Halfway Complete

Last night Tristan, Katlin and I watched the sun set for quite some time. The colors were so beautiful (deep orange, purple and blue) and the sky even seem textured. No matter how hard I tried, a camera could not do justice to capture the essence of the moment. We were hoping to see the green flash of light that sometimes occurs at sunset when it is really clear out , but we did not get a chance to see it. Perhaps on another cruise! Oh, I also saw what we think was a mola mola (see a photo I found on google below). It was pretty neat. I thought I saw a patch of algae or a skate and then I noticed a dorsal fin periodically pop out of the water. It was moving pretty slowly, rolling up and down (rather than jolting laterally like a shark would) and was by itself so that is how we inferred it to be this giant sunfish. I have only seen them on TV, so it was neat to finally see a part of one!

Today we reached station 8. The zooplankton and water samples were collected starting at 8 pm and we began our sediment coring at 3:30 AM this morning. The weather has been amazing lately. I was seasick a day or two ago and had to sleep it off for awhile; well, 17 hours! I never slept so much in my entire life. Luckily, Dr. Hammerschmidt and Katlin were able to cover my experiments for me. In fact, Dr. Hammerschmidt used to do all of our experiments on prior cruises (being Will's, Katlin's, mine and his own....No wonder they call him "The Mercury Man!").

Now that the wind has died down to about 6 knots and the swells have shrunk, I cannot get enough of the ocean! When I went to the aft of the boat this morning, the sky was dark blue and it was so calm I could even seen the stars (they were not darting all over the place like they do normally when we are moving). There was a half moon hanging high in the sky and you could just barely see the horizon. As we were waiting for the box corer to go down and back up nearly 2000 meters (yes, we reached the slope), the sky began turning orange and pink as the sun began creeping up in the sky. The boat seemed to slice the sky in half, demarcating night on one side and day on the other. Oh, it was phenomenal. The human body really does not have enough senses to truly capture the moment! This cruise is already scientifically invaluable; this is the first time anyone has collected sediment samples from the slope to study mercury! Yet, it is moments like this make that this cruise personally purposeful, as well.
~Lisa