By Meghomita Das (www.meghomita.com)
Noel Jackson is the co-chief scientist on the research cruise along with David Schimdt. Since our current mission has two separate experiments (Seawater Optical Fiber Strainmeter and GNSS-Acoustics), Noel is the point-person on the strainmeter experiment. I got to ask her some questions during one of our lab times.
Q: How many cruises have you been on? Any fun stories you would like to share with us?
Noel: This is my fourth cruise and every one of them had some fun stuff going on. On my first cruise, the seas were a bit rough which created a lot of splashes on deck. I kept going on to the deck to take pictures of the tiny rainbows that the splashes created till the captain yelled at me to get back inside since it was dangerous. Other fun thing was in the last cruise when we took a broom from the ship broom closet and sent Jason down to the benchmark to clean it. We also did lose power at sea once because some biological foul blocked the filter in the cooling system and overheated the engine.
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| Noel and ROV Jason before a Jason dive |
Q: What is your role as co-chief PI?
N: We are conducting two different experiments in this cruise: one part of it is to deploy the transponders at two GNSS-A sites and launch the waveglider and the other part of it is to service the seafloor optical fiber strainmeters (SOFS). I am a PI for both experiements, but for this cruise I am working on the SOFS part more. My main goal is to detect shallow slow slip in Cascadia below the locked earthquake-generating zone as well as test the proof of instrumentation for SOFS and make sure it is a good setup to detect deformation at the plate boundary. The SOFS deployment is the first long-term deployment of its kind in the United States so we really want to make sure it works and we can use it to record strain at the plate boundary.
Q: How did Apply-to-Sail start?
N: We had included apply-to-sail in our original NSF proposal for the GNSS-A community experiment. The seafloor geodesy community is really small and we wanted to get more people on board as part of community engagement and outreach. Before submitting the proposal, we were aware that apply-to-sail has been successful for other missions like the ocean-bottom seismometer installation cruises so we wanted to incorporate something similar to our proposal.
Q: How does a seafloor optical fiber strainmeter work?
N: At a basic level, the instrument is just a buried fiber optic cable and a laser. The instrument records the two-way travel time as the laser travels through the fiber optical cable. As the fiber gets strained and changes its length, the phase of the reflected light changes and we can measure that change in length relative to a reference fiber to detect subtle motions along the Cascadia subduction zone. It gives us a measurement that is precise to less than the width of human hair which is pretty cool! The strainmeters that we are working with were custom-built for this project.
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| Noel explaining the SOFS and REMy mechanics on deck |
Q: Any encouraging words for future participants of seafloor research?
N: Do not be intimidated by the the idea of seagoing research like this. There is a lot to learn and nobody really knows what they are doing during their first time at sea. There are also no specific pre-requisites required for geophysicists to participate in seafloor projects. The seafloor is an important frontier in geophysics, and scientists don't have to be from specific institutions to participate. I do seagoing work from the University of Kansas. And, expect the unexpected when you are at sea since plans change all the time! It's important to know how to roll with the punches and make decisions on the fly.
Great interview. Thanks for writing it up.
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