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Backseat driving – the science backroom team operations

Posted on July 20th, 2011 by admin

Jenn Biddle - Science backroom

I’m so excited to be officially joining the PLRP team this year as part of the science team. I got excited about astrobiology in graduate school and after my PhD, was a NASA Astrobiology Institute postdoctoral fellow. When I became a professor, I kept looking for ways to stay involved in NASA and astrobiology science. I collaborate with the NASA Astrobiology Institute at Penn State University and now am part of the PLRP team!

I typically do deep sea research, so the PLRP approach of using manned submarines is not too unusual to me. What is unusual is that we’re taking an analog mission approach to the science and exploration – complete with a mobile mission command center. I’ve been really impressed with the amount of infrastructure that the team has had to create in order to do their work, including setting up wifi in remote places and running video feeds across miles. Typically my research done on a ship has communications already on it – we just hop on and do science. Coming to a remote (and beautiful!) site in British Columbia certainly presents challenges.

Today I got my full immersion into PLRP science and headed up the science backroom team for the third dive in Kelly Lake. One disadvantage of a single manned sub is that only one person is seeing and observing things in real time. Maybe they can take a video, but the rest of us might wait hours to see it. That means decisions are slowed and science might be impeded. So this year the team designed a way to have a sub tethered to a cable, sending video feeds to the surface – and then the coms team has been able to shoot video back to the mobile mission command center. What this means is that many of us scientists can sit in comfort and see and hear what the pilot of the sub is observing. That way we can confer on what we are seeing immediately, add extra sets of eyes to a busy pilot and give advice or opinions on what is happening. Really what we did was sit back and go “Cool!” when a lovely microbialite would pop up on the screen.

We additionally got a true mission-feel when we started doing delayed communications. If an astronaut is off of the Earth, it takes a while to talk to them! So even though our sub pilot was only a few kilometers away, we gave ourselves a delay to see how things would go. Not surprisingly, it did seem easier – doesn’t your job go better when your “boss” stops interrupting you? But we’ll see how well it works when we actually want samples. Maybe 10 brains are better than one – maybe not! It’s part of this week’s experiments. My final experiments won’t be done for a while. We are collecting samples from Pavilion and Kelly Lakes to continue to describe the microbial communities that are in the microbialites. My group is specifically interested in the phototrophic (light-harvesting) communities, who we expect are driving the distinct shapes we see in these structures. Our work is in progress, so now updates yet – but watch for later updates as we start to unravel the mysteries of these beautiful and mysterious microbialites!

Written By: Jennifer Biddle

Inside the MMCC

Inside the MMCC

Bill keeping - comunications, MMCC

Darlene Lim (PI) - Inside the MMCC - there are million ideas going on inside her head right now

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Posted in Field Reports, Microbialites, Science Reports, Underwater Exploration | Comments Off

Boy meets microbialite

Posted on June 30th, 2010 by Tyler Mackey

Today was my first research dive of the 2010 PLRP season, starting a project on microbialite morphology. I am a geology graduate student from UC-Davis and, while I’m not a true microbiologist, my thesis work is focused on the potential signatures that their communities can leave in the rock record.

Side view of the MOUS showing vertically oriented growth structures (note lasers are 10cm apart)

Growth processes in the Pavilion Lake microbialites may give insight into the significance of ancient microbial carbonates. I’m particularly excited to join the PLRP crew because of the wide range of microbialite morphologies that are present here. In the course of the next two weeks, I will be diving on one particularly large microbialite, affectionately dubbed the MOUS (microbialite of unusual size). The carbonate structure is apparently templating a boulder from a rockslide. While today was mostly an exploratory dive to photograph and survey the structure, I will mostly be investigating the relationship among light regime, microbialite morphology, and invertebrate grazers.

Above the MOUS with blocks of microbialite

Locating the MOUS underwater was our first task of the day. We dropped down near its recorded location and then followed the lake bottom down along a landmark rockslide until we reached 85 feet. From previous dive records, we knew that the top of the structure was at 87 feet, so we swam parallel to shore until we intersected it. The visibility in Pavilion Lake is great (particularly as I’ve done most of my training off of Northern CA) so it was pretty easy to spot.

Sediment deposit with surrounding growth on the top of the MOUS

While my dive buddy, Mike Delaney, worked putting in a temporary transect line to help us more reliably locate the structure (particularly during night dives), I photographed some of the major regions. Large blocks have spalled off the side of the structure throughout its growth, forming an incipient conglomerate of sorts at its base. I’d love to see this in the rock record!

Mike Delaney installing temporary transect line

One of the aspects of modern analogues that really fascinates me is time-averaging. What we see here on the surface of the lake is a geological instant, and over time the current growth surface will be incorporated into the microbialite subsurface. What would this look like? Outside of this project, one of my broader research questions is determining what sort of paeleoenvironmental record might be left in a microbialite, and how that signature is altered with preservation, or lack thereof.

I’m excited to learn more about the interactions between these microbialite structures and their surrounding environment as the field season progresses. There is always room for the unexpected in fieldwork, and I look forward to seeing what future dives will uncover in the lives of these microbial communities.

-Tyler

Editor’s note: Tyler’s boyish good looks have earned him the affectionate nickname “Boy” among the science team – resulting in the title of the blog entry.

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Posted in Microbialites, Science Reports, Underwater Exploration | 2 Comments

Mosaicing Microbialite Roads

Posted on June 29th, 2010 by Alex Forrest

As I near the end of my doctoral studies, I reflect on how different my thesis is from what I actually started four years ago but at the same time how much things come full circle. My involvement began when I started using UBC-Gavia, an Autonomous Underwater Vehicle, to map the bottom of the lake. Unfortunately, as a result of the slope steepness in this lake, we found it very hard to accomplish and so the focus of my thesis is on water temperature and physical transport. That said, I’ve maintained a soft spot for image mosaicing.

Gavia, the Autonomous Underwater Vehicle (AUV)

Just recently, we have been working with people from the Center for Coastal and Ocean Mapping (CCOM) and the University of Delaware to mosaic not only the images we have been collecting but also those Deepworker images. The first, and easier dataset to work with, was the flat sections in the middle of the lake which has been of interest due to the microbialite mats that have been observed there. These are easier to process as don’t have roll and pitch errors that are introduced. Below is just a very small sample of what the final product that can be generated.

Microbialite Mosaic

Mosaic of images collected by UBC-Gavia of microbial mats from the central basin (length of image is about 10 m long).

In addition to running AUVs, I am also lucky enough to participate in PLRP by being a Deepworker pilot and I was able to have my first flight yesterday. After finishing my mission yesterday and completing all my objectives, I was told that I had a bit of extra time left over so I leaped at the opportunity at testing my new found mosaicing skills. As I was coming back to the barge, I passed by what people around here call ‘microbiliate roads’; long straight lines of microbialite that are aligned along the slope. Lining up the camera, I tried to film a long straight line up the slope. Although the mosaic still has some error resulting from vehicle pitch – you can see this in the image by the fact that it begins to ‘pinch’ out – but I was still pretty happy with the first attempt.

So now the next step is to refine the processing so that we can start using these images for our mission planning for both AUV and Deepworker flights. Part of doing this is to clean the images to remove the roll and pitch effects and then we can drape these images over the bathymetry data that we are collecting. This will allow us to start creating a georeferenced map of the photos.

- Alex

Posted in Deepworker, Microbialites, Science Reports, Underwater Exploration | 1 Comment

Rebreathers and Robots

Posted on June 18th, 2009 by Alex Forrest

Robert A. Heinlein once wrote a book called ‘Have Space Suit – Will Travel’ but I would argue that the same thing could be said for underwater robots. During the past several weeks of preparation for this summer’s Deepworker deployment I have been doing some extensive travel with some of the other AUV (Autonomous Underwater Vehicle) projects in which I am involved. Two of the more interesting places have been Aberdeen, Scotland and Chesapeake Bay, Maryland.

The helicopter underwater escape training simulator

The helicopter underwater escape training simulator

The first of these was to do the Basic Offshore Safety Induction and Training course (BOSIET). This is the training necessary to prepare for potential rescue scenarios for transport to offshore oil rigs, and is required for an upcoming AUV project. One of the more intimidating parts of the training was an inverted exit of a flooded helicopter simulator. The simulator shown on the right is lowered into the water while you breathe through a rebreather (where air is temporarily stored in your life jacket). This allows you to breathe underwater for about 30 seconds and allows you enough time to release from the harness and push out the window and exit. This was a definitely a unique experience that puts a new perspective on working in and around the water, at Pavilion Lake and elsewhere over open water in the Caspian Sea and over sea-ice in the Canadian High Arctic.

Adam Skarke from the University of Delaware getting ready to deploy the Gavia vehicle

Adam Skarke from the University of Delaware getting ready to deploy the Gavia vehicle

On my return from Aberdeen, I stopped over in Chesapeake Bay to attend an event informally known as AUVFest 2009 where four AUV groups from around the United States met to perform a demonstration of their technologies, and to work with educators on how to transfer knowledge from the practice to the classroom. This was a fantastic workshop that really emphasized how every vehicle, with their varied sensor setups, fills a different niche for underwater exploration. For me, this really hit home as an important concept at Pavilion Lake, where we have a wide array of tools and vehicles that must be optimized in order to get the best scientific returns. Sharing the varied and extensive experience at this workshop showed that Heinlein was right with a slight variation: “Have AUV – Will Travel”.

~Alex Forrest

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