Happy Thanksgiving (American)

It doesn't look like much, but it was really a great meal.

Not just for field work: Dynamometers and a cyalume glowsticks make a festive holiday centerpiece.  

Seven meter swells kept us off the water today. We're hoping for a quick trip out to the sensor buoys tomorrow morning.

Location, Location, Location!

Bamfield is a small fishing town on the west-end of Vancouver Island in beautiful British Columbia, Canada. The air here is clean and crisp, sweet from the surrounding rainforest. The people are weathered from the cold, but warm and close, people you'd have over for dinner. Most of Bamfield's inhabitants commute to work on on a boat. It's hard to get around without one. Some of Bamfield's inhabitants even include bald eagles, black bears, sea lions, seals, and other interesting little critters.

We conduct our research through the Bamfield Marine Sciences Center, but the magic really happens out on the mussel beds found across Barkley Sound. You can find us jetting around to different mussel beds across the sound, but as of this year, we've launched new buoys.

The buoys have sensors on them to help us take salinity and temperature readings in the water. By having the buoys at strategic points across the sound, we can track changes in the water throughout in the year. In particular, we want to see how rainfall and freshwater runoff affect salinity across the sound.

Pulling up buoys. The sensor is in a housing attached to the chain.

Considering the huge downpour of rain and hail since we got here, we should be getting some interesting results.

We're waiting for better waves to work the mussel beds.

Is it salty?

Despite the big swells, we got out today to monitor some salinity sensors. Jenny got a bit more salt water than she expected.

Measuring wave forces

The weather kept us on land today, which gave us a chance to catch up on some unexciting but necessary work.

We're very interested in the forces that waves exert when they hit the shore. Strong waves can tear large chunks out of the mussel bed. It's one example of ecological disturbance, where organisms are killed, injured, or removed from the ecosystem (in our case, they are ripped of the rocks). Forest fires are another type of ecological disturbance.

To measure the maximum wave force, we use some clever, simple devices call "dynamometers" or "drogues" (I usually call them dynos). Basically, we attach a whiffle ball to a spring that is, in turn, attached to a string. When waves pull on the ball, the spring lengthens, and a small rubber stopper moves down the string. By measuring how far the stopper moves and doing a little math, we can approximate the maximum drag force that the ball has experienced since the previous reading. In the field, we usually check the dynamometers once a day. The Denny Lab at Stanford has an excellent page on making and using dynamometers.

Before you can put the dynos in the field and start measuring waves, they need to be calibrated to find their spring constant. For this, we hang a range of weights from the dyno and measure how far the stopper moves.

Jenny demonstrates her stopper measurement technique

Multiplying the weight by the acceleration of gravity gives us the force exerted on the spring by the weight. Then we plot the force of a range of weights against the movement of the stopper and derive the spring constant. Now repeat eleven million times to calibrate all the dynos. It's THRILLING.

Gary wants to calibrate dynamometers all day, every day

OK, it's not the most exciting part of research. But it needs to be done, and working together helps it go quickly. Plus, you can always treat yourself for your hard work.

Nachos!

Hoping for calmer weather tomorrow.

Winter in Bamfield

The research team arrived at Bamfield Marine Sciences Center late Saturday night (November 19th) after a long journey from Los Angeles that morning. The combination of airplane, ferry, and driving was almost 1,500 miles. It looks like winter in Bamfield; I can see my breath, there is frost on the floor, and the trees have lost their leaves.

Our first task on Sunday was to organize our equipment so that everything is ready to go on our first day of work. We set up our lab in the Rix Center wet lab at BMSC.

We hope to get started today, but so far the weather is not on our side.

Hi,

Welcome to our research blog. This a placeholder until we post lots of stuff.