Logistics

Posted on February 8, 2023  •  2 minutes  • 393 words

I’m feeling as you would if you were to show up early to a good friend’s wedding. You know that there are a lot of logistics to coordinate and small crises to solve. You want to help, and to be a part of things, but you don’t really have a good picture of everything that needs to happen, and so the best thing to do is to stay out of the way.

There’s a lot of cool science planned for this expedition. People are using labelled chemicals to track how they move and are transformed within the marine ecosystem. People are running experiments in refrigerated spaces to simulate the deep, cold ocean. Others are going one step further and running experiments remotely at depth within experimental chambers tied to moorings.

You can imagine that there are a lot of moving parts. Pumps and instruments need to work, reagents need to arrive, to clear customs. Entire laboratory spaces, housed in shipping containers, need to be transported and loaded onto the vessel.

We are still enduring this logistical phase. We are waiting for one lab container and some critical chemical reagents to arrive. In the meantime, we are at sea, following a small transect (a fancy word for a sampling route) along the Costa Rican coast so that one of the groups on board can conduct their intended research. We were going to do this on the way to our larger sampling site, but since there are some final components that we still need to collect on land, we are knocking out these stations while we wait.

As for me, I’ve set up my space, tested my pump and put together a sample collection plan. I’ve got a small list of things I still need to do before we reach our big site, but we are at least 6 days out from that, and I see no rush to get everything queued up to go, only for it to rock back and forth during the transit ahead. In the meantime, I’ve volunteered to help deploy the CTD rosette for this afternoon’s sampling station, and I’ve turned my lab bench into a desk so that I can do some computer work to pass the time in the coming days. A waiting game, but eventually the party will start and we’ll all get to play our part.