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  TODAY'S WEATHER Partly cloudy 82.4°F (28.0°C) Latitude: 9 deg 57.5 ’N Longitude: 104 deg 18.8 ’W Wind Direction: W Wind Speed: 8 Knots Sea State 0 Swell(s) Height: 3-5 Foot Sea Temperature: 84°F (28.9°C) Barometric Pressure: 1010 MB Visibility: 10-25 Nautical Miles  Breakfast Dry Cereal Toast and bagels Eggs to order Fresh fruit Blueberry muffins Bagels with cream cheeses and lox Lunch Pizza- vegetarian and pepperoni Spicy chicken wings Beef and Barley soup Salad Bar Dinner Bubba Gump Shrimp- shrimp with lemon Gumbo - meat, seafood and vegetable stew Red beans and rice Sweetcorn Corn Bread Salad Bar Apple pie and ice cream Waterspouts This morning, Peter Lean, one of the students on board was watching the eastern sky when he saw several small waterspouts. A waterspout is a small tornado -- a whirling storm caused by winds. It forms a funnel-shaped column of clouds that extends from a dark black cloud in the sky right down to the sea surface. Typically, the cloud column is 100 to 200 meters wide. Inside the column, air moves upward and sucks up water from the ocean surface. Waterspouts are common in tropical seas. This morning, we saw three of them. They looked as if they were pinning the cloud layer down to the ocean surface. These are spectacular ocean events to witness--as long as they are not big and are far away from the ship! RV Melville continues to steam slowly across a calm, clear blue sea at 1.4 knots. Most people can walk faster than this speed. We travel so slowly because -- 2,500 meters below us -- we are towing the “sonar fish” only 100 meters above the seafloor. If we go too fast, we would not have time to pull up or let out some cable to “fly” the sonar fish over the seafloor’s changing terrain. In addition, if the fish flies too quickly over the seascape, it won’t be able to send and receive lots of sonar “pings” from each parcel of ocean floor, which we need to make the clearest possible images of the seafloor. It would be like trying to see the landscape driving at 100 miles per hour. If you were
a big, beautiful blue-and-yellow Mahi Mahi fish (also known
as a “dolphin fish“) watching the sonar fish,
or if you were aboard the Melville today, you might
not think we were doing much. But life is actually quite
hectic for scientists. Watches change every four hours, and
people are busy doing many different things to ensure that
we keep smoothly collecting our essential seafloor data.
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© 2010 Dive and Discover™. Dive and Discover™ is a registered trademark of
Woods
Hole Oceanographic Institution
