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A very big part of this project depends on a piece of equipment called the ADCP (acoustic Doppler current profiler).

If you have ever read a scientific paper, you probably know how dry and dull they can be. As a graduate student I spend a lot of time reading papers and I can say with confidence that the methods section is often the most mind-numbingly tedious part – this is the portion of an article … Continued

Science and art are deeply related. Both involve looking hard at what is around us: taking time to observe and collect information to filter through brains. Art asks questions, science seeks answers. I have been drawing and painting since I was a child. I studied art in college and took it with me everywhere afterward. … Continued

I have been dreaming about this day for a long time. I arrived at the White Shark Café region – about halfway between Hawaii and California (see figure below). I have been, with my lab team and collaborators, planning this expedition for three years, and have had many a sleepless night. Taking a ship as … Continued

The ocean is full of relatively small events that happen over a short period of time. To help scientists maintain a more persistent observing presence in the ocean, we use robots called Autonomous Underwater Vehicles (AUVs) to move around the ocean in three dimensions and collect data. On this research cruise we are using 3 … Continued

As the old saying goes, “Where there is smoke, there is fire.” This is the approach researchers on R/V Falkor are using: searching for particles and chemical signals as tracers of plumes. The chemistry of seawater around volcanoes is different from that of the rest of the ocean. When the team runs into these differences over … Continued

Dr. Kelvin Richards, the Principal Investigator on the Mixing Up The Tropical Pacific Cruise beams with excitement at the prospect of collecting new data. For him, this cruise is a significant step forward, or east, to obtain long awaited information. After working in the western equatorial Pacific for many years, Dr. Richards is curious to see … Continued

I have been onboard R/V Falkor for a week now, and have had the opportunity to intermingle with each of the departments, learning every possible aspect of the ship.Falkor’s crew is divided into four major departments: deck, engineering, interior, and science. Each group plays a very important role in the daily life of a research vessel. However, … Continued

Today was very eventful with continued DIDSON operations, small boat operations, acoustic sampling of additional areas for pilot whale echolocation activity (a.k.a. ‘clicking’), and more photo identification of short-finned pilot whales.