1 + 2 = 3
(1) Tonight I was reviewing some core station sheets for some notes regarding over-penetration of the sea floor. This core station sheet was filled out with pertinent information about the core deploymnent. These are basically meta-data about the core location, the coring process, and the coring results. Core coordinates, coring station number, core number, “observer (the person recording these official data), type of core, water depth, date, times, tension on the wire, coring configuration (e.g. how many weights, where the corer was deployed, length of trigger chain. stoping cable, etc.) are all listed. The lengths of the core sections are also in a table.
Other cruise-specific data are listed. The Vessel, Cruise Name, and Leg Number are listed.
(2) Before seafaring chaps and maidens make an equator crossing, they are considered “wogs” (lowly lowlife of the sea). When wogs cross the equator, they are inducted into the family of Poseidon (through a form of initiation). The details are kept secret at the risk of becoming the recipient of the full force of Poseidon. Once accepted into the realm of the depths, one is considered “shellback.”
(3) During our cruise offshore Sumatra, we crossed the equator twice before we were initiated. Poseidon was NOT happy, so our initiation lasted extra long. We continued to work the ship, take cores, plan, collect data, etc. during our initiation.
In the first two images below,
(4) Check out the name of the vessel.
(5) Check out the observer.
Here is the ship station sheet compilation in pdf format. (1.5 MB) The image below is also link to the pdf:
Here is a typical station sheet:
Here is the documentation of core 65, which is the core that got stuck. The core was stuck in the seafloor for many hours. We were lucky to get the core out. Maximum strain was about 24,000 pounds. The head engineer cut the wire after we got the core because it exceeded the elastic limit of the cable:
We thought that if we moved the ship horizontally, that might help us pull the core out. This page shows our calculations regarding this that allowed us to estimate a reasonable distance to move the ship.
