Helen FieldsScience Writer

On Thursday, I met up with Brandi Murphy, one of the technicians on my icebreaker trip in the Bering Sea last year. Brandi works for the University of California – San Diego’s Scripps Institution of Oceanography. She’s at their Nimitz Marine Facility, or, as I would call it, “the place where they keep the boats.” Since I was in town for a conference, she offered to give me a tour.

It turns out Brandi doesn’t normally do the kind of stuff she was doing last spring on the Healy. On that cruise, she was collecting water; normally, she does marine seismic stuff. Basically, she knows how to tow an air gun behind a boat, make it go boom, and record the sounds that bounce back on a bunch of hydrophones. Here’s the 800-meter cable o’ hydrophones:

“Cable” is really not a good enough word for this. It’s a flexible tube filled with silicon oil. The orange bits are hydrophones – there are 48 spaced along the cable – and the blue bits are floats that keep it hanging at the right level in the water. Wires carry the data from the hydrophones, and computers along the cable process it before sending it back to the ship.

So this high-tech tube trails behind a research vessel and records the sounds from the air guns bouncing off the bottom of the sea. They actually go about 1,000 meters below the bottom, so scientists can use this to map the rocks below the surface.

Next, we poked around the New Horizon, one of Scripp’s research vessels. It’s a whole lot smaller than the Healy, which is my point of reference for all ships. For example, the Healy has two gyms with lots of exercise equipment. The New Horizon has a stairmaster in a workroom and this:

And now, something Brandi thinks you should know if you’re ever on a ship. The lifeboat is supposed to be released by a little pressure-sensitive mechanism. But if that happens, the boat is already underwater and things are pretty bad. So if you should ever find yourself needing a lifeboat, release the latch she’s pointing at or cut the rope below it.

Then find the black thing coming out of the end and pull it to make the raft inflate.

Finally, Brandi took me to look at FLIP. That’s for “Floating Instrument Platform.” It isn’t a boat; it has to get towed out to sea. See the big long thing sticking out front, kinda looks like submarine? That’s part of FLIP. It’s filled with air right now. When it gets out to sea, they fill it with water and the whole thing turns – it takes half an hour – until it’s floating upright in the water.

Everything turns 90 degrees. The walls become floors. And people live aboard, so everything has to either be capable of moving 90 degrees or be duplicated at 90 degrees.

Walking around on the platform is like being in an Escher print. Look up while standing on the deck and you’ll see an unclimbable ladder:

Inside, we saw a bunk on wheels and this sink, in a bathroom:

And here’s a door outside:

The whole thing was both disorienting and totally cool. This video shows what it looks like when it’s flipped.

Brandi is also a knitter – she was working on beautiful burgundy-colored cardigan on the cruise last year. Here’s her knitting blog, which is mostly about spinning these days, but let’s not hold that against her.

The other day I was at the grocery store, and I had tuna on my list. It’s easy, it keeps more or less forever, it fits in cans, I can put it on salads. But then when I was actually standing in front of the canned fish, I was hit by this sudden wave of guilt at using giant, long-lived fish at the top of the food chain for cheap protein. I’ve heard many talks in which people who understand the oceans say we really ought to be eating bait fish. (And I’ve been buying tuna all along, so I don’t know why the guilt chose last Saturday to set in.) I looked at the other cans on the shelf.

Which brings me to today’s lunch:

I haven’t quite been able to figure out the full environmental implications of this choice. Fish are confusing. If you look up “tuna” on the Monterey Bay Aquarium’s Seafood Watch website, there are six different kinds of tuna, and whether or not you should buy them depends on how they’re caught. If you look up sardines, they give you two options, actual sardines and atlantic herring – but it seems that what I have is actually a little Atlantic fish called a “brisling” or “sprat,” which the Monterey Bay Aquarium doesn’t cover. (Read about sprat here.)

But I do understand food webs, and sardines are way lower down than tuna are. It’s like eating grain-eating chickens instead of man-eating tigers – it’s a more efficient use of resources. Fortunately, they taste pretty good. I polled my Facebook friends, and the consensus was that they should be on toast. A former choir director also suggested a large whisky and soda. I haven’t added that particular flourish yet, but I can’t imagine a large whisky and soda would make anything worse.

As the scientist standing at the window next to me said a few minutes ago: “They wouldn’t show *this* on Deadliest Catch, would they?” The Bering Sea is absolutely dead calm. It looks like a pond, only flatter.

You can see a whale surface a mile away, because there is nothing between here and there. I’ve only seen two whales, a pair of humpbacks after lunch, but other people have seen minke whales and a fin whale today. I also saw some Steller’s sea lions swimming in the distance and a whole bunch of far-off harbor porpoises, and I have high hopes for orcas. I mean, what I *want* is humpbacks leaping over the bow, but I’ll take orcas.

I was interviewing a scientist when Chris got the page about the humpbacks and I dragged her up to the bridge with me to see what was going on. It worked out well, that bit of multi-tasking – we saw whales and I learned some basic physical oceanography, all at the same time.

We’re out of the ice for the last time. We’ll be back in port on Tuesday.

On Friday I finally made it down to the National Gallery to see the Pompeii exhibit. I visited Pompeii in the summer of 1998, and it was really cool – lots of halfway-standing houses to run around in – but hardly any of the artifacts are at the site. So I was excited to actually see the stuff, and it’s lovely. Lots of marble portraits, some frescoes, a funny set of frolicking bronze animals.

It turns out the Romans were really into their fish. The exhibit had a little corner on seafood – a couple of frescoes and a reproduction of a mosaic with fish, octopus, and so on. But that stuff wasn’t just for eating. From the text on the wall:

Many proprietors of villas owned fishponds that provided a ready supply of oysters and other delicacies. Private fishponds were a status symbol that was pursued to absurd lengths. Cicero complained of senators who lavished more attention on their mullets than on affairs of state. Anecdotes tell of villa owners treating their fish as pets, adorning their favorites with jewels and gold rings and weeping over their deaths.

You have to love the Romans. They didn’t mess around. They were just straight up decadent. The exhibit closes March 22nd and will be at the L.A. County Museum of Art from May to October.

Photo credit: me, 1998.

Hey, lookit, I blogged. I mean, somewhere other than here. It’s over at ScienceNOW, the daily online news service of Science magazine. The topic: fisheries. Not *all* of the world’s fish are completely doomed. Fisheries scientists have decided that if everyone in the world thinks that all the fish news is totally bad, nobody is ever going to want to do anything about it. (Hey, they’re doomed – let’s just kill ‘em all and have the world’s biggest fish fry.) So they’re embarking on a campaign to tell the good news stories.

You could tell this was kind of a struggle sometimes. I went to part of the scientific session (the blog post was written after the press conference) and Greenpeace guy John Hocevar said, “I’ve been trying to stick to good news but I can’t quite do it.” He hung in there for a while, but then he got to tuna: “Truthfully, the tuna news is mostly bad.” Oh well. He still wrung some good news out of it. And there really are fish success stories.