Dive and Discover : Exp 7 : New England Seamounts : Daily Updates

You’ll rarely hear a scientist say this, but there’s an element of cancelled-dive syndrome that brings a sigh of relief. That’s because the amount of data this cruise has generated is mind-boggling. And getting your mind boggled isn’t always fun.

While we celebrate every time the CTD gives us more water samples or Alvin fetches a new full-basket haul of deep-ocean specimens, the fact is that every single piece of information we bring in must be examined, classified, stored, analyzed further, and eventually referred to in a series of learned articles. Not to mention, sometimes, scrubbed clean with a toothbrush.

At a recent science group meeting, Chief Scientist Jess Adkins acknowledged that the amount of information his small group of colleagues confronts is “daunting.” Several of those colleagues noted their difficulty in simply keeping up with what was coming in, and the mood of the meeting turned a tad dark.

“Hey,” Jess said. “I agree this is a scary amount of data. But this is not a reason to despair. It’s a reason to be ecstatic!” He was right: The more high-quality data you have, the more informed your conclusions will eventually be. But sometimes that’s easy to forget.

You’re probably familiar with this ambivalence whenever you do research of your own. There’s the excitement of collecting armfuls of books from the library and a long list of Web sites that promise to address your topic in detail. You’re on your way! But then, the inevitable sense of doom: How the heck am I going to get through all this stuff, not to mention make sense of it?

We’re dealing with the same thing here. With a week left in the cruise, we have more than 3,000 separate Desmophyllum cristagalli samples. More than a hundred other fossil corals. Hundreds of biological specimens. Millions of soundings (taking up gigabytes upon gigabytes of disk space) from ABE. Roughly 70 hours of video from Alvin dives. Thousands of tow-cam photographs. Water samples. Maps to superimpose on each other and manipulate in order to make new maps.

That’s a partial list.

It makes you pine for 1960, which was the last time a vessel named Atlantis came to these waters looking to find out more about the deep ocean. That ship had masts and sails. A lot of the scientists’ work lay just in navigation, a task now left mostly to computers. If they wanted to know the depth of the ocean beneath them, they used primitive sonar or dropped a weighted line.

The tools for gathering data in 1960 were fewer and less advanced, and the time to gather it was more limited. But those practical restrictions made it less “daunting” to deal with the information they did collect.

In 2003, RV Atlantis conducts scientific research 24 hours a day, seven days a week. It’s very expensive, but it’s a bargain given how well its expeditions meet the stiff challenges of cutting-edge marine science.

We’re efficient, informed, and fast. But can we keep up with ourselves?