Journal Entry

A Day on the Ship

By popular request, here’s a look at my typical day. On the ship, work is 24 hours a day so we work in 12 hour shifts: 12am to 12 noon or 12noon to 12am. (the crew have a slightly different rotations). My shift is noon to midnight. I usually get up around 10am and make use of the workout room. It’s really interesting to run on a treadmill that moves beneath you.

My roomA closer look at the comfortable cabins on the NBP. GymThe workout room on the NBP.

I miss the official breakfast (only served 7:30am to 8:30am), but after running, doing chores like laundry or cleaning my room and getting ready for the day it’s time for me to grab lunch (served 11:30am-12:30pm) for my “breakfast” just before my shift starts at noon. Then I make the commute of 56 steps, including stairs, from my room to the lab (it’s a few more steps in high seas).

KitchenThe food service area on the NBP. Dry labThe dry lab of the NBP, where we spend most of our time working for this cruise.

Most people have one specific area of responsibility for their whole shift. I’m lucky to have a split shift. From noon to 6pm I help whatever science is going on for the day. I can assist with CTDs or cores or drone flights. Or I can make observations (and take photos) from the bridge or help catalogue and clean up distortions from data collected so far.

BridgeThird Mate Brian Tweedy on the bridge of the NBP, piloting the ship.

Then it’s time for dinner from 5:30pm to 6:30pm. After dinner I take my turn monitoring the multi-beam bathymeter. I have to ensure it's collecting data at the proper depth and that we’re not getting too much distortion from the ice. During this time I also edit data taken by the multi-beam earlier in the day, cleaning up any distortion. I do this until midnight when the next shift comes to relieve me.

Data collectionCollecting data on the topography of the ocean floor. Data editingCleaning up distortions, usually caused by ice, in data collected on the topography of the ocean floor.

If I’m hungry when I get off work, I can grab Midrats (short for Midnight rations, which is kind of like second dinner in the middle of the night) served from 11:30pm-12:30am. Then it’s time to relax or read for a bit then sleep before repeating it all the next day.

DinnerThere's a lot of good food on the ship. GalleyThe galley of the NBP, where we all eat our meals.

Since we are collecting data seven days a week, there are no “weekends.” I think I distinguish my weeks from one another by our weekly Friday fire drill. Even though there are no weekends, there are still fun things going on around the ship. We currently have a ping pong tournament going on, and you play your bracket when everyone finds a little free time. We also occasionally have movie nights or birthday parties.

Ping pongWe're having a ping pong tournament on the NBP! Raul and George play a practice round in the cargo hold.

The midnight to noon shift has a similar work pattern, just with a different timeframe. Usually waking up around 10 or 11pm, grabbing Midrats for “breakfast” and then working until noon (with a break for breakfast for their “lunch”) when we relieve them. Then they have lunch for “dinner” and relax, use the sauna or workout room and head to bed in the afternoon.

There are lounges on the ship where we can watch movies and a “library” of books left behind for us to browse through (most people bring their own digital books or movies). They even have a ping pong table and foosball table to use. Although there are computers, we have very limited email and internet. No Facebook or Reddit for me (someone else is posting my blogs to Facebook for me while I'm gone). We use a ship intranet to communicate with each other on board. I tend to spend a lot of my free time up on the bridge or out on the weather decks looking for wildlife or writing these blogs.

LoungeThere are two lounges on the ship where we can hang out, play games, read, or watch movies.

There is plenty of good food and the cooks—Mike, Michael, and Lorenzo—make sure we’re well fed. There are also always snacks, like popcorn, nuts, and juice boxes out. They have peach juice! I haven’t had this many juice boxes since kindergarten.

Snack areaThere are always lots of snacks available for us to eat when it's not meal time.

The ship, support staff, and crew make sure we have everything we could need. We’re doing science in style.

Comments

Fri, 04/10/2015 - 04:53

Annie Maben

How long did it take your circadian rhythms to get in gear to be able to do the 12 hour shifts without sleep deprivation? Have they done studies on this before? Can you really get meaningful sleep during the day when you're off? Curious about how your mental sharpness holds up.

Fri, 04/10/2015 - 15:55

Susan Steiner

Great day on the ship!! It looks like you have all the comforts of home! only 3 cooks for the whole ship, sounds like those guys might never sleep. Your shift sounds like great work. I wonder what "cleaning up the distortions" means...how you know which data is not what you want and what you do to clean it up.
Great journals...love reading them!!

Fri, 04/10/2015 - 19:02

Dominique Richardson

Hi Annie. For me it didn't take any time at all. But I'm also known to be able to fall asleep wherever and whenever. It seems to be very person
dependent. Some people on the night shift have had no problems
adjusting, some are still sleepy several weeks in. As for circadian
rhythms, they're probably all out of whack for us anyway. It's almost
winter down here, so we're only getting about 8 hours of sunlight right
now. We are also still on the Hobart, Tasmania timezone, despite passing
through several different time zones in our transit. This is done for
ease of communication with nearby bases and because we'll be returning
to the same port. So our "noon" and "midnight" do not correspond with
midday and midnight. Time is very relative down here and I would not be
able to tell what time it is without my watch.

Fri, 04/10/2015 - 19:02

Dominique Richardson

Hi Susan! That is a great point! Thank you for bringing it up. When we receive the data back on the ship we can visually tell what we want to
keep and what we want to clean up. When there are thousands of sound
points in one area and then 2 or 3 that are someplace else, we can
remove those as "outliers". When the multi-beam sends sound out, most of
the sound "pings" hit the bottom and bounce back. But if there's a lot
of ice or air bubbles under the boat, sometimes they hit those and
bounce back early. When you look at all the points of sound we receive
back, you can usually see a distinct line that shows where the ground
is, but often there are a few stray points that are really shallow or
really deep and seem to come from nowhere. Or sometimes a few stray
points show up in the perfect arc pattern they were sent out in. We know
that there isn't' a tiny piece of ground 1 foot under the ship (it's the
ice we're running over), and that there isn't a thin band of ground that
forms the exact arc shape we sent the sound out in right under us, so we
can remove those points before they're added to the map. Hope that helps
explain "cleaning up distortions."

On 2015-04-10 16:55, webmaster@polartrec.com wrote:

Sat, 04/11/2015 - 08:42

Vicki Macauley

Very interesting. I went to Antartica a few years. A crew from one of the Labs was supposed to come on ship to explain what they do, but the weather would not permit it from happening. I think Antartica is one of the most beautiful places on Earth.