The scientists on RRS Discovery work all hours. The ship is expensive to run and the Shelf
Seas Biogeochemistry (SSB) Project has a lot of different tasks to achieve and it
would not be possible to do this without working 24 hours a day.
What this means is that a small fraction of the scientists
and crew on board need to adjust to working during the night. The shift that I
have been allocated runs from 6 pm to 6 am. Getting into the swing of it is
hard as your body clock adjusts but this is the third cruise in this project
where I have been asked to work the night shift so I am getting used to
it. There are a few downsides: we miss
all lunches and most breakfasts (although food is left out for us), we don’t
see that much sunlight, and everyone’s day finishes as ours begins but there
are lots of positives.
1.- Sunset
Sunsets at sea are spectacular things. The air is clear, the sky turns multi-coloured
and the light reflects off the clouds.
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A spectacular sunset.
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2.- The big fauna comes out at night
A lot of the larger
creatures like the cover of darkness. So far on this cruise we’ve seen two
different types of shark, a sunfish, dolphins, a whale, garfish and many
jellyfish. A lot of the fauna get attracted to the lights on the boat that
shine on the water while we are working. This means that as they approach the
boat they are easy to spot. We regularly watch dolphins play around our sediment
corer as it hits the water.
3.- The lab is quieter
The controlled temperature laboratory we use on board is
possibly the busiest part of the ship.
It is a small lab in the middle of the ship where we keep the sediment
we collect that is kept at the same temperature as the bottom of the sea. There
are ten people working in there and bench and floor space is very limited. All the space that will be used is planned
out months in advance but when lots of people are working in there it can
become very cramped. During the night shift the majority of those who use the
lab are asleep so we get the chance to work knowing we won’t be in anyone’s
way.
4.- Getting involved with everyone’s work
Because there are so few people working at night we all help
to collect each other’s samples. Over
the three cruises I have had the chance to trawl for epibenthic megafauna
(looking for large rarer invertebrates that live on the sediment surface), use
a sediment profile imager (SPI) to make cross section images of the sediment
water interface and helped deploy a large in
situ flume (a device that sits on the seabed and creates a current that
runs in a circle to look at how the mud and sand behave under different conditions).
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SPI camera, |
5.- Snacktime
The kitchen does not run 24 hours, so when we work nights
there is no lunch put on. We eat dinner for breakfast and breakfast for
dinner. You can get lunch put aside but
sometimes it’s more fun to create snacks from the leftovers of dinner, toast
and buffet bar. Salad mountains, rum and raisin ice-cream granola, peanut
butter, jam, banana and nutella sandwiches, potato salad baps, and anything you
fancy.
6.- Sunrise
The sunrises are as spectacular as the sunsets, with the
added knowledge that the nights work is almost over and it’s nearly time for
bed as everyone else gets up.