spheroid.

We've not gone away...but the internet has: Alex explains

For all you land dwelling folks working at stationary desks, it is often the case that refreshing your Facebook page can provide a small escape from reality and spur you on to do another 10 minutes of hard work, before another Facebook refresh is due. For us out at sea however, one cannot rely on the internet being there to comfort you, and this blog post comes about after 4 whole days without internet.

Discovery’s internet connection is provided by a geostationary satellite at 38ºW in the middle of the Atlantic ocean. Discovery’s Internet receiver is located in front of the main mast. Putting two and two together (this is the science part of this blog entry), one finds that after you have sailed sufficiently west, and keep a westward heading, the main mast blocks out all signals from the geostationary satellite. The last 4 days we have been steaming to the WB6 site, and so our westward course meant continuous internet black out. We had 15 minutes of relief when we stopped and turned into the swell to deploy our last Argo float. However, being the one who deployed it, by the time I reached the lab again internet had gone. Though some were lucky enough to send off a single email!

So with the topic of discussion on board being the lack of internet, what is there to do when you need a break from your swaying Matlab screen? Often you will find us refreshing internet pages anyway, despite knowing what the outcome will be. In actual fact, reading about how the DNS look up failed often provides about as much relief and stimulation as Facebook does sometimes. Some great alternatives to internet entertainment can be to take a pleasant walk out on deck in the hot sun, and watch some flying fish leap about. However the weather has been less than satisfactory these past 4 days, with bouts of heavy rain, choppy seas and much cloud. Some intense lightning storms have even made good shows in the evening.

One might ask, why is Discovery designed so poorly, such that internet is blocked by something so trivial as the ships main mast? Surely, in this modern day and age where you can check facebook 2000 miles from land, such engineering difficulties would be easily overcome. You have to remember that Discovery is 50 years old now, and back in her day, the internet didn’t exist. When it did become available, some tell stories of your email being delivered to you each morning on paper printouts, and any outboard email you wished to send had to be given to the purser on a disk so he could send the whole batch at once. Dark times indeed.

So why are we able to put this blog post up today then? Well we have reached the WB6 site and our altered heading means the mast isn’t getting in the way, and so it looks like we will have internet for a good portion of the day. However once we are done here the blackout will return, as we set sail for Freeport in the Bahamas for the crew change.

Alex

Movember Time!

Because moustaches grow at sea too you know!

Many of you may have heard of Movember before, but for those that haven't: it's the month formerly known as November that has been renamed to promote men's health awareness (and give an excuse to grow outrageous moustaches!).

Many of the scientific party, technicians and crew have decided to take part in this event - some going as far as shaving off already well established facial hair to keep with the spirit of growing a moustache in a 1 month period.

The Disco's Last Dance blog have setup a Movember team page for cruise participants where we shall be exhibiting our progress, and hopefully receiving some donations to the Movember cause.

More information on Movember and the programmes it supports can be found at http://uk.movember.com/about/

Darren and team

Moorings, moorings, moorings.

Seeing as the main purpose of this cruise is to service the RAPID-26N moorings, I thought I'd give a bit more information on what our scientific moorings are like.

They are basically long plastic-covered wire ropes (or synthetic fibre ropes), with a lot of floats to hold the top end up, and a big lump of steel to hold the bottom end down. The scale of them can be impressive though, with our tallest mooring rising approximately 5150m from the seabed, meaning it would dwarf a skyscraper if it were stood next to it .

The height of our mooring called MAR1 relative to some famous landmarks. We are currently steaming towards this mooring and will be working on it on Thursday.

Yet for all their length, the wire diameter is less than 8mm, and the majority of the buoyancy is provided by glass! The hollow glass spheres are packed in plastic "hard-hats" to protect them from impacts, but they are designed to withstand the pressure at a depth of 6000m (600 times atmospheric pressure). Sometimes, however, even these implode due to the enormous pressures.

Glass buoyancy recovered from a mooring today. Usually glass spheres reside inside plastic hard hats. Here the enormous pressure the spheres were under from the ocean has caused the glass to disintegrate into white powder. The force of the implosion can be seen in the damage to the plastic hard hats.

As the mooring is deployed, self-logging instruments - built into titanium or stainless steel pressure cases - and additional buoyancy are clamped to the wire ropes or inserted inline between joins in the wire. The mooring is assembled as it goes over the stern, and once all the wire, floats and instruments are streaming aft of the ship, the anchor is attached and dropped into the water. The whole mooring is then pulled down as the anchor sinks and it eventually stands upright with the top of the mooring stopping about 50m below the surface. The mooring is then left in place collecting data until we come to collect it in 18-months time.

To recover the moorings we use an acoustic release that when given the correct coded acoustic signals lets go of the anchor allowing the mooring to float to the surface. The ship manoeuvres in to pick the top of the mooring up, and then the rest is winched aboard with the instruments taken off and the data downloaded. A replacement mooring is deployed and we move to the next site.

Darren

Halloween

To break up the monotony of a long steam, we decided to have a Halloween party on board. This was a highly industrious affair with people fashioning outfits from all sorts of ship and scientific equipment. No costumes were purchased beforehand and all were made by hand. Crew, technician and scientists were all involved. An excellent night was had by all, as can be seen in the enthusiasm below. I'll let it to the reader at home to decide who's costume was best (vote for the shark!)..

Disco's last Haloween Dance: From left, David Axe Smeed, Rafael Zombie-Catany,  Sheets Duncan, Martin Horrorson, Long John Charlotte Mielke, Gerard Mac-the-knife-Carthy, Bengamin Mort, Mummy Alexander Clarke, Darren Bones Rayner, Jaqueline Witcherhouse and Ian Murdereroch.

An Update

Disco's last dance included many pirouettes south of the Canary Islands. Cruise track (red) south to the first mooring at EBH1, (magenta) on to Santa Cruz, (light blue) out to EB1, (dark blue) back east to EBH4, 5 and finally (black) out towards the Mid-Atlantic Ridge

Believe it or not, we are halfway through the cruise. To celebrate we had an excellent Halloween party. Photos to follow. In fact, the main lab–our home for this cruise–was very quiet beforehand with most scientists diligently working away at their Halloween costumes.

So far the cruise has mainly been doing loops south of the Canary Islands (see cruise track above). We started with our moorings, called EBH1, south of Tenerife and worked in towards the African coast but were unable to reach Moroccan waters so we returned to Santa Cruz de Tenerife for repairs to the ship (magenta). Then out southwest of the Canaries (light blue) to EB1. Then, finally, back in to the Moroccan coast to finish work there (dark blue).

Westwards ever westwards from there (black). Feeling good about the trade winds being at our back and, being late in the year, little prospect of bad weather from Tropical Storms…

The last three days we have spent battling the tail end of Tropical Storm Tony. Tony, I'm putting you on my list of enemies. All this has meant we've spent the last few days pitching into short choppy seas. And losing time…

Darren asks: What time is it?

A selection of the clocks on board RRS Discovery

So after being bullied into it I'll write a post for the blog. Which is strange really, as we've recently been sent details about anti-bullying training (maybe my colleagues haven't had time to do that course yet!).

Anyway, what shall I say? How about the problems of timezones when at sea?

Things shouldn't be complicated, but with us crossing several timezones - and hence having several clock changes - as we go across the Atlantic it can get confusing when trying to keep track of the time at home relative to the ship's time. To compound matters, all scientific time recording uses GMT as the timezone.

At the start of the cruise we had two timezones to think about: the ship matched the UK and both were on British Summer Time (GMT+1), and the instruments were on GMT. Then to adjust for daylight hours the ship time was changed to match GMT - still only two timezones to worry about.

Going further west it got more complicated and ship time went back another hour, so we then had GMT-1, GMT and BST to contend with. All this can be readily resolved during the day, but when the fog of sleep is still lifting you worry that you got it wrong when setting your alarm. "Have I missed the start time for the piece of work we're doing today?" Or more importantly for some: "Have I missed breakfast?".

We've now come across a new problem, which although may be useful at home, just adds to the confusion here. Last night the UK's clock's switched from BST to GMT, and apparently so did many people's mobile phones. A mobile may be of no use to make calls when at sea, but for many of us it's our alarm clock, so when it automatically changes timezone and goes back an hour (despite all settings suggesting it shouldn't) then some people were caught out for our 05:30 start. Again the thought processes are slow in the morning and it took a good while for some to fathom why they were late. There was even an accusation made of someone changing someone else's phone time!

Me? I can just be smug that I somehow spotted the problem when setting my alarm last night.

Darren Rayner

Ben and his love of CTDs and sunshine

Ben (left) and Darren (the shy guy who hasn't written in the blog yet) enjoying themselves in temperate climes during our port call in Santa Cruz de Tenerife

I am usually found sailing into stormy seas in the high latitude North Atlantic and the Southern Ocean. The last time I sailed on Discovery the wind hardly dropped below force 10 (wind speed of about 60 mph). So this time it’s quite refreshing to pack a bag containing shorts and sun cream, rather than wooly hats, scarves and thermals. My role on this RAPID cruise is to oversea all the underway data collection and processing the CTD data. What’s a CTD?  I’m glad you asked.

A CTD is the physical oceanographers main instrument. Alex is stood next to one in a previous post. It is lowered from the ship on wire to within about 10m of the seabed and then hauled back on board. This can take a while, as the seabed is currently 5000m below us! During this journey instruments measure how the temperature and conductivity of the water varies with depth. Temperature and conductivity are used to calculate the waters salinity (or saltiness). The MicroCat instruments (picture here) on the moorings are in effect little CTDs so we attach them to the CTD and use their bigger, and slightly more accurate, brother to check that they are working correctly.

We not only check that the new MicroCat instruments going out on the new moorings are OK we also attach the ones we have recovered onto the CTD and fly them into the depths as well. As if they haven’t had enough, they have been out in the darkness all alone for a year already!

Ben Moat

What are we doing here?

Reading Rafael's post on the blog yesterday I realised that there are just two scientists who hadn't yet written anything - and I didn't want to be last.  I am David and in Gerard's classification of oceanographers (students or grizzled sea-scientists) I fall into the latter.

You will have already read that we are currently travelling between Southampton, the Canaries and the Bahamas.  You might also have thought that this sounds like the itinerary of a holiday cruise rather than a research endeavour.  So what are we doing here?

The sun heats the equatorial regions more strongly than higher latitudes and the ocean and atmosphere redistribute the heat transporting it form the tropics towards the North and South poles.  There is though a remarkable exception.  In the South Atlantic the ocean transports heat towards the equator.  As a consequence the North Atlantic transports more heat northwards and this has an important impact on the climate of northwest Europe.  The  RAPID project measures the poleward heat transport in the North Atlantic ocean.

This is my first time on a RAPID project cruise but the work has been going on since 2004.   There isn't another project like this anywhere else and the measurements we make are widely used by climate scientists.  We are really quite proud of it.

You might still be asking why measure the heat transport at the latitude of the Bahamas and not somewhere else?  There are a couple of reasons. This is the latitude at which the northward transport of heat is greatest - about 1.3 PW (1.3 quadrillion Watts).  It is also a latitude at which the Gulf Stream is constrained in the Florida Strait and that has been monitored by our colleague in Florida AOML and RSMAS for many years.

Below are some of the instruments used to monitor the ocean.   We are deploying about 170 altogether - considering the size of the ocean the number required seems surprisingly few.



David

Microcats in the Deck Lab. Microcats are instruments that measure temperature, salinity and pressure on a mooring

   

Hurricanes, ocean saltiness and me: Rafael Jaume-Catany

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Rafael with Mt. Teide in the background as we departed Tenerife

 How can I start writing about myself and introducing you my research curiosities avoiding being dull and boring. How can I describe you that at the moment I am living the opportunity of my life doing research on board of the historic RSS Discovery. I cannot count how many times I have been looking at this living legend from the canteen of the National Oceanographic Centre (NOC) and imagining one day stepping on board. I was imagining that moment would be like to connect with the history of ocean sciences.

Well, so here we are. I am writing you from the cabin number 27 of the RSS Discovery and wondering how many times scientists have been using this table facing the eye bull (round window in the cabin). Meanwhile Discovery is doing its last journey, me, Rafael E. Jaume-Catany from Sóller a little but proud village in Mallorca (Spain) I am doing my first forty-day cruise along the North Atlantic.

The task of finding my research questions is a work in progress that has been developed through my studies in marine sciences in the University of Vigo. Then in the University of Palmas de Gran Canary (Spain) and in the University of Algarve (Portugal), where I found my passion for using satellites to monitor different parameters of the oceans including ocean color to study global ocean’s productivity, sea surface temperature (SST) and the sea level. But in there my research question was still not clear and I had to cross the line and I had to go to the University of Baja California in Ensenada (Mexico) and start discovering my research interest.  There, I started to look at phytoplankton blooms induced by hurricane motion over the west Pacific. But if you are reading this and you are thinking that this is nothing new for the scientific community, then you are right. So I had to come back to Europe seeking what could be really original, useful for the society in the same time enjoyable for me..

This is how my research interest put me in contact with the satellite group at the NOC where I had the opportunity to work and to complete a master’s programme in the university of Southampton using SMOS and Aquarius, two brand new satellites from a European and American-Argentinean partnership missions. The aim of both missions is to measure the sea surface salinity (SSS) from space. Finally, this journey brought me here. During this Discovery cruise I am processing the temperature and salinity measured at five meters depth along the Discovery track from all along the way from Southampton down to the Canary Island and then to the Bahamas. This cruise is an excellent opportunity for me to see from the first hand how in situ oceanographic data are collected. We are going to deploy very exciting instruments including Argo floats, surface drifters from the SPURS project and a large number of moorings from the Rapid project.

It is an incredible experience and I am glad that my passion for science was strong enough to bring me here.

Rafael

Nemo found on top of my computer...

Figure 1: Nemo in the lab with, from left, Charlotte, Rafael, Alex and Ben.

Let me introduce another member of our team. In Figure 1 (I told you there would be science here) is our pet clownfish called Nemo. As all observationalists tend to be, I was sceptical of bringing a clownfish to sea. My scepticism was soon sidelined when I learn he speaks fluent English (though with a strong French accent). We have struck up an unlikely friendship. He informs me that he hates his name and likens its prevalence to the explosion of Kylies in the UK in the early 90's. He maintains that he was born in the mid-1950's (thus rubbishing his earlier story about the origin of his name) and can tell me anything about the ocean as he knows everything and has been everywhere. I am inclined reinstate my scepticism.

I am at a loss as to what category of sea-going scientist Nemo fits into: he is neither student (Figure 1, left & background) nor gristled sea-scientist (Figure 1, right). In fact I'm not even sure if 'he' is male or female–apparently that's a touchy subject with clownfish. Anyway, he was in need of an introduction. He apologises for not writing this entry himself but fins are not good for typing. I pointed out that he had plenty of fins but not enough gers. I don't think he got it.

The reason he looks so unhappy in the picture is because we've had an unexpected stop in Santa Cruz de Tenerife and he is not allowed up the road. As we approached Santa Cruz, a rainbow split the sky. The rocky peaks of Teneriffe were swaddled in mists. The whole sight was rather wonderful. Personally, I'll be happier seeing this view from the aft deck in a few days time…

Santa Cruz de Tenerife

First Impressions: Charlotte

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Charlotte and her first Argo Float

My name is Charlotte and I am a PhD student in Hamburg in Germany.  Back at home, I am working on understanding the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC), the mechanism responsible for carrying warm waters from the equator to higher latitudes. Despite its importance for the climate, measuring the AMOC is very difficult and the RAPID array (where we are headed) provides the very first continuous measurements. So I was very excited at the prospect of experiencing the data-collecting first-hand.

Unlike everyone else, I didn’t get to sleep in my own bed the last nights before the cruise, but at least that meant that I also didn’t spend the last days agonizing about things that I might have forgotten to pack. Once I had waved rainy Hamburg goodbye from the airplane, I knew that I better have all important documents with me – or there was nothing to be done about it.

As I hardly knew any of my fellow scientists before, I was a bit nervous when I arrived in Southampton, but everyone turned out to be really nice! The ship itself was also a pleasant surprise (larger than I thought it would be!), as was the weather, which was considerably better than in Hamburg.

This is my first time being on a ship for more than one night, and it has been quite an experience so far. Thankfully, the seasickness left me after a few days on board, so that I could really start to enjoy the journey.  There are a lot of unexpected delights: The food is very good (and I do not have to cook myself), we have seen dolphins more than one time, and there is no better place to watch sunsets or the stars than on a ship in the middle of nowhere!  

Dolphins off Discovery's bow

 So far, we have deployed a drifter and an ARGO float, and mooring operations are underway since yesterday, which is also pretty exciting! I am really looking forward to the next weeks!

Deploying Harry

Today we deployed ‘Harry’ the first of our five Argo floats. We give them nicknames, in this case it the name of my youngest son. Compared to other instruments we deploy, the Argo float is relatively small and possibly one of the only instruments we are allowed to deploy ourselves. By the way - Harry is the long yellow cylindrical tube in the above image, not to be mistaken for the two scientists in yellow hard hats lowering him over the side!

Caption:  Raphael Jaume Catany and Gerard McCarthy deploying the Argo float ‘Harry’.  The insert top right shows the float in the water soon after deployment. 

 

Argo floats not only float, but they sink as well! As they sink they measure the temperature and salinity (or saltiness) in the upper 2000m of the ocean.  Hopefully they return to the surface after about 10 days and tell us what they have measured (within hours of surfacing!!). Their positions at the surface are also recorded, which we can use to determine how the upper ocean is moving. The position of ‘Harry’ and the other 3663 operation Argo floats can found here. The floats are operational for about 5 years before they run out of power and sink to the cold-dark ocean floor.

Measurements from little ‘robots’ like Argo help scientists to a better understanding of the world’s oceans and lead to more reliable climate models. These models are used to understand (and eventually predict) the planets long-term climatic changes and it’s natural variability.  

Ben Moat

First Impressions: Alex Clarke

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Alex Clarke and the CTD, starboard deck

Hello, I am one of the students on board RRS Discovery, helping out with the refurbishment of the RAPID array. I graduated from the University of Bath in physics and have been searching for exciting opportunities for further study in various fields. I have never sailed any meaningful distance before, and so the opportunity to spend 6 weeks as sea was very exciting, especially tied in with the science work. 

I have to say, the excitement somewhat died on day 2 and 3 due to feeling ill and sea sick. However I am gradually able to use a computer for longer periods now without having to go and lie down. The constant wavering of the boat is quite an interesting experience, I am still finding it hard to walk around and carry out daily tasks without almost falling over. 

One of the major points of excitement was when we sailed over the continental plate and took a look at the echo depth sounder as we went from 500 to 5000 meters of water (unimaginably deep!). I was also lucky enough to see a pair of dolphins whilst I was looking over the front of the boat. 

The moon, Venus and, most importantly, the CTD

 I am a keen star-gazer and I got a glimpse of the sky out here the other night, it was very misty (which was fairly scary in itself being out on deck in the dark) but I still caught a shooting star, saw part of the Milky way and picked out Andromeda without any need for binoculars! So I am looking forward to even clearer nights to come. 

We are currently in international waters off of Portugal and have tested the CTD to 1000 m. The next one (due at 3am) will be interesting as it goes all the way down to 5000 meters. Lastly I am looking forward to getting out to the RAPID array, seeing how they are retrieved and deployed, and also using the data that we get from them.

Alex Clarke

Departure

We set sail on Monday from our home port of Southampton. We had been mobilising the ship since Friday in preparation for departure. Our rusting hunk of scientific history, as the BBC called poor old Discovery, sat in contrast with the enormous, white Ventura across the pier in Ocean Terminal.

We don't usually mobilise from Southampton–often we fly to the Canary islands and moblise there. Mobilising at home has the advantage of allowing you to sleep in your own bed and not having to stand behind people who neither move nor walk on the moving walkways in Gatwick. On the downside, the scientific party haven't had the chance to get to know each other.

Over the next few posts, everyone will have a chance to introduce themselves. In the meanwhile here's our glamorous set of scientists.

RRS Discovery. After 50 years of service, Discovery Cruise 382 will be her last.

This is Disco's last dance: an entirely* fictional account of the final voyage on RRS Discovery 

 After 50 years of loyal service, Royal Research Ship Discovery (affectionately and appropriately known as Disco) will undertake her last scientific cruise this October/November. This blog will document the facts, fictions and science of this last cruise: Di382. The aim here is not to laboriously describe a CTD but to provide an amusing and sometimes informative account of a research cruise. I can't guarantee that this cruise will be as exciting as our last cruise where we ate freshly caught sushi off bin-bags in the main lab and watched the captain jump overboard. But where fact is lacking, we'll just make stuff up. We will talk science too, I promise. I hope this blog will be of interest to oceanographers, physicists and normal people alike.

I (@ger_the_sea) will be tweeting under #rapidmoc and #discoslastdance during the cruise.

* not entirely fictional