No Wave Shall Go Unmeasured

Just another axiom of mine. No, just joking. But it is ever so abundantly clear that if one is going to follow rocks around on the beach one should measure the waves. Seems like they might have to do with things. We've been talking with UW faculty Dr. Andrea Ogsten for some time, and she was kind enough to offer us space on one of her upcoming cruises to Elwha. Last week, we got the call so myself and (thank goodness she could help me) Joanne suddenly went into hyper mode to put together an instrument, mooring and get it all up to Washington. In the end I had to drive up, but we put the wave gauge into the water a few days ago. With luck it is happily collecting data down there.

Shameless self-promotion in the digital age

I am only just starting to grasp what life as a scientist must be like for those that have jumped through the various hoops, done their time in school, published their papers, worked through a post-doc or two and slaved as an assistant professor for a time. After all of that, you finally "make it". As near as I can tell, that "making it" still involves a considerable amount of positioning oneself against your colleagues such that the money that is floating around in our economy for research science goes to your work. In effect, one of the early steps in most research projects is ritualized begging, which we call "proposal writing". As in any professional venture, it is certainly not the merits of the proposal alone that can sway the decisions of those with the dough.

So, with these things in mind, and given that I am training myself as a scientist, this blog post is also serving as the world premiere of my newest tool for shameless self promotion, my own website, dedicated to ME. You will immediately note that I will certainly NOT be getting any calls seeking my services as a web designer from this site. My hope, then, is that it might someday help me in the great game that the scientific community must play, "Who Gets The Dough?".

Now I just get to kick back and watch the support for my projects roll in...

As it turns out, science is characterized by great periods of sitting in front of a computer punctuated by brief but happy periods of not sitting in front of a computer. At the beginning of this month I had on offer to go down to San Diego and drive a small boat around in the ocean. I really do love such things, and take River Rat's utterances as gospel: "There's nothing . . . absolutely nothing . . . half so much worth doing as simply messing around in boats." So I jumped at the chance. Additionally, the project requiring the messing around in the boat is Dr. Jon Warrick's, who is the one person that I view as most responsible for setting me up in school, so I owe him a favor...or two.

So we found ourselves just off-shore of the Tijuana River, within spitting distance of the U.S.-Mexico Border (we were only accosted by burly armed coast guardsmen in fast inflatables one time!) repeatedly dunking expensive equipment into the ocean, eating cheese and crackers and doing everything in our power to keep ourselves engaged (data collection in oceanography is often not really that...stimulating). We were working quite close to shore, though, and on the days with swell imagining all of the horrible ways that I could wreck a government boat kept me pretty interested.

The Metaphorical kicking in the head

Last week I turned a corner in my graduate schooling. The Ocean Sciences Department structures the hoops that a student must jump through as follows: In your first year you take four required courses on various aspects of oceanography, chemical, physical, geological and biological. Then, at the beginning of your second year, a bunch of really smart people get together in a small room and grill you on all of the things that you feel, vaguely, like you've heard before but, after a whole summer, you just can't seem to dredge up. As far as I can tell, nobody ever truly fails (like get kicked out of school fails). But people are made to re-take classes, which is apparently threat enough to make this an incredibly anxiety-provoking exam for most students. I've spoken with students who have left campus and essentially taken a study retreat for a few weeks before the exam. One fellow student re-wrote and summarized, BY HAND, her entire collection of notes from all four classes. TWICE. As has been a pattern in this academic adventure, I felt much like Lane Meyer in the classic class scene from Better Off Dead, peeling last year's notes out of my back pocket, pulling the pieces of old gum from between the pages and trying to make sense of my nearly unintelligible scribbles.

In retrospect, the experience was worthy of the attention paid to it by my fellow students. The smart people asked me questions, I did a lot of staring blankly at them, and they would lead me on with little hints until eventually I crafted an answer. Afterwards, I felt like I had spent two hours being metaphorically kicked in the head by some really smart people. But in the end I passed. It wasn't elegant, and I certainly didn't impress anyone, but according to my peers, passing is all that matters.

Now I get to start thinking about this spring's hoop - the qualifying exam. This is where you present your research plans, again in front of a room of really smart people. This time I am going to where a helmet.

Open Water Live!

I am going to let Curt Storlazzi, my dive buddy on some dive's yesterday to check some oceanographic instrumentation, describe it:

"So today we were diving off Santa Cruz today to check on some oceanographic moorings and a tripod we deployed yesterday. As my dive buddy Ian Miller and I get to the surface, our comrades (Jamie Grover, our boat captain and Amy Draut, another diver) on the boat are swinging it around trying to follow what Jamie is saying is a mola mola (sunfish). As the boat turns, Ian and I see a fin that looks nothing like a mola mola but rather something a little more threatening. Jamie and Amy are pretty interested in it, and Ian and I are sort of laughing as we get out of the water and into the boat. We swing the boat around and what do we see? Check out the attached photos.

I would like to say it was huge and threatening, and from eye level in the water it's fin sure looked it, but it was just a baby....that was probably thinking, "In a year, you're TOAST!""

Despite our initial excitement that we were watching a juvenile white shark glide effortlessly next to our boat, I've come to the conclusion that this is a salmon shark. Still, its the first time I've seen a true pelagic shark in the wild (and shared space in the water with one), and it was exhilarating.

Oh, How They Move

Slowly I am pulling together my PIT tag information and mapping cobble movement on the beach. Today, with the help of Josh Logan, I was able to partially overcome my handicap with various software and figure out how to put this information together. What you see here is as hot off of the press as it comes. This image covers two surveys on August 4th (red triangles) and August 12, 2008 (white triangles), with a sample of 32 tagged rocks released on August 2nd. So what is the big deal? Well, this two week period was relatively quiet. Waves were very small (definitely unsurfable). Despite this, stuff was moving on the order of 10 meters or more per day. Remember, these are rocks, not sand. Also, we can clearly document a VERY uni-directional pattern of rock transport on this section of beach. Its only a start, but being able to see SOME progress is a very nice thing in my day.

Ian

PIT tags are everywhere!

They really are. I read this morning about a company that uses PIT-tags in curb-side recycling containers to track recycling rates, and distributes rewards based on a households recycling rate. Pretty bright. If I had thought of that I might be rich right now. But instead I put them into rocks. So I am not rich.

I've spent the past few days starting to analyze data on cobble movements on the Elwha shoreline that we collected using PIT_tagged rocks. All told, we tagged 224 rocks by drilling a 1/4" hole in the rock and epoxying (is that a verb? Like facebooking?) the tag in place. The tagged rocks were placed at three different locations (shown on the groovy map as small, barely discernible black dots) and then we mapped and surveyed the movements of the tags using a reader and GPS unit over periods of days, weeks and months.

The re-find process involved walking the beach with a reader unit (looks just like the crazy old guys you see early on Monday morning down at Main Beach in Santa Cruz, looking for quarters and lost rings in the sand). When the reader antennae and a PIT tag come into proximity (usually about 1 meter) the reader squeals and records the tags ID. We can then GPS the location of the rock using its ID as a Waypoint in the GPS.

The movements surprised me. In some cases, I found that relatively large material, that I hadn't expected to move at all during the summer, was moving 15 to 20 m per day. Our next step is to try to survey movements around a storm event.

Ian