Sea Log: 2024-03-02
Hello all. Some long night shifts were catching up with me and I simply fell asleep before I could properly get these logs posted. So we’ve got some assorted things to catch up on:
We are in some big boi swells still.1 Last night, our Bongo was fine2 but MOCNESS got pulled in early. We were going to go super deep to 1500m3 but we didn’t even get half that depth because the net started drifting in the wrong angle4 with all the bounce from swells on the wire. And that bounce on the wire is dangerous for the nets and the winch sooo…. net came in early. Again, a light biomass haul and no neat-o5 critters to report.
I finally saw bioluminescence, it was a lovely bright purple color. So Sam and Grace are not gaslighting me.6
Another essential ship activity: the ship merch store was open for business! Of course, got my own ship hat7 and the new t-shirt.
I’ll leave you with some musings on beauty and philosophy, because I recently finished Easy Beauty by Chloé Cooper Jones.
Appreciating the small, mundane bits of life is a bold and dramatic act of embracing beauty. Nearish the end of the book, the author reflects on the small beauty all around her with her son Wolfgang on the beach: “We’d not been given perfection, not godliness, not symmetry, nor gracious measurement, not a bad hand, nor a curse; we’d not been given anything other than a life to spend together; our lives, not easy or free from pain; we’d been given only a real life, dreadfully normal and sublime, and I would no longer betray its beauty by wishing it otherwise.”
And as I am currently on a voyage at sea and resonate with the sentiment that ‘the customary scale of everything is changed,’ this chunk felt particularly apt as I now have the time and space to slow down, think, enjoy the luxury of “boredom.”8 “Bosanquet’s third term, ‘width,’ is more abstract. He writes that difficult beauty has the ability to disorder and confuse us by disrupting our habitual ways of thinking and doing and being. Our habits build up our little house of self-importance and difficult beauty floods this house, forcing the spectator to ‘endure a sort of dissolution of the conventional world.’ To find pleasure in this dissolution requires uncommon strength because it is not always enjoyable to be shown how small and silly your house of self-regard is in the face of bigger and more important things, which is almost everything. Difficult beauty does just this kind of pointed showing. To face this and to recognize it as beauty–even as your habitual view of things, your known world, disintegrates–requires that you learn, Bosanquet writes, to ’feel a liberation in it all; it is partly like a holiday in the mountains or a voyage at sea; the customary scale of everything is changed, and you yourself perhaps are revealed to yourself as a trifling insect or a moral prig.”
Answering some of the people’s questions:10
What is a desk pet? A fun lil ocean critter to have on your desk. Used to spark conversation with anyone who passes by your desk, or to incite fear/excitement/intimidation.11
Sea fun fact of the day: There’s a lot of dissolved organic matter in the ocean (whether it be partially degraded phytoplankton or other detritus from photosynthesis or virus-induced when a virus got into something and then blew it up). It’s an open question to figure out where this organic matter comes from (more precisely) and where it goes and why it takes so long to degrade as it cycles through the ocean.12
Thanks to Ben for explaining some marine chemistry to me recently.13
Footnotes
There’s nothing like walking down a hallway and having to lean at a very noticable tilt to not fall over. It’s comical to do and watch.↩︎
Still gotta be careful to not windsock the nets too badly, and catch the cod ends quickly when the net comes back up↩︎
So about 2000m of wire paid out↩︎
flat/parallel to ocean floor which is not the angle we want for optimal collection; we want it more vertical↩︎
or out of the ordinary, for what’s become ordinary out here↩︎
They kept seeing it and my eyes refused to see it for a while.↩︎
Dad, I’ll stop “borrowing” yours now↩︎
Yet I don’t want to call it boredom simply because we’ve settled into a routine. If life becomes merely routine boredom, where is the magic? the zest? That, I believe, is what we ought to seek out and find each and every day. In the mundane and in the grand adventures.↩︎
Asking for a friend↩︎
Depending on the vibe you’re going for. Dealer’s choice. Some of the things that exist in the ocean are creepier than others.↩︎
Current estimates via carbon dating put the material at an average of about 6000 years old. How and why does it last so long when it cycles through the oceans/between the poles multiple times before somehow going away??↩︎
I’m at the point of more or less knowing what I’m doing, so I’m talking with other science folks to hear about what research they’re doing on and off the ship.↩︎